20 May is World Bee Day. The day aims to raise awareness and inform people about the importance of the bee to our ecosystem, as bee populations around the world have declined sharply in recent decades.
Last year, Nagel-Group established five bee colonies at the sites in Versmold, Borgholzhausen, Bochum, Langenfeld and Eschweiler. In this way, Nagel-Group wants to make a contribution to strengthening the insects and ensuring the pollination of our food plants around the Nagel-Group sites. The busy Nagel-Group bees have survived the winter well and are already filling the trays with honey. This year there will be a few jars of Nagel-Group honey again in autumn. Depending on what the busy little bees bring in during spring and summer, this will result in around 15kg of all-year honey per bee colony.
Just a few weeks ago, the apprentices at our Borgholzhausen branch expanded the flowering food supply on site. The wall at the branch, which was previously covered with grass, was quickly transformed into a bee-friendly flower meadow. Soon, the first flowers will bloom there and provide honey bees, as well as wild bees and other insects, with a large and varied nectar and pollen supply.
Get active yourself: on the windowsill and balcony or garden.
Flowering kitchen herbs for the windowsill and balcony such as savory, borage, mint, sage, chives, rosemary, thyme, hyssop and lemon balm in the balcony box delight bees and enrich our food. For the perennial flower bed, the following are suitable: stonecrop, globe thistle, snapdragon, phlox, knapweed, mallow, ribbon flower and forget-me-not. Even a bee-flower mixture from the garden market, sown in a flower pot and regularly watered, already offers a large number of insects – and certainly also the bees of Nagel-Group – a rich food selection from spring to autumn! In winter, the colonies then manage with what they have collected until around October and what they still have left in the hive after the harvest.