With Bees’ Needs Week around the corner (14th July), now is the perfect time to do a Pollinator Count with your students!
Bees' Needs Week is an annual event run by Defra, working with a range of organisations including conservation groups, businesses and charities.
The aim of the week is:
to raise awareness of the importance of bees and other pollinators
share ideas, actions and activities that highlight the ways in which everyone can help them thrive
Use the 'Pollinator Count' activity from the National Education Nature Park to promote learning about pollinators and flowering plants, support an important citizen science project, and even make improvements to your site!
This is a timed count of insects that visit the flowers in your outdoor spaces. The data will show you how many and what types of insects are visiting your site to forage for food (with some pollinating the flowers when they visit), and which types of plants are most supportive to different insect groups. Your learners can use this information to identify where and what improvements they can make to the site, and use the information to research and tell stories about the insect antics at your setting.
Together, the data collected by you and others will show how educational settings support wildlife. At the Natural History Museum, researcher Dr Victoria Burton will analyse this information to assess the health of pollinators across the Nature Park and to explore which habitats and flowers best support pollinators. For more about the science behind the Pollinator Count, visit this blog post.
There is no need for prior insect or plant identification experience and the activity is specifically designed for young people, so its perfect to get involved!
Here is the link to the activity!