It hasn’t been a great year so far for bees and butterflies in my garden, but I had a wander down to the raised beds the other afternoon mainly to see whether my least favourite flower (because of its smell, not looks) Eryngium – the sea holly – was attracting anything other than flies. I was happy to see not only bees, mostly white-tailed bumblebees, but also a few Red Admiral butterflies gorging themselves.
Eryngium Alpinum ‘Blue Star”
Echinops
Eryngium Alpinum ‘Blue Star”
Golden Marjoram
Eryngium Alpinum ‘Blue Star”
Agapanthus
And just in case you were thinking that it was the purple / blue tones that attract the bees, here’s a bee that tunnelled so deep into a daylily I thought it had become stuck!
Cornwall in Colours 
I gather it’s not been a good year for bees in Europe – I was watching a programme about bee keepers in northern Italy recently and they have had a poor honey season 😦 With so many summer storms apparently the flowers have taken a battering and consequently there are less flowers for the bees to collect pollen from. It’s a really concerning situation – we need bees! We noticed a lot of bees on our walk today (spring is just stirring here) – it was lovely to here them humming 🙂
My garden is humming, but 99% are bumble bees, hardly an honey bees or hoverflies this year.
Hope the honey bees come back soon!
Beautiful garden! Working on sprucing up my local community garden for the fall and for the pollinators.