You have a garden but you don't often see bees in it?
What to do about it?
Bees love all sorts of flowers, but mostly purple ones, they see the colour purple best of all. They like open flowers where they can get easily to the pollen and nectar and also tubular flowers.
When we put a new gate and railings at the front of our house, we planted 72 lavender plants... okay, they were supposed to be dwarf lavender, but they grew to almost 3 feet high! The bonus that we had with the lavender was the huge attraction for local bees, we regularly see over a hundred of them helping themselves during the summer months. I could watch them for hours, just hopping from flower to flower, not caring about anything other than the "job at hand".
It's tempting for us to get involved in selling seeds, but, quite honestly, we aren't gardeners to the extent that we are experts, Anne knows far more than I do, but I think that it really is something for experts whose business it is to produce them.
That said, here are some links along with explanations on the differences between the options on offer:
The cheapest way to get flowers in the garden is to buy unadulterated seeds and one of the best suppliers, they've been in business over 200 years, is Suttons.
The drawback with seeds is that if you want the best results you need to plant them in pots and then transplant later, if you don't want them to be bird food by simply scattering them on the ground! They take a bit of time and effort, but the results are well worth it. £3.49/1000 seeds, 25 varieties:
https://www.suttons.co.uk/flower-seeds/native-british-wildflower/honeybee-mix-seeds_MH-53182
One of the easiest, but also the most expensive is to buy seed balls. They're effectively protected and composted already so you can simply spread them around on the ground and wait for them to germinate.
However, the recommendation, is that you use one tin for a square metre of ground. At 600 seeds in 20 balls for £6.50, that's quite expensive, but the results are going to be much better than simply scattering seeds on the ground. Almost two and a half times the cost of seeds, but far less effort:
https://seedball.co.uk/product/wildflower-bee-mix-tin/
Buying a bag of 100 balls brings the cost down significantly to under half the cost per ball.
https://seedball.co.uk/product/bee-mix-100-wildflower-seedballs/
The final option I'm going to mention here is seed paper. There is a caveat to this one and that it's not for planting in the garden, they say it's not to be planted "in nature" but when you dig deeper (no pun intended) it transpires that the seeds are not UK native varieties, it's manufactured in India with Indian seeds, so they might cause problems:
https://greenili.com/a6-seed-paper/
However, this may well be an option for "patio gardens" where everything is in pots or containers.
There you have it. Three options.
If you have a greenhouse or somewhere that you can plant seeds in pots and have some time to spare, then seeds are the cheapest and will almost certainly give the greatest return for your money.
If you want the easiest way, but more expensive, then buy a bag of 100 seed balls at just under half the cost/ball of the tins.
Seed paper? Only for pots. They might be a "fun item" to give as gifts, but personally, I wouldn't recommend them.
There's plenty of good information on the web, but here's a starting point for you:
https://www.gardenersworld.com/plants/plants-for-bees/
