This week Natural Resources Wales have granted Pontypridd the status of official Bee Friendly town. This is part of a scheme devised by Welsh Government and Friends of the Earth Cymru to incentivise towns, counties and businesses to take action to help reverse the decline of pollinators, bees in particular, which are an important keystone species who’s numbers are declining rapidly.

In order to gain this accreditation the Friends of the Earth Pontypridd group had to help bees in 4 ways: By providing habitat, providing food (in the form of flowers), getting the community involved and taking action to reduce pesticide and herbicide use.

The group would like to thank Pontypridd Town Council who have been very supportive of their efforts from the start, creating an environment and land use committee. They are currently working with local allotment associations to create a Bee Friendly strategy for allotments and are bringing the land they manage open to use by community groups and opening up their land management policy for public input. They stagger mowing on a large field they manage called ‘Tommy’s Field’ to allow the native wildflowers to bloom.

Ynysanghard War Memorial Park has also made changes to make itself more Bee Friendly, allowing patches of the park to flower instead of mowing, building bug ‘hotels’ and prioritising hand weeding over herbicide use. The ‘Friends of Ynysangharad Park’ volunteer group has been established which is a voluntary community group that has brought the abandoned greenhouses back in to use and has established a community garden, using permaculture techniques to grow food and flowers.

Schools have gotten involved in planting bee friendly flowers and establishing wildflower areas. This includes St Michael’ Primary School (which won an RCT ‘Love where you live award for their efforts), Coed-y-Lan and Coedpenmaen. A group of local residents called ‘Friends of Graigwen Woods’ got together to buy and conserve a large piece of woodland above Graigwen in order to bring it into community ownership and prevent it being developed. This has preserved an important piece of natural habitat.

With help from the Your Pontypridd BID and the Town Council, a number of planters have been put around town and planted with bee friendly flowers. In addition to this there has been numerous events and workshops where people have been making bee hotels, planting flowers and learning about bees and other pollinators, and a lot of little community gardens and guerrilla gardens have popped up around Pontypridd where locals have taken it into their own hands to make their community look nicer and help wildlife.

Pontypridd has managed to achieve the status of Bee Friendly Town by building on it’s strong community and by different groups working together towards a common goal. Congratulations to everyone involved, find out more about your local community groups on the links below.

Friends of the Earth Pontypridd - https://www.facebook.com/FOEPontypridd/

Friends of Ynysangharad War Memorial Park - https://www.facebook.com/FriendsOfYWMP/

Pontypridd Town Council - https://www.facebook.com/PontypriddTownCouncil/

Friends of Graigwen Woods - https://www.facebook.com/friendsofgraigwenwoods/