This morning I have been listening to Plight of the Bumblebee, which was broadcast on Radio 4 yesterday and is available on iPlayer for a week. Although there has been a lot in the media about the decline in honeybee populations, there has been less focus on the fact that all bee populations are declining, including the bumblebee.
The show starts in Scotland, where a fruit farmer who grows strawberries, raspberries and blueberries in polytunnels uses hives of imported (from the Netherlands) bumblebees to pollinate his fruit crops. He says that the bigger, fluffier bumblebees do the pollinating work of 20 honeybees, and they are able to work in cooler conditions.
With the loss of two species in the last 70 years, there are 24 native bumblebee species in the UK, and about a quarter of those are at risk. The Bumblebee Conservation Trust was set up to address this issue, and they do a lot of research into bumblebees and also run conservation projects. They even have a sniffer dog, called Toby, who is being trained to sniff out bumblebee nests early in the year when they just contain a queen – with no workers coming in and out of the nests they are impossible for a human observer to spot.
The different bumblebee species have different lengths of tongue, which basically means that they are capable of pollinating different flowers. They also have a trick called Buzz Pollination – they can alter their vibration from their customary low drone to a high pitched buzz which causes some flowers to release a shower of pollen. Without buzz pollination, our tomato crop would be very limited.
The Great Yellow bumblebee has been affected by the loss of wildflower habitats and is now only present in Orkney and a few other places in Scotland. The Short-Haired bumblebee has been extinct in the UK since 1988, but colonies were exported to New Zealand 120 years ago to help with pollination there, and so the bee could be reintroduced to the UK in a special project running in Dungeness.
Although special projects like these are important, there are more gardens in the UK than nature reserves, and if we all grew a few bee-friendly plants then we would be creating a huge bee reserve. How do you choose bee-friendly plants? A good tip if you’re at the garden centre and can’t remember any plant names is to wander around and see which plants are being visited by bees. If it will grow in your garden then it should attract bees there too :) You should also be looking for old-fashioned flowers that would be at home in a cottage garden – the modern annual bedding plants have been over-bred for showy blooms and are very little use to bees. Especially the sterile F1 hybrids, which have no pollen.
What does the future hold if we lose the bees? Fewer flowers, less colour in the countryside, less fruit and more wind-pollinated grain crops. If we want colour and a diverse diet, we need to look after our bees! Follow the link to the show homepage for links to more of the projects mentioned in the show.