The Bee and Pollination Festival will take place at the University of Bristol’s Botanic Garden at The Holmes, Stoke Bishop, Bristol, on Saturday 8 and Sunday 9 September 2012.
This year’s theme focuses on vegetable growing and Bristol City Council’s allotments team will demonstrate new ideas to improve allotments with their garden displays. The Avon Beekeepers Association will stage their annual Bristol Honey Festival, with exhibits of honey and bee products. A live hive will give visitors an insight into the workings of the honey bee along with talks and displays on the importance and pleasure of keeping bees.
The event will feature research by the University’s School of Biological Sciences into the current alarming decline in bee and pollinator numbers and what is being done to better understand the reasons for the decline and how it can be reversed.
Nick Wray, Curator at the Botanic Garden, said: “The weekend will include lots of interactive events and displays. Orchids will feature prominently because their flowers are the most highly adapted to specific pollinators and there will be some fascinating orchid examples.
“The festival is a great opportunity for members of the public to see what bees and pollinators do for us.”
Other exhibitors will include sculpture, local cider apple producers and beer tastings. Orchid enthusiasts, including the Writhlington School Orchid Project, will show the relationship between pollinators and flowers in a display of orchids. Local nurseries will be selling a wide range of plants aimed at providing nectar for bees and habitats for wildlife.
Free tours will be offered throughout the weekend giving visitors the chance to see and learn something new about the garden, which will be ablaze with September colour, including many autumn flowering salvias, anemones, grasses, toad lilies and hardy bromeliads.
The Bee and Pollination Festival at the University of Bristol’s Botanic Garden, The Holmes, Stoke Park Road, Stoke Bishop, Bristol, will be open from 10 am to 5 pm on Saturday 8 and Sunday 9 September. Light refreshments will be available.
Entry to the festival is £3.50 adults; free to University staff and retired staff, Friends of the Botanic Garden, students and children under 16.