Today’s feature is from The Great Sunflower Project, they’re giving away free sunflower seeds and hoping you’ll help them out a bit in return (and bees too):

By watching and recording the bees at sunflowers in your garden, you can help us understand the challenges that bees are facing.

• It takes less than 30 minutes.
• It’s easy.
• Free Sunflower seeds for planting.
• No knowledge of bees required!
• Enter your bee counts online or send us your paper form.
• We would love to have you join us; let’s help our most important pollinators together!

I think the free sunflower kits are available for U.S. residents only (I couldn’t see anything specific so I could be wrong), but once you learn how beneficial sunflowers are to bees–you might want to plant a few regardless of where you live.

Make sure to check the FAQ section, not just any sunflower will do–you need to plant one that will produce pollen for the bees. You’ll also find instructions for how to plant and grow sunflowers here.

There is a lot of information on the site, but you can also read this article by Sunset Magazine about the project - Grow Sunflowers, Support Bees:

The Great Sunflower Project is looking for citizen scientists all over the U.S. to plant sunflowers and then observe how many and what kind of bees buzz by them. (All they’re asking for is for you to take a look for 30 minutes twice a month and record what you see.) They’re looking for folks to plant in urban, suburban, and rural environments. Participants can be any age.

When all the data is in, San Francisco State University scientists will use it to make a coast-to-coast pollination map, showing where bees are and aren’t throughout the United States.

Nice summer project for the kids too!

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