If your garden has seemed different in recent years, with that familiar buzz much quieter, the air less colourful and alive, it's probably not your imagination. Bee and butterfly populations face alarming declines worldwide. That's a scary thought, considering that...
We need insects in our garden, so use a product that only controls the pests. Insects are necessary in our gardens. They play an important role in the natural ecosystems that keep our gardens healthy and alive. As such, using blanket pesticides with the intention of...
Summer has arrived and so have the creepy crawlies. For many garden lovers the detection of caterpillars in their veggie gardens is soul destroying, normally for two very different reasons. Firstly, the devastation of their attack and the inevitable ruin and damage to...
This particular bacterium, or disease, is one of the good guys, keeping fungal outbreaks under control. It’s easy to see things happening in the spring garden: shoots peak out of the soil, leaves unfoil, buds burst open and everything grows seemingly overnight. But...
We always say, “you are what you eat”, and most of us think we’re being healthy when we eat five servings of fruit and veg a day. But do we really know what we’re eating? When we buy a punnet of plums or a bag of kale from the supermarket, do we know what they were...
Gardening is biology, revolving around the biological processes of growth and life. For millions of years, plants have thrived and grown successfully with no human intervention. Chemical pest control and plant nutrition have become the norm over the past 80 years,...
Bees are classified according to common character traits Bees can be classified in many different ways. Their taxonomic classification uses shared characters that are indicative of relatedness between species, and this is best expressed as an evolutionary tree....
by Stephen Smith Garden for Bees Many of you will have read that if bees become extinct, mankind will follow within a few years. Whether or not that is actually true, there is no doubt that bees play a crucial role in the pollination of our food, and they are facing a...
By Dr Connal Eardley The Bee’s Perspective Flowers provide food for bees. To plants they are sex organs. The origins of flowering plants and insect pollinators began simultaneously about 100 million years ago. Cross-pollinated plants use vector, such as wind, water or...
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]What Is a Bee? This short series on gardening with bees in South Africa will explore the reasons for adding this extra dimension to gardening, and the pleasure that can be found in it. Our country’s bee diversity is astounding, and...