Watch before you plant, using the count the UK scheme already defines: ten minutes, one 50 by 50 cm patch, one target flower species, in dry weather at 13°C or above in sun or 15°C or above when cloudy, between 1 April and 30 September, as the UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme sets out. The condition that changes what you see is the hour: the same patch on the same day gives different totals at 11:00 and at 16:30, which is why the method fixes the weather and the duration before it fixes anything else.

Choose a space you are already allowed to use. Watching is not permission to plant, cut or remove anything, and where the ground belongs to a school, a housing association or a council, the observation stays an observation until the manager says otherwise.

Ten minutes, one patch, one flower

Mark the 50 by 50 cm square and count the open flowers of your one target species inside it before the timer starts; that count is what the insect total is read against. The scheme names 14 target flowers and allows another flower where none of the 14 is available. Then count every insect that lands on the target flowers for ten minutes, sorting them into broad groups and putting anything you cannot place under "other insects". One person keeps the timer and calls each landing; the other writes the group, the flower count and the weather boxes. Swap for the second count so that neither the calling nor the writing becomes one person's job.

What a quiet count does not show

A count with nothing in it describes ten minutes on one patch, not the state of local pollinators. The national picture is assembled differently: the UK's pollinating insects indicator covers 393 species, 158 bees and 235 hoverflies, and stood 23% below its 1980 value in 2024, with no change between 2019 and 2024. The same indicator shows the two groups moving apart — hoverflies 44% lower in 2022 than in 1980, while the wild bee index was 19% higher, on that page's own figures. Two groups in one indicator pulling in opposite directions is the reason a single garden total answers nothing on its own.

In 2024 more than 700 people submitted over 4,200 FIT Counts, the scheme reports. That is the scale at which counts start to mean something, and it is also what your ten minutes joins when you submit rather than keep them.

Example: two counts on one lavender patch

Example. Two people run two FIT Counts on the same lavender on 12 July: one at 11:00 at 19°C in sun, one at 16:30 at 17°C in sun. Both clear the 13°C sunny threshold and both fall inside the 1 April to 30 September season. The square holds 30 open flower heads on both counts. The morning count records 14 insects, the afternoon count 6. Twenty minutes of watching in total, and the defensible sentence is that the morning count on this patch recorded more than twice the afternoon count on the same 30 heads. The indefensible one is that mornings are better for pollinators, which would need far more than two counts on one patch.

Choose plants after the counts, not before

Take the counts to a planting question rather than to a shopping list. The RHS Plants for Pollinators lists were relaunched in July 2025 after a review begun in 2022, and the expanded list now runs to over 10,000 plants across cultivated, wild and global lists, which is a UK horticultural starting point rather than a planting rule for every European climate and soil. That page also puts mowing less often, so lawn flowers such as dandelions bloom, among its quick measures — a change that costs nothing and can be tested with the same ten-minute count before and after.

Then ask a local adviser about your actual conditions: light, space, container or soil, maintenance, and what already grows there. Bring the flowering dates you observed rather than a photograph of someone else's border, and ask whether a management change is already planned for the space. Where the disagreement is really about how the space looks, a tidy patch and a healthy habitat separates the aesthetic question from the habitat one, and if you would rather submit your counts than keep them, choosing a citizen-science project you can complete compares what each scheme asks of one record. Keep the original counts either way: they are the before in any later comparison.

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