We've been creating quite the buzz here on the Shropshire Petals flower field. This summer we've been growing a 17-metre bee made entirely out of cornflowers.
The idea behind our giant wildflower bee was to celebrate how incredible bees are, and highlight the importance of looking after them. It's estimated that a third of all food is pollination dependent, so these fuzzy little guys deserve some appreciation.
Our giant bee also symbolises the hard work we've been doing to improve our sustainability for the next generation, in caring for our environment and taking responsibility for what we produce.
We planted the bee by hand and within a few weeks watched it start to grow. Now it's blooming with glorious colour and there is a wonderful array of wildlife enjoying the fruits of our hard work.
We chose just three colours for the giant bee, yellow cornflowers for the inside stripes, white cornflowers for the wings and black cornflowers for the outline. The giant bee can be seen from the sky, and getting up close you can hear a busy buzzing of activity.
Bee Facts
- There are three main types of bee in the British Isles, the bumblee, solitary bee and honey bee.
- Bees fly at an average of 13-15 mph
- Honey bees' wings flap at over 11,000 times a whopping minute
- All worker bees are female
- A queen honey bee can lay between 1 and 2,000 eggs per day!
Top 5 bee friendly flowers
If you're thinking of growing some beautiful flowers in your garden, here's a few that will keep your local bees very happy:
- Lavender
- Cosmos
- Echinacea
- Salvia
- Snowdrops
Improved sustainability at Shropshire Petals
Here at Shropshire Petals we're constantly taking steps to become more environmentally sustainable. Every year our flower field offers food and habitat to thousands if not millions of bees, insects and a range of wildlife. Our giant bee has been set aside from the rest of the field so it won't be hand picked like the rest of our flowers, to make beautiful petal confetti.
We're also taking time to look at how we can be more sustainable too; a percentage of the farm is powered by solar energy; we launched our return scheme in January 2019 for any plastic products, so customers can return them to be reused or recycled; and we've been working tirelessly to develop new confetti packaging to include a home compostable window.
We've also made small but meaningful changes in our petal shed by signing up a two terra cycles to recycle crisp and biscuit packets (guilt-free snacking), reducing the amount of paper we use in the shed to save trees and also using pencils or refillable fountain pens to avoid using single use pens.
We've even made sure our dispatch boxes and leaflets are made from recycled materials, not to mention our brand new confetti samples packets are also compostable. We've still got some way to go but we're very excited about our progress and will keep you up to date our journey.
Love as always SP xxx
