Our gardeners spreading Howbery compost.
BEE-ING EVEN GREENER AT HOWBERY PARK Written by: Donna Bowles, Estates Manager, Howbery Park
We are committed to cherishing our beautiful landscape at Howbery Business Park, making the most of outdoor spaces for our community to enjoy, and playing our part in encouraging bio-diversity. Our most recent initiative – championing bumblebees – joins a whole raft of other measures introduced over recent years, which those based here clearly appreciate.
starting point was to do more at Howbery to support other species of bees.
New initiative buzzes in
The beehives that we introduced to Howbery four years ago have proved a particular hit with our community. Places on our bee workshops – either to extract honey from the hives, or to look inside them while wearing protective clothing – are always full, and jars of honey are snapped up. The kitchen also keeps a portion for cooking in our restaurant.
We have pledged to support bumblebees at Howbery as a part of biodiversity scheme and are aiming to meet objectives set by Nurture Landscapes (which maintains our grounds) and the Bumblebee Conservation Trust. The objectives include introducing ‘homes’ for wildlife, buying certain ‘bee-friendly’ plants, buying peat free compost, and putting up information boards to improve bee knowledge. There are currently 24 species of bumblebee in the UK and 8 of them are endangered. Two species became extinct in the last 80 years..
The interest in our honeybees is typical of how our community embraces our various eco-friendly measures, encouraging us to carry on in the same vein. So when we were considering how to improve bio-diversity on site further last year, the obvious
The Howbery gardeners are therefore now recording sightings of bees, and noting which plants they are visiting. By ensuring that we have flowers suitable for bees at different points in the year, we can ensure we are providing continual food for these
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important pollinators while they are out and about. Most hibernate in winter.
“ Howbery is
everything you would expect a business park to be and more.
”
Jonna Mundy, CEO of You HR Consultancy
When we have met all the objectives, the Bumblebee Conservation Trust logo will be inscribed on the blank petal of a flower-shaped award. We will then choose another area of biodiversity – such as butterflies, insects, birds, amphibians or wildflowers – to focus on to gain our next petal. Signing up to the Nurture scheme gives structure to our biodiversity work, allowing us to clearly demonstrate significant biodiversity improvements,
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