Like us, bees also have their preferences, their favorite flowers . It’s something that researchers recently discovered in a comprehensive study that could help increase the population of these efficient and important pollinators.
As they say, gardeners will be better able to choose the right plants that, without a doubt, are not the most expensive.
In the United Kingdom, at the University of Sussex they used plants from a garden to determine which plants were more attractive to bees and which to other similar insects, such as bumblebees or sylphs. And they realized that both their favorite plants and those of others were just as beautiful and easy to care for as the others.
The study looked at 32 different plant species, some rich in nectar and highly scented, which were thought to be more attractive to insects, and others rich in pollen, which they thought would be more attractive to bees.
Although the reduced number of plants for the study did not show great results, we could say that thanks to this study we will be able to better choose the flowering plants that we want to put in the garden, especially if we want to help the bee population to recover. .
Thus, they realized that the marjoram plant, dahlias, lavender and wallflowers were very attractive plants for bees . However, geraniums do not attract them as much.
The team of researchers put a number of lavender varieties to the test, and found that the improved hybrids were highly attractive to insects, more so than the unhybridized varieties.
The data was collected in a very simple way: visiting the garden daily for two summers.
