Ingham’s W RLD
ONE of the soporific pleasures of summer is sitting out in the sun and listening to the gentle hum of bumblebees working the flowerbeds. It’s always nice to relax while someone else is working. The first bumbles are already out, a promise of balmier days to come, sipping the nectar of the daffs and pollinating them at the same time. And a new RSPB book tells how these lumbering creatures are the cargo planes of the insect world.
Indeed “bumble” means to move awkwardly which has lent itself to the myth that they should not really be able to fly at all.
True, says Richard Comont, bumbles cannot just stick their wings out and hope for the best. Instead they fly more like a helicopter. When they flap their rather small wings, they twist them through the air so the tips perform a figure of eight with each stroke.
As they beat their wings a staggering 8,000 times a minute – and up to 200 beats a second – this turns them into mini rotor blades.
By the end of a foraging shift, they need all the lift they can get.
Bumbles drink nectar, store it in their honey stomach, using some to fuel their flight and putting the rest in nectar pots for the queen and larvae to feast on.
They also get covered in proteinrich pollen which in grooming they brush down to pollen baskets that you can see on their hind legs.
This pollen can equate to 75 per cent of their body weight. No wonder they’re more helicopter than Concorde.
So perhaps their original name, humblebee, as used by Shakespeare and Darwin, was misguided. They have a lot to be proud about. They are miracle workers, muscular masters of the air.
Their fur traps the pollen – and as they get older and brush against the flowers it falls out so elderly bumbles can be almost bald.
It will come as no surprise that the males spend all their time trying to find queens to mate with – leaving the females to do all of the work.
And next time you relax and enjoy the hum among the dahlias and the delphiniums, pause for thought. It has nothing to do with the bumbles’ wingbeats. It is them breathing. The hum is produced by the air rushing through their breathing pores to give their very busy wing muscles the oxygen they need for flight.
So that iconic buzz is actually the drone of nature’s heavy breathers in action. But as they are females there’s nothing to worry about. Bumblebees by Richard Comont, Bloomsbury, £9.99. WE RIGHTLY get worried about Islamic State and Russia. Sadly President Donald Trump is doing his best to screw the planet without a shot being fired. He has declared war on climate change policies. Oaf. If the forecasts come true, the climate crisis facing our grandchildren will make IS look like a picnic. KEW’S experts are trying to tame a climate change baddie: burping cows. Cattle chewing the cud release methane that is 25 times better at trapping heat than CO2. Kew is working to find forage plants to boost meat and milk production but lower methane emissions. The race is on, says Biogeosciences. Hot weather makes plants tougher and cows burp more methane. GREEN TIP: Put up bird nestboxes facing away from the sun so the chicks don’t roast. TASMANIAN Devils have been given hope of beating a facial cancer wiping them out by a pioneering treatment. A Tasmanian Institute has saved three poorly devils by injecting them with live cancer cells – and triggering their immune system. It brings an extinction-beating vaccine closer. UNDER the limpid waters of our chalk streams and rivers, aliens are taking over. Salmon & Trout Conservation UK says Yankee crayfish, Himalayan Balsam and demon shrimp are devastating native wildlife. It is also on guard for a parasite that could wipe out salmon. We need more monitoring and more safeguards. A Britain without wild salmon would be a poor place indeed.