Wendy Tobitt on how the council aims to attracted more winged wildlife into the city

This can be a golden year for bees and other pollinators if you are able to fill your garden with yellow and golden flowering plants.

The vibrant colours will attract many pollinating insects including hoverflies, moths and bees.

The wildlife garden at BBOWT’s Sutton Courtenay Environmental Education Centre, near Didcot, is having a makeover this spring to create colourful flower beds. The nectar-filled flowers will encourage more pollinating insects to the site, and inspire hundreds of children who visit the centre every week to create wildlife areas at home.

Mark Bradfield, the community wildlife officer who is working at the centre, is looking for volunteers to help with the transformation. They will also create a sensory garden for children to explore, and more places for wildlife in the woods and around the ponds.

This will be a great opportunity for keen gardeners to find out how they can make their gardens more wildlife-friendly with bee-homes and bug-hotels. With a new England-wide strategy for bees, Oxford city’s own plans for more bee-friendly areas in parks, restrictions on the use of bee-killing chemicals on crops, and the Royal Horticultural Society celebrating 50 years of Britain in Bloom with golden floral displays, 2014 could be the year of the bee.

BBOWT will be responding to the draft National Pollinator Strategy for England, published by Defra last month. This sets out a 10-year plan with priority actions to be implemented from this summer. You can have your say on this draft strategy via the BBOWT website.

The Oxfordshire Bee Summit held in February has inspired Oxford City Council to take a look at how bee-friendly its parks and recreation areas are, and work with a pollinator advisory group to encourage more winged wildlife into the city.

For too long we have taken bees and other pollinating insects for granted, and not paid enough attention to the immense value they bring. ‘Free’ pollination by insects is worth more than £400m to UK agriculture each year but insect numbers are in severe decline.

One of the aims of the National Pollinator Strategy is to find out more about why there has been such a dreadful loss of bees over the last few decades. The Urban Pollinators project hosted by the University of Reading and supported by the Wildlife Trusts is already capturing data from researchers working in cities and towns across England.

Oxfordshire’s fields of oil-seed rape, and other flowering crops that bees rely on for food, especially now when they are emerging from hibernation, will be free of neonicotinoid chemicals this year. A two-year EU-wide restriction on the use of use of neonicotinoid chemicals in pesticides used on crops that are attractive to pollinators came into force in December. This followed a report from the European Food Safety Authority that identified a high risk to honey bees from common neonicotinoids, which are used on 1.2 million hectares of the British countryside.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Britain in Bloom this year, the RHS has given out seeds of golden-flowered plants for community groups and local authorities to create pollinator-friendly displays. Sunflowers, marigolds and nasturtiums will be glowing in raised beds and hanging baskets in towns across the county, and making a huge splash in Henley-on-Thames, which is representing Oxfordshire in the national finals of this year’s Britain in Bloom competition.

Bees are not the only pollinators. Hoverflies, butterflies and wasps all feed on nectar and pollinate flower-ing plants too, and so do moths. They feed on the nectar of flowers that are more scented at dusk, such as evening primrose and honeysuckle.

Visit www.bbowt.org.uk to discover plants for pollinators, join the wildlife garden work party at Sutton Courtenay Environmental Education Centre, and have your say on the National Pollinator Strategy.