Leverhulme Memorial Primary, N-P4 'Superbee'
Leverhulme Memorial Primary, N-P4 'Superbee'

We live on the Isle of Harris. Harris has beautiful beaches and machair wildflowers. We like the story of Beataidh Banrigh (Super-Bee) by Tiree Primary School children. The story is told in both Gàidhlig and English. We have both Gàidhlig and English in our school too.
Beataidh is one of the rarest bees, the Great Yellow Bumblebee who lives amongst the Machair wildflowers, on an island just like ours. Bees are amazing nature’s engineers and love Machair flowers and plants, so we thought our pocket garden could be a mini machair to attract a Beataidh, bees and other insects into our school garden.
We did a community roadside and a beach clean-up and recycled a pallet from a local crofter, an old Barbie doll, plastic bottles and used driftwood to build our bug hotels. When we were on the beach, we found seaweed. It’s a very good fertilizer. Lots of crofters on Harris put it on their potato patch.
We approached Temple Collective, a local business, for support with the project. We chose Temple as they make products using machair flowers. Their website says they use Organic and regenerative farming practices. Temple kindly let us use an area in their greenhouse and helped us learn all about the organic techniques they use. We got lots of support from Matt who works as the gardener. He helped us choose the seeds to grow some edible plants and flowers that are found on the machair. We also planted potatoes.
When we visited the greenhouse, it was so exciting to see little green shoots appearing and we repotted them to give our seedlings more space to grow. Not all the plants survived, and some machair flowers are not ready to be in the garden, but luckily we planted more than enough to get plants which bees and humans can eat. We have Marigold, yarrow, nasturtium, radish, broad bean, potatoes, thrift, kale, broccoli, mixed salad and mizuna.
The pupils tell their garden story. Find out how even Barbie got involved.
While we waited for the plants to grow, we painted the pallet with an island scene like in the story, decorated the recycled bottles as bees for decoration, birdseed and to catch water to help the plants. We painted bee pebbles too. We also learnt how to use saws to cut bamboo and willow (That was hard work!) We also used drills, hammers and nails to build our bug hotels.
We got an area in the school garden ready for the plants. We put down cardboard to keep the weeds and grass away and then covered it in peat free compost. Matt tells us this technique means you have healthier soil compared to digging.
As we learnt so many new skills, everyone has a different part they enjoyed, but we all loved bringing it all together in the garden. It was so exciting to see it come to life. We even had a bee visit while we were planting! Our Eco-committee will continue to care and upkeep our garden.
The project has led to lots of exciting activities too. We made machair flower soap and lip balms with Caroline from Temple. We also had a local Artist Marigold Williams help us make machair flower lampshades.
