Ingham’s W RLD
AFAMILIAR hum returned this week as bumblebees, nature’s lumbering fatties, celebrated the spring sunshine by feasting among the daffodils and primroses. Soon other pollinators joined in the fun – a brimstone butterfly flitting across the garden followed by a small tortoiseshell. Then I learned that I live on an “insect superhighway”. A proposed 10,600-mile UK-wide network of “B-Lines”, launched by TV naturalist Steve Backshall, crosses my area, giving insects and other wildlife badly-needed connections between the nation’s few remaining flower-rich habitats.
Buglife, which has spent a decade drawing up the network, says that since the 1930s England and Wales have lost 97 per cent of their wildflower meadows – an area 1.5 times the size ofWales.
This has caused a huge cut in nectar and pollen and isolated many wildlife sites, their species marooned in natural gilded cages.
Some 41 per cent of our pollinators are suffering serious declines. As they provide agriculture with a service worth £430million a year, it’s a decline that affects us all.
By linking up flower-rich habitats, from rose gardens to meadows sprinkled with poppies and cornflowers, the surviving bees, butterflies and hoverflies can spread their wings and thrive.
So the B-Lines seek to provide nectar corridors for the insects to travel along, with at least 10 per cent of the network offering pockets of flower-rich grasslands, flowering hedgerows or flowering trees.
Gardeners can help by planting nectar and pollen-rich native plants so that towns do not become brick walls to bees.
Buglife hopes to create 370,000 acres of flower-rich habitat – four times the size of the Isle of Wight.
The network is also more than four times as long as all the UK’s motorways but many times more precious in terms of wildlife.
The insects are followed by the animals which feed on them and the seeds they help to create. So this network will boost everything from hedgehogs to frogs, swallows to flycatchers, many of them in trouble themselves.
Imagine a land where wild flowers were commonplace. Butterflies would love it but so would we all.
See the B-Lines network at buglife.org.uk/our-work/b-lines