How to make a garden genuinely useful to bees

Start with the gaps, not the peak

In June almost everything is flowering. A garden that provides magnificent June forage and nothing in February or October has helped at the moment help was least needed. The two windows that matter most are early spring, when bumblebee queens emerge alone and have to found a colony on whatever they can find, and autumn, when colonies are building winter stores and new queens are fattening for hibernation.

The half nobody plans for

• Bare, sunny, undisturbed soil. A south-facing bank or a patch of unmulched ground is what ground-nesting mining bees need, and they are among the most numerous bees in most gardens.
• Hollow stems and dead wood. Leave last year's stems standing over winter and cut them in late spring, not autumn. Leave a log pile.
• Rough tussocky grass and an undisturbed corner. Bumblebees nest in cavities at ground level — old rodent burrows, tussocks, compost heaps.
• A bee hotel, with real caveats: tubes 6-10 mm, closed at one end, full morning sun, and cleaned or replaced every year or two. An unmanaged hotel accumulates parasites and disease and eventually does more harm than good.
• Shallow water with something to stand on. Bees drown easily; pebbles in a saucer solve it.

What to avoid

• Double-flowered cultivars. Extra petals are usually converted reproductive parts, so the plant often has little nectar and no accessible pollen. Double dahlias, double roses, pompom marigolds and pollen-free sunflowers look generous and are not.
• Weekly mowing. A lawn cut every week supports almost nothing. Cutting monthly, or leaving part of it, lets clover and self-heal flower and costs nothing.
• Insecticides, including 'bee-friendly' formulations. Timing helps a little; not using them helps far more.
• Tidying in autumn. Cutting everything back and clearing dead stems removes the overwintering sites for the next generation.
• Treating mining bee mounds in the lawn. They are harmless, last a few weeks, and are evidence of exactly what you were trying to encourage.

If you only do three things

1. Plant something that flowers between October and March. This is worth more than any June planting.
2. Leave a patch of bare sunny soil and a patch of long grass, and stop cutting stems back in autumn.
3. Mow less. If you have grass, cutting it monthly rather than weekly is the highest-value change available for no money and less work.

And if the goal is to help bees rather than to produce honey: plant for them instead of keeping hives. Plants add resources to a landscape. Hives add competitors for the species that are actually in trouble.