An ambitious plan to help our bees, butterflies, hoverflies and other pollinating insects has been launched today by Buglife with funding from Defra. Herefordshire B-Lines aims to connect the county’s best remaining wildlife sites through targeted wildflower habitat creation, linking the north to the south, east to the west and towns to the countryside.
Buglife has worked with the local authorities and other partners to map out a network of potential wildflower habitat – called B-Lines, and are now inviting farmers, landowners and the public to get involved in creating new pollinator habitat, and practically restoring wildflower-rich grasslands.
Bees and other pollinators are disappearing from our countryside because of a lack of wildflower-rich habitats. Three million hectares, 97%, of the UK’s wildflower-rich grasslands have been lost since the 1930s. Creating pollinator habitat along B-Lines will help wildlife move across our countryside, saving threatened species and making sure that there are plenty of pollinators out there to help us grow crops and pollinate wildflowers.
Herefordshire is just one of the counties recently mapped leading to the completion of the England B-lines network, enabling Buglife’s vision of a river of wildflowers across the UK to be realised. The next step will be getting wildflower restoration and creation happening across the country.
Hayley Herridge from Buglife said “This is an exciting opportunity for people to help our struggling insect pollinators. If we establish a network of wildflowers across our landscape, we can support the recovery of our pollinator populations enabling them respond to threats such as climate change.”
“If you have land which you are interested in restoring to wildflower-rich grassland, or if you would like to get involved in other ways, please get in touch – we’d love to hear from you.”
Andrew Nixon, Conservation Senior Manager at Herefordshire Wildlife Trust said “Like other parts of the country Herefordshire has lost most of its wildflower meadows and other flower rich habitats. This in turn has impacted on the pollinators we love to see in the countryside and in our gardens. The B-Lines map for Herefordshire will be a very useful tool to help us prioritise where we want to create wildflower habitats to best help our pollinating insects to survive and spread.”
