Recognise mini heroes
Mention pollination, and we think of honeybees and bumblebees, but there are other insects that are just as important, says Adrian Thomas
High summer: flower borders everywhere are putting on a show. But as you sit back and revel in your planting skills, it's likely that you’re not the only one enjoying the flowers. Some of your blooms are likely to be abuzz – colourful pit stops for those insects that do such a great service by moving pollen from one plant to the next, ensuring that our flowers and crops set seed or produce fruit. Everyone knows how valuable honeybees are as pollinators. One hive can contain up to 40,000 workers, an all-female army spreading out on daily shopping trips in search of abundant nectar and pollen. The nation also seems to have fallen in love with bumblebees, the teddy bear of the insect world, and has been moved by their plight given that many species are in terrible decline. But look closely among these more familiar pollinators and you may notice different insects going about their business too. You may suddenly realise that some of the insects you thought were honeybees or bumblebees are in fact something else altogether. They may look similar, but on closer inspection turn out to be too rounded or pointed, or the colour isn't quite
right, or they move in a different way. The variations can be so subtle it’s like a game of Spot the Difference. The reality is that where you may have four or five species of bumblebee in your garden, you may also have a dozen or more types of solitary bee, and 20 or more types of hoverfly. In the warmer southern half of the country, you may have even more. In her seminal 30-year study of a suburban garden in Leicester, wildlife conservationist Jennifer Owen recorded an astonishing 45 species of solitary bee and 94 species of hoverfly. This gives us some hint towards the real number of uncelebrated insects that are out there delivering ‘pollination services’. To give you some idea of their importance, a 2013 government paper for the Office for National Statistics reported that 'globally, evidence is emerging that wild bees and other insects are more important to crop pollination than managed bees'. Gaining the skills to identify every type of bee and hoverfly is not something most of us have the time or inclination to do. Yet it’s easy to learn the basic differences, as our simple guide shows (far right).