⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review - Plant Trees, Sow Seeds, Save The Bees by Nicola Bradbear

This review has been made possible thanks to @NetGalley and Ebury Publishing, Penguin Random House for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A pocket sized anthology of everything you would need to know about bees! I picked this book up because of the sunny weather we've had recently and to find out what it is we can do to help our fuzzy little friends. I found this as a very informative anthology, describing in clear, engaging and humorous language the difference between bees and wasps, and what to do with our yard to help bees do their job.

Bradbear has done a great job of being informative without making the content seem dull. The delicate black and white water colour illustrations of the bees lived up the descriptions and they're beautiful to look at! They're the kind of thing you'd want to hang in your cottagecore house, maybe in the kitchen by a bright open window. I think this is the perfect gift for any precocious animal lover, a lovely gift for your mom or grandmother on Mother's day which is coming up, and anyone who likes spending their weekends in the garden. I'm sure dads and hubbys alike would love to hear that they need to mow the lawn less!

A fabulous no nonsense approach is found in this book.
We are huge bee and other pollinator lovers and found that we have a lot of things in our garden to help, but we can do more and we will be adding more to our list.

There were several things that we were unaware of and made notes of those too.

I will be looking at the paperback book as unfortunately this ARC had the most amazing illustrations for identifying 'stripeys' but they were all monochrome, fingers crossed the book has colour.

Highly recommended if you want to do your bit.

Thank you to Netgalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest review. My family have a large overgrown garden that has felt like an Eden during lockdown as we've marvelled at the incredible wildlife that enjoys it. We've begun dreaming of how to develop it to be even more biodiverse and make use of spaces that are currently serving little ecological purpose. I found the book to be really informative without being heavy reading. It contains not just information regarding the species of stripy insects found in the UK, but a great wealth of knowledge on plants and practices you can adopt to be pollinator-friendly.

There were a few sentences I found poorly written, but it was otherwise a really useful book. Laid out in thoughtful sections, it was an easy book to dip in and out of. I will return to this again and again as we come to deliberately cultivate the wild in our garden.

I loved this book, full of interesting facts about stripey insects primarily bees. Wonderfully descriptive and full of helpful tips on how to identify the different types of bees,I didn't realise there were so many types. I now have a list of plants and flowers to buy to encourage bees, butterflies and other insects to my garden. The book really helped me to understand exactly how important these little creatures are to the world and we need to do all we can to help them.

I like this book and its mission. The information is simple and easy to read. But it would be amazing if there were photos instead of black and white illustrations so that we could truly see how the bees looked like. There are many books about bees out there, and to be honest, I wouldn't choose this book over them.

My first impuls was to give this book 2 stars. It's quite straightforward listing kinds of bees, kinds of bee-friendly plants and environments and how to make life easier for bees.

But on second thought: I found myself thinking about reorganizing the garden so it must have made an impression...