Bee hotel and observation box in Memorial Garden, Guy’s campus, KCL, April 2025 – not enough flowering ground cover or shrubs

Science gallery, Guy’s campus – there are some flowering plants, but there needs to be more spring-flowering ground cover, bulbs and perennials, and a crab apple in the large pot.

Guy’s campus – non occupied bee hotels

Denmark Hill campus – too much bare earth and evergreen shrubs, needs bee-friendly groundcover, perennials and bulbs and shrubs like Rosemary (May 2025)

Stamford Street courtyard – shrubs cut back too much so can’t flower. Need to be underplanted with groundcover flowering plants such as geranium. Too many evergreens. No flowers for bees or other pollinators.

Great Dover Street courtyard – too much bare ground, nothing flowering. (May 2025)

GDS – Scope to plant up all the tree pits with spring-flowering bee-friendly bulbs and flowers

GDS – scope to replace dead Portuguese laurel with bee-friendly, evergreen Sweet box flowering January – March

Honor Oak – Bee hotel and boxes not occupied. Not enough flowers and a bit too shady. Could move to a sunnier spot (below) where the box and hotels could face south east and flowers could be planted.

Bee hotels are also situated in a shady spot in Maughan Library (below). There are no options for moving them to a sunnier spot, or to improve the flowering plants.

Cavity-nesting solitary bees have 3 requirements for nesting

• 1. Sufficient nectar and pollen-rich flowers when they are flying and looking to provision a nest with pollen
• 2. Suitable nesting boxes such as wooden bee hotels filled with 15cm deep tubes made of bamboo or cardboard, or wooden bee observation boxes. These should ideally face south or east, be a metre off the ground, in a fixed spot and undisturbed
• 3. Nesting material with which to construct their nests, such as damp earth (Red mason bees), leaves from Rose bushes (leafcutter bees), fibres of Lamb’s ear (Wool carder bee).

To date only requirement 2 had been met in most cases, but there is much planting that can be done to provide a variety of bee food and nesting material.