as we've heard repeatedly over the past  couple of years, the bees are disappearing, which, since they pollinate around 16% of the world's flowering plants, can only be bad news. But here's the good news. One of the simplest and most effective measures to speed their return - alongside restrictions on pesticides and better commercial beekeeping techniques - could also be the most attractive.  around 1.3m hectares of wildflowers and hedgerow have been lost in the industrialisation of British agriculture, and 3m acres of wildflower meadows have gone since 1945, causing both birds and bees to struggle to find enough to eat. But Landlife, the charity which established the UK's first wildflower centre in Merseyside in 2000, has been creating new habitats in derelict industrial spaces - sowing wildflower meadows among brick rubble and crushed concrete - and has since found both bees and birds thriving there. "We now have fields where we can count eight different types of bumblebee per square metre," says Richard Scott, senior project manager. "That's 80,000 bees per hectare, so you can really hear it."  It's a far less costly method of treating wasteland than topsoil and grass, which offers very little for wildlife, and a beneficial side-effect has been a decrease in antisocial behaviour in areas where they plant. Landlife believes a concerted effort to replicate these projects in every town and city could create a huge matrix of bee habitats nationwide. "Very often these solutions are overlooked," says Scott, "but in almost every case, in the places where we sow, people are demanding more."