Look at the difference a regular supply of water makes to a planter with a shallow depth of soil. After a few days without water, most of the plants appear dead. But a few weeks after a drip, irrigation system provides a trickle of water for 10 minutes every 12 hours, they plants soon bounce back.
Here are a few steps for feeding and helping bees in a drought when there is a hose pipe ban:
- 1. Prioritise watering flowering plants (or plants that are about to flower) in pots every morning or night with a watering can. Flowers that are drought stressed will retain nectar that bees and other pollinators need to give them the energy to fly, and sometimes they produce less pollen too.
- 2. Prioritise watering flowering plants in borders and beds every few mornings or nights with a watering can.
- 3. Keep saucers of water toped up with stones in them. Bees, mainly honeybees, and hoverflies may alight on the stones to drink the water.
- 4. Leave some grass long, and messy areas of your garden messy, as bumblebees may be nesting there, and will need shade the vegetation may be providing.
- 5. If your bee hotels are in a very sunny location, move them to a shadier spot if there is no longer any activity around the hotels.
- 6. Grow a variety of drought-tolerant flowers (and shrubs) for short-tongued and long-tongued bees whereever you can – on a patio, balcony, rooftop, window box. And keep them watered when they are flowering.
- 7. Plant dense shrubs where bumblebees can shelter from the heat and they provide cooler corridors when they are flying from one patch of flowers to another.
- 8. If you are aware of the location of an underground bumblebee nest, try to provide it with some shade.
- 9. Timed drip or trickle irrigation is specifically permitted by Thames Water for domestic use during the current hosepipe ban if it it meets several conditions: not handheld, delivers water drip by drip directly onto or beneath the soil surface, there is no surface run-off or pooling, no spraying, misting or jetting of water through the air. So a standard soaker/drip hose kit with a battery timer and an inline pressure reducer should be compliant.