Interview with Author of Planting for Honeybees
Reviewer Goes Thumb to Green Thumb with Sarah Wyndham Lewis, Author of Planting for Honeybees.
Why is it that conversations about the birds and the bees are dominated by human sex, while the life and times of those flying critters is so much more interesting—and important, if you consider the crucial role Honeybees play in pollinating more than 30 percent of our fruit and vegetables and 90 percent of our wildflowers. Moreover, as you’re certainly aware, Honeybees are facing a firing squad of threats, from agrichemicals and bacterial diseases to climate change and parasites. It ain’t easy being beesy.
Rather than write this off as another in a long list of insurmountable, throw-our-hands-up-in-despair global problems, if you have a yard, garden, roof terrace, patio, small balcony, or even a little windowsill, YOU CAN DO SOMETHING TO HELP!
Meet Sarah Wyndham Lewis, who manages more than one hundred bee hives in urban and rural England with her husband, Dale. She may be allergic to bee stings but that doesn’t stop her from devoting her life to the betterment of Honeybees. I recently reviewed her beautiful little guidebook, Planting for Honeybees, and instantly knew this was a perfect project for a springtime Foreword Face Off. You’ll never feel the same about exotic flowers and wildflower meadows, I guarantee it.
Sarah, in your intro, you stress that Planting for Honeybees is not a gardening book—rather, it’s a book of ideas to guide readers as they go about making their gardens and yards more welcoming to honeybees. I’m reminded of the unforgettable phrase “If you build it, he will come,” from Field of Dreams, an American baseball movie from the late 1980s. It’s a counterintuitive, full-circle approach: instead of planting to feed ourselves, we’re planting to feed honeybees, so they, in turn, can pollinate the plants we eat. Can you talk about your journey of realization, experimentation, and discovery as you developed these enlightened ideas?
As with so much in life, the seeds of my experience right now were planted in my childhood. I come from a large Scottish family and the Scots are true pragmatists. So whilst there were many notable gardeners and stock farmers in my family, there was always a clear understanding that what you put into the land, and into your animals, is what you reap. It behoves us to respect nature, especially if we depend on it for our living, our nutrition or our pleasure. (And respect should never be confused with sentimentality.)
That sense of being able to combine pleasure and outcome came to me most strongly from my maternal grandfather, who could put a name to every bird, every mammal and insect, in fact every part of the natural world, and he fully understood their fragile interrelations. His enormous garden in a London suburb, which won many awards for its beauty, was in fact a carefully constructed environment to produce maximum habitat and food for all—from a bush for the blackbirds to nest in and feast on, to strawberries for the lunch table. I spent so much of my childhood tucked into corners of that garden observing its wildlife. Likewise, many of the farmers in my family had an equally strong understanding of managing their land, their crops and their animals in a careful and mindful way. A fully sustainable way. As a child, these things sink in without you even knowing it and I hope—in fact I know—that I passed these values on to my own children.
I’ve spent most of my life adult life living in London, pursuing a very urban career as a journalist and married to a stockbroker. Yes, we spent a lot of time in the countryside and we had a patch of garden here and there, but we were essentially city folk, albeit, ones who always shopped in the farmers’ market. We also had a menagerie of cats, dogs, guinea pigs, and even a corn snake to satisfy that need to connect with nature.
Then one day, about twelve years ago, Dale (my stockbroker husband)—out of the blue—said “I think I might like to go and learn about bees.” Surprised and a bit shocked I said, “You do know that I’m allergic to bee stings don’t you? (subtext: After 20 years of marriage, you don’t know that?) “Oh,” he said.
But we went on our urban bee adventure anyway and both lost our hearts to the sheer endeavour and brilliance of the beehives we looked into that day. Dale started his training very shortly afterwards and the following year, the first hive arrived on our roof, followed by several others. Along with all the paraphernalia and pervading stickiness which goes with the craft of beekeeping.
Next up was our little weekend house in deep countryside on the Suffolk coast. Hives started appearing there too, and any resistance I might have had to living quite so close to bees in not one but now two locations, was literally brushed aside as I learnt more and more about them.
But so much of what I learnt was horrifying. The threat that bees face from disease and loss of habitat and how modern farming practice seems purpose-designed to finish off bees for all time. The wild population has already been decimated and managed (hived) bees struggle to keep a foothold.
In the city, we had inadvertently started our rooftop apiary just before a wave of beekeeping fashion which saw London rapidly becoming the place with the single largest hive density on earth. And some of the lowest honey yields. Because there is just not enough for all of those bees to eat.
The farmer—and the gardener—within me suddenly woke up. I may not be the woman to get up close to the bees, but I am the woman who can help educate people to the single most positive way in which they can help bees. By planting. I had such a lot to learn, so quickly. But I had that base set of principles from my family to fall back on. A garden, any garden, should, above all, respect and serve the natural world.
Our very first bee-friendly plantings were, naturally, on our own (food-growing) city allotment and then in local parks surrounding our home apiary, right by Tower Bridge. We have carried on planting in public spaces over the past ten years—identifying spare patches which can be transformed with the help of community and charity gardening groups and even input from some big businesses in the area. There’s always lot of red tape though, and, especially in the early days, we were not always free to achieve the best possible outcome plant-wise. But in my own small garden at our house in Suffolk I could do exactly what I wanted.
Which was where everything suddenly got a whole lot more complicated. Looking for advice on what best to plant proved really hard. Not only am I not a very skilled or practiced gardener, I also have a silly aversion to Latin names and the attention span of a flea when it comes to remembering what I want to plant where. I bought books, I canvassed other beekeepers and gardeners, I amassed endless scruffy little bee friendly planting lists from countless different sources. And I was genuinely none the wiser. They all argued with one another, failed to acknowledge that not everyone has rolling acres to plant or, it turned out, were simply perpetuating old myths.
But I persisted. And certain key themes emerged, together with an understanding that the honeybee is a particularly fussy pollinator due to its physiological make-up (short tongue and little body fur, meaning poor temperature regulation).
Most pollinator-friendly planting knowledge resources are generalized and overlook the fact that what feeds honeybees can also feed other pollinators—but not necessarily vice versa. If something says that it is ‘bee-friendly’ my first reaction is now always What kind of bee? A Bumblebee (which species of Bumblebee?), a Mason bee, a Honeybee? Their needs and foraging abilities differ so widely.
A couple of years after I began experimenting with our Suffolk garden, I wrote a little booklet called Planting for Honeybees, distilling what I had learned so far. We sought corporate sponsorship, which allowed us to print 10,000 copies to give away free to gardening clubs, beekeeping associations, customers buying our raw honey, literally anyone expressing a desire to help bees. (Or, even saying the word ‘bee’ out loud within my hearing!)
Dale by this time had left his job in the city to become a full time beekeeper and we began travelling far and wide explaining the principles of sustainable beekeeping and the absolute obligation on any beekeeper, like any farmer, to supply (ie, plant) adequate food for honeybees, whether in both town and country settings. One evening, we were speaking to a small, local group amongst which, it turned out, was my future editor, who worked for a brilliant publishing house. She contacted me the next day to ask whether I would like to turn my booklet into a book. Which is how Planting for Honeybees came about.
A surprising insight in your book fingers flower hybridization as one of the many threats faced by honeybees. It seems, the brighter, frillier, more exotic flowers we’ve grown to love in our gardens usually don’t have accessible pollen and nectar for the short-tongued honeybee. What are some of those inhospitable, albeit beautiful flowers, and what do you recommend growing in their place? Are wildflowers the answer?
Humans are hard-wired to seek novelty and exercise their creative instincts and the natural world has suffered from this in so many ways. Selective plant breeding has fundamentally changed the structure and productive qualities of countless plants and many of the results are beautiful, but so far removed from the original species that they can effectively offer little or no pollen or nectar. My two favorite illustrations of this are the dahlia and the rose. In their oldest, simple-petalled forms, these plants brim with nutrition. In their fanciful, multi-petalled, highly bred, and most ornamental forms, they are completely useless to the Honeybee. Even if there were to be any pollen or nectar available, the complex petal forms would make it completely inaccessible.
So yes, for bee-friendly plantings, I always recommend choosing the simpler, older forms where the pollen is in full view and the nectaries undisturbed by selective breeding. So not so much wildflowers as wilder flowers, say, a dog rose instead of some fancy show rose and a wild blackberry bush instead of one genetically engineered to produce giant tasteless berries .
This is not to say that there are no pollinator friendly varieties/cultivars. There are plenty around but you just need to check that they are specifically noted as being pollinator-friendly before you buy. (Even better, if they are noted as being particularly good for Honeybees.)
Aside from gardens, you strongly encourage readers to utilize their yards as friendly environments for honeybees. Will you list some yard dos and don’ts, please? And also talk about the importance of shrubs, bushes, and trees.
I strongly encourage everyone to plant everywhere they can! If you have a garden, plant a garden. If you have a more multi-purpose space such as a yard, plantings can happily share that with people, animals, dis-assembled motorbikes, and children’s play equipment. You just need to zone it to create different areas and ensure that the plants don’t get trampled before they have a chance to establish themselves. Container planting can be a good way forward as well, giving you the chance to move things around if needed.
Not all gardens have to look like a picture book. Mine certainly does not, in fact, a lot of it looks pretty wild, bushy and overgrown most of the time. Don’t let a lack of formal gardening knowledge or experience stop you. I never have!
And there is another really good reason behind why my garden looks as it does—which is that the Honeybee evolved over millions of years as a woodland creature. Left to themselves, bees nest in trees and obtain the greater majority of their food from trees and bushes. Astonishingly, just one single basswood tree in flower produces nectar equivalent to a solid half acre of flowers.
Once you know that, you immediately begin to think differently about Honeybee plantings. If you have space in your yard, banish the thought of that bed of high-maintenance flowers and replace it with durable, structural plantings such as shrubs and bushes and—if you have space—productive fruit and nut-bearing trees. Because these will not only feed the bees, they will feed people, birds, mammals, and insects too. Try doing that with a dahlia!
Between the demands of pollinating so many of the plants we eat, and our huge appetite for honey, we certainly ask a lot of these generous insects. Speaking of which, we can’t have a honeybee discussion without mention of honey? As a beekeeper, can you give us a sense of today’s honey industry? And also, perhaps, remind us of honey’s amazing healing properties and, along with beeswax, some of its other qualities?
Mankind has had a relationship with honeybees since prehistoric times. Honey is the original luxury food and one of three key hive products (the other two being beeswax and the resin-based propolis) which have played a central role in countless religions, cultural developments, medicines, cosmetics, foodstuffs, and trading economies since the earliest times.
At the heart of their utility is the extraordinary bee chemistry which transforms nectar into honey, produces the wax on which the colony is built, and the propolis with which they stick the hive together. Remarkably, honey and propolis both have powerful medicinal properties ranging from anti-bacterial and anti-fungal actions to anti-viral and anti-inflammatory.
Fully understood and exploited by our ancestors, these properties are now starting to be explored by modern medicine, albeit they are intent on isolating and patenting the active ingredients rather than viewing these unique substances in their natural, holistic composition.
Equally sadly, the understanding of the labour-intensive production behind and scarcity value of honey has also been compromised. It’s an expensive, unpredictable product which has now been commoditized by the food industry in a race to the bottom to produce an always-the-same product which meets a certain supermarket price point. These objectives are utterly unrealistic and have led to honey becoming one of the three most highly processed and adulterated substances on earth. Wine and olive oil being the other two.
If, as the food industry commonly does, you buy bulk honey on the international commodity markets, super-heat, micro-filter, and pad it out with bulking agents such as rice syrup, you end up with a denatured product which has lost not only its nutritional value but also its entire reason for being. It’s also doing a great job of putting small, local honey producers out of business.
If you don’t have a beekeeper near you to buy from, my advice is to look in farmers’ markets or small health food stores and seek out single-source raw/cold-filtered honeys from family farms or clearly traceable individual producers.
Windowsills, small balconies, green roofs, patios, live walls, and other smallish spaces all earn attention in Planting for Honeybees. What are some key things to consider when seeking to honeybee-friendly these areas? Do Honeybees seem to do okay in urban settings?
Honeybees positively thrive in urban areas, as long as they have enough to eat. There are some sound reasons behind their success; despite shrinking green space, cities can offer such a wide variety of multi-season forage, native and non native, grown in many different situations, from parks and public areas to patios and green roofs.
This is where funny little spaces such as windowsills, balconies, and fire escapes really come into their own and my aim is always to try and get as much planting as possible into the area available. So the key thing is not just to look at the footprint, but also at other available planes such as walls or even a ceiling of climbers strung on wires. City dwelling makes for ingenious gardening.
No doubt, many readers have the idyllic image of wildflower meadows impressed in their brains as the most favorable habitat for honeybees. But you’re pretty clear in the book that these meadows have their own problems. Can you talk about how meadows are complicated and not everything they’re cracked up to be?
I just don’t understand where this modern-day bees-need-wildflower-meadows obsession comes from. What I do know is that it is a real distraction when you are trying to have a serious discussion about feeding Honeybees because it has hijacked the agenda away from the trees and bushes which (by virtue of the type and the sheer volume of pollen and nectar they produce) have always and will always make up the majority of Honeybee forage.
Even many professional gardeners don’t know or understand this, and there is a lot of “eco box ticking” around packets of wildflower seeds being distributed by organizations who want to seem green and caring. I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade—wildflowers are a great treat for the honeybee—but they are a second tier food resource. Any good beekeeper will confirm that sound honeybee health and welfare starts with productive trees.
So let’s have lots and lots of wildflowers everywhere we can, but let’s at the same time understand that they won’t save the world and they will generally need very specific planting conditions to thrive, which is why they often don’t thrive.
And we also need to understand that a wildflower meadow is not some romantic, natural, wild environment—it is a carefully understood and managed construct which depends on sowing the right species mix, the correct soil conditions, and a specific mowing or grazing regime to maintain balance and durability of key species.
So, bringing this question back to the real world: If I only had a tiny patch of ground to plant in and not a lot of time to look after it, what would I put there to feed pollinators? Wildflowers? Garden flowers? Or a hardy, densely flowering, food-producing bush such as a Wild Rose or Blueberry? For me, the bush will win out every time. (Or maybe I’d even upsize to a little apple tree or willow.
Lastly, do honeybees have personalities? Do you consider your bees pets? Do queen bees have an attitude?
I absolutely love this question! It goes right to the heart of our desire to connect with honeybees, and humans do this best through anthropomorphising.
No, Dale and I don’t see our bees as pets—at least not in the same way as we view the beloved cats and dogs we share our home with. We now have over 100 hives located in various urban and rural settings, so it would be hard to feel that close to them all.
That said, I do feel very bonded to the home hives we share our London rooftop and Suffolk garden with, and we do have special relationships with our Queen bees.
Queen bees are beautiful; the largest, most distinctive creature in any hive. Unlike worker bees, with their six week lifespan in high summer, the Queens live a productive life of two to three years, so we know each of them for quite a long time and we do name them. I’d like to say that we do this out of pragmatism because it helps with record keeping, but the reality is that we do enjoy indirectly giving them personalities.
And yes, Queen bees have attitude, but not perhaps in the way you are suggesting. They don’t carry themselves with a special swagger or send their house bees scurrying off on royal whims. In fact, the Queen is utterly at the mercy of the rest of the hive. Her attendant bees feed her, clean her, and take away her waste, and will show no hesitation in replacing her with a new Queen if they begin to doubt her productivity. But the pheromones produced by the Queen bee do dictate the personality of the hive. Spread from bee to bee on a continuous basis, they govern the life and temperament of the hive as well as acting as the olfactory passport to distinguish occupants from invaders. A bad tempered Queen will produce a bad tempered hive. A gentle Queen gives us laid back and happy set of bees. Change the Queen and you change the entire temperament of the hive within just a couple of days. So I guess you could call that attitude!
Matt Sutherland
