This week marks the day of the Bee.  There are lots of different types of bees, most people know what a Bumble Bee or a Honey Bee looks like, but many don’t realise there are many different types, some look like wasps and some look like flies.

This guide in the download section of the UK News website: Variety of Bees Guide (600 downloads)  shows you the variety of different bees: There are over 250 different types in the UK but this lists the most common ones!!

Good places to spot bees across our operations include grassland locations – Raynes, Halkyn, Southam, Kensworth, Denge and urban sites Jarrow and Stanwell (near Heathrow Airport).

Broadly speaking, bees are in trouble, they feed on sources of nectar from flowers. Changes in how we farm using chemicals to get rid of insect pests has also caused problems for our native bee population.

Some people don’t realise that without our native bees to pollinate our food crops we wouldn’t have almost all of our fruits and many vegetables. Gardens have become less friendly to bees too, we can help this by adding native flowers to our garden and cut the grass less, allowing grassland flowers a chance to flower and set seed – you could join #NoMowMay and see what flowers pop up in your grass.

Feel free to spot bees on your site and take a photo to send into Sean Cassidy: sean.cassidy@cemex.com He’d love to see what different sorts of bees we have on our sites.

Spotting bees and thinking about what you can do to help them is a part all of us can play in helping bees and nature around us.  A child friendly Bumble Bee guide can be found here:

https://www.bumblebeeconservation.org/assets/documents/BBCT_Kids_ID_sheet_(big_8).pdf