Last weekend (18-19 April 2021) Netherlands counted bees. Good, because little is known about how bees do it here. Clearly: bee hotels and other bee-washing are not going to solve bee mortality. Turns out the little bug is often abused to sell the well-meaning citizen crap. Think of undeservedly green images or useless bee hotels and flowers: Be-washing. Good to get to know your own bee so.

'There's been a lot to do lately to bees. Everyone wants to help them, but many people do not know how. So a lot of initiatives do not work, or even work against the indigenous. Native bees need Dutch plants, they are completely adapted to that in the course of evolution. But in garden centers you can find all kinds of plants from the other side of the world. Or plants that are grown by appearance, so that they have as large as possible petals. There is often no nectar or pollen in there. Bees can't do anything with this.Yet companies sell these carnival mixtures under the guise of 'good for bees'. Often there are even pesticides in it, bee researchers discovered. Very unhealthy.'

Also municipalities often sow exactly those flowers in which at all do not work. That's only fun for cycling recreators on Instagram. Or they set up a bee hotel, but mow the lawn around it. In millimetered grass all the flowers are decapitated, then a bee hotel has zero sense.''You see a lot of companies that place bee hotels at their dairy farm and then say: we are green. Meanwhile: nowhere flowers. It's really Geenwashing. bee hotels are fun and educational, but hardly helpful. A few bees sit in the closet, but 80 percent of the species nest in the ground. In addition, the hotels are often badly made and not 'slippery' inside. Bees open their wings.


Why bees count?
The more we know about bees, the better we can help the bee. That's why we're asking everyone to participate in this nationwide bee survey. Almost 360 species of bee are found in the Netherlands. More than half of them are threatened.

Home - National Bee Count
Bees are important for pollination. “80% of our edible crops and almost 90% of our wild plants are pollinated by bees and other insects,” says Koos Biesmeijer, bee expert at Naturalis. “Researchers use the results of the National Bee Count to see where the different species of bee occur in the Netherlands and whether these numbers increase or decrease.”

Birds bee connoisseur Linde Slikboer of Knowledge Centre EIS is the Biesbosch and the Noordwaardpolder one of the two places where the sand bumblebee still sees. The bumblebee can also be found around the Haringvliet and on the island of Tiengemeente. She examines why the sand bumblebee picks this place to stay. In the area there is a lot of comfrey and the sand bumblebee seems to be especially similar to this plant.

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