Take Part in the Big Garden Bee Count

White Tailed Bumblebee. Photo: Penny Frith

Cheshire Wildlife Trust is calling on local people to create a buzz next month and help build a picture of the status of the bumblebee in Cheshire.

The conservation charity has teamed up with RECORD, the local Biological Records Centre, which is producing a bumblebee distribution atlas for Cheshire, and wants you to record your sightings.

Charlotte Harris, Chief Executive, explains: "Bees and other pollinators such as moths and butterflies have lost much of their habitat in the past 60 years, including a staggering 97 per cent of wildflower meadows. They’re also under fire from pesticides, habitat loss, intensive agriculture and climate change.

"As the local Wildlife Trust for Cheshire, Halton, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford, Warrington and Wirral we’re ideally positioned to take practical action to help them across the local area and we already do lots of work across our reserves to restore and improve habitat for these vital species. But we want to do more, which is why we're taking the first steps of a long-term pollinator campaign so that we can help these vital insects for years to come.

"To do that we need to understand the bigger picture so this year we've teamed up with RECORD which is working with Carl Clee, the Cheshire County Aculeate Hymenoptera Recorder, to produce a bumblebee atlas for Cheshire.

"Once we know exactly what the picture is like for bees in Cheshire, we can plan how we can best manage our own reserves for these amazing pollinators and identify areas where we can join up the gaps to create 'bee roads' for pollinators across the county."

On Sunday, July 17th, the Trust wants as many people as possible to take part in its first Big Garden Bee Count and to report what type of bees they see on this day.

Tony Parker, Chair of RECORD, said: "Don't worry if you don't know a honeybee from a bumblebee, Carl Clee has produced some handy bee identification sheets to help. Sending sightings is simple. The team at RECORD just needs to know what you've seen, where, and when."

Identification sheets can be downloaded from www.cheshirewildlifetrust.org.uk/beescount where you'll also find a link to a special online form to send your sightings.

You don't have to wait until July 17th to send your findings, RECORD is already collecting data, and you can continue submitting sightings until the end of September.