Leave your mower in the shed and count your flowers for ONE DAY between Tomorrow – saturday 23rd may until sunday 31st may.
That’s the message from Plantlife in their new citizen science campaign Every Flower Counts
WHY is this information important …?
- On a single day in summer, one acre of wildflower meadow can contain 3 million flowers, producing 1 kg of nectar sugar. That’s enough to support nearly 96,000 honey bees per day.
- But since the 1930s, we have lost nearly 7.5 million acres of flower-rich meadows and pastures. Just 1% of our countryside now provides this floral feast for pollinators.
- Against this loss, habitats such as lawns have become increasingly important. With 15 million gardens in Britain, our lawns have the potential to become major sources of nectar.
- But no one has ever quantified this resource before. This is what Every Flower Counts aims to do: work out how many flowers are on our lawns, how much nectar they’re producing and how many bees they can support through the calculation of our first ever National Nectar Score.
- Every Flower Counts will then allow us to monitor trends over time. Can we manage our lawns differently to increase the National Nectar Score? Will climate change have an impact on flowering and nectar production? What are the most abundant flowers and what can we do to encourage them?
By taking part in Every Flower Counts, you’ll help us answer these questions and get your very own Personal Nectar Score to show how many bees your lawn can support.
Last year – 2019 – Every Flower Counts participants counted the flowers in nearly 5,000 one-metre quadrats in lawns all the way from the Channel Islands to Shetland. The results are fascinating and surprising.
495,676 individual flowers were counted
203 different species were found, including orchids and other rarities such as meadow saxifrage, knotted clover and eyebright
The top 7 lawn flowers were (total counted in all quadrats):
Register
To take part, you will need to register – it’s FREE – at Plantlife
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