TO bee or not to bee?

If that is the question, then Salisbury’s Secret Garden might have the answer.

For the last couple of years, Becky Twigg and her group of passionate volunteers have been working hard on the Secret Garden project: this has converted a former churchyard into an enchanting nature space, all behind a mysterious looking iron gate at the top of Mill Road.

Building on this success, Becky now has bigger goals in view, with the launch this Saturday of the Salisbury Bee Trail.

Dotted around the city will be a dozen Bee Trail stops: armed with a map (available from the Tourist Information Centre, Fisherton Mill and Arts Centre) and a smartphone app, trailers will be able to scan each sign to bring a different species of bee to life on their phones, and learn more about these small but invaluable insects.

Chatting to Becky over a cup of tea on a particularly soggy summer holiday weekend, I must confess to learning more about bees in twenty minutes than in my entire adult life put together.

Turns out there are more than 250 species in the UK, a population that the honey bee plays just a modest part in.

Indeed, in terms of the all-important pollination, it is the many species of wild bee that do the heavy lifting.

These range from plant-specific bees, such as one of Becky’s favourites, the ivy bee, to some so small they’re no bigger than a grain of rice.

Rather than these bees living in hives and colonies, a lot of these wild bees in fact live alone and on the ground.

And rather than all bees being able to sting you, most can’t –only the female has that capacity (insert your own joke from the 1970s here).

Becky’s aim for the Bee Trail is twofold.

Firstly, she wants to help people learn more about bees.

And secondly, she wants to encourage people to make the city more bee friendly.

I asked her what families and businesses could do in the regard: don’t treat your lawn is one answer; create a bee bank or build a bee hotel in a sunny spot is another.

‘We need to stop being spectators to conservation,’ Becky argues. ‘Nature needs feet on the ground’.

And where better to start than with a summer’s walk around the city?

The Bee Trail is something unique to Salisbury – no other city in the UK currently has anything similar, though Becky hopes that others will be inspired to follow suit.

It’s a venture well worth supporting – the sort of feel-good project that helps make Salisbury a better place to bee.

For more details on the Bee Trail visit secretgardensalisbury.uk