This summer, with bees buzzing busily in our parks and gardens, is a key time to recognise the vital role they play.

Bees put food on our plates – pollinating 75 per cent of crops worldwide – keep our farms in business and our countryside thriving. Yet numbers of bees have been severely declining in recent years, with 20 UK bee species already extinct and a quarter of those remaining at risk.

We have enjoyed doing our bit to make Barnet bee-friendly this season, by filling our gardens with seeds of flowering shrubs, lavender, having a bee-friendly allotment, even helping wild bees by planning to build a bee hotel in Finchley.

We would like to help Barnet with a biodiversity action plan. Our friends at Occupy Barnet have been guerilla gardening; loads of packets of seeds were planted by Occupy Barnet and Save Cat Hill at the magical site.

But to fully tackle all the nationwide threats to bees, from pesticides to how land is used, much larger scale action is needed too.

That’s why I hope the Government’s upcoming National Pollinator Strategy – due this autumn – will include some tough action. That means better support for farmers to create new habitat for bees and reduce their reliance on pesticides – more than 70 per cent of UK land is farmed, so what happens there is pivotal to bees’ heath. And when new developments are built to tackle the housing crisis, couldn’t each one include bee-friendly green spaces too?

Such measures would help the cause and keep our Barnet blooming.

Don Lyven, Jim Roland, Phil Fletcher, Cecilia Holmes, Poppy, Janette Ewens, Philippa Whitecross and Ben Samuel

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