An ambitious plan to help our bees, butterflies, hoverflies and other pollinating insects has been launched today by Buglife. The Shropshire B-Lines mapping, funded by Defra, aims to connect some of the county’s best remaining wildlife sites through targeted wildflower habitat creation, linking the north to south, east to 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 is 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.
Shropshire 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 healthy populations of bees and other pollinators 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.”
Joe Phillips, Evidence and Data Officer at Shropshire Wildlife Trust said: “We were very keen to support Buglife on this ambitious project as the fate of our insect populations, and boosting them significantly, is of high priority for UK conservation. Nature needs a network of more, bigger, and better space – this is exactly what B-Lines will do, not only to the benefit of pollinators, but ultimately to the benefit of us. We will collaborate with Buglife to create new pollinator habitat in Shropshire and we, undoubtedly like you are, are ‘buzzin” at the prospect of enjoying more bees in our lives because of B-Lines”.
