With our beautiful native daffodils blooming away, a group of Year 5 pupils were inspired to go for a walk around the grounds to observe what else was happening around our grounds. Tucked away by our youngest pupils’ outdoor area is a Mahonia aquafolium, which is a bit leggy, prickly and quite ugly really, but it is doing a very important job right now – providing early food for bees. In fact, we saw a queen on one of the flowers which gave us a bit of a fright as we were getting up close for a photo when it flew out! However, seeing it made us really stop and look around to see what else was providing nectar this early in the season.
We found a surprising number of pollen sources; from crocuses and catkins to primroses, blackthorn and hellebores. We also found masses of ivy growing along our boundary fences and we know bees love foraging in there in late autumn and winter. However, during our next planning sessions we will be researching what we can add into our grounds to lengthen the season so bees can have access to even more food as early and as late as possible through the year. We had an assembly recently about the plight of bees so we know we need to support them as much as we can. We are fortunate in having our own apiary with four of our own honey bee hives which are starting to wake up. This gives us an opportunity to study bees close up.
The grounds at Wicor contain many different plants and the teachers are helping us to understand the concept of biodiversity. We have a tree-lined sports field (field maples, ash, silver birch, rowan, hazel, alder, holly to name a few) which we have added to recently with a nuttery and an elder grove. These trees provide homes to many different animals and we have tried to keep to native trees when we have planted more. We asked the question ‘does it really matter if they are native or non-native?’ We found out that it does matter because native trees generally will be able to support more wildlife than non-native.
However, we do have zones of non-native plants too. For example, we have our tropical bed where the banana plants are all wrapped up to protect them from harsh frost and some big bare patches of earth too, where tender tropical plants have been lifted and taken into our polytunnels for the winter. And in our Jurassic bed we have plants from all over the world, including cycads and tree ferns, nestled among the 185 million year old limestone.
But back in the long borders, the bees are a-buzzing among the polyanthus, lungwort and the wonderfully fragrant wallflowers. Spring is definitely here on the south coast of England.
New Nature 