The British Beekeeper’s Association is promoting a lovely approach to beekeeping this year that is all about the forage! They say that even though we all want to be beekeepers, we can certainly all be ‘keepers of bees’ by planting the right plants as sweet, yummy forage habitats to welcome bees into our lives. As a newbie beekeeper who is unsure about keeping bees of her own in London, I‘m a huge advocate of the keeper of bees approach. Its widely accepted that bee populations have dropped in the UK because they have a suffered a huge loss in habitat over recent decades so more forage habitat is much needed! Ideal bee feeding habitats are flower-rich grasslands and clover fields but unfortunately these have been disappearing in the UK due to changes in agricultural practices and intensified land use. The majority of farmers use industrial practices like monoculture where vast areas of one crop are grown year after year instead of using traditional methods of crop rotation where land is purposefully left covered in wildflowers like …