Abigail, Laura and Lucy, PhD researchers at the National Botanic Garden of Wales, need your help to find the best flowers for hungry pollinators.

Bumblebees, honeybees, solitary bees and hoverflies are essential to global wellbeing. The rapid decline of insect pollinators is a real cause for concern.

Growing pollinator-friendly plants in our gardens is one way to provide more food for pollinators but which plants do they like best? 

Plants for pollinators' lists can be useful to help us choose the right plants but they are generally not based on real scientific data. Here at the National Botanic Garden of Wales we have more than 9,000 different types of native and non-native flowering plants for our pollinators to choose from. We are in an excellent position to scientifically test which are best. 

To see which plants pollinators have been visiting we will collect samples of pollen from their bodies. We extract, amplify and sequence the DNA in the pollen using DNA barcoding techniques. This allows us to discover exactly which plants are most important for pollinators and apply this information to develop pollinator-friendly seed mixes that we can all use in our gardens to protect pollinators.

This is a very expensive process – costing £3,000 to sequence the DNA of 100 pollen samples. We want to sequence 500 samples so to do this we need your help. We are asking for donations to directly fund our research, and help save our pollinators!

To say thank you for your support, we are offering the following rewards:

For a £50 donation: two free tickets to visit the Botanic Garden

£100: four free tickets to visit the Botanic Garden

£150: a Stitching Botanical’s Pollinator Embroidery

£250: Bumblebee Walk and introduction to identification around the beautiful Botanic Garden and Waun Las National Nature Reserve with the Science Team

£300: Beekeeping Day in the Botanic Garden’s Apiary

£400: Day in the Science Lab learning about and having a go at DNA barcoding