The Bee&B

How my daughter's intervention turned my patio into a five-star insect resort. Jennifer was over for tea (still no milk, the heathen) when she caught me mid-rant. I was passionately explaining to a very unimpressed robin that if he didn't pull his weight with the slug population, my entire garden would look like Swiss cheese. "You know, Dad," she said, sipping her milkless abomination, "for someone who's so worried about the bee-pocalypse, you've got a patio that's about as welcoming to pollinators as a locked pub at closing time. It's all slabs and one sad rosemary bush." She wasn't wrong. I'd been busy writing about the problem and had done sod all to fix it myself. Like publishing a fire safety manual while my own bin was on fire. "Right," I said, properly chastised. "What do we do?" What followed was a crash course in turning any space, from a sprawling garden to a scruffy windowsill, into a proper insect service station. And it turns out the trick is simply to think like a very…