Magical creatures

AN APPRECIATION OF THE BUMBLE BEE

The next time you’re in the garden, take time to watch the bumblebees. One of the first things you’ll notice is that there are lots of different types: brown bees, big bees, tiny black ones, ones with yellow and black stripes, others that are black with a red bottom. It astonishes me that many people labour under the misapprehension that there’s just one species of bee – in the UK, there are around 24 species of bumblebee, along with over

250 species of solitary bee and just one honeybee. You can see huge queens in the early spring, followed later by their smaller workers, and then males with fluffy yellow faces idling about on flowers in high summer.

Compared to honeybees, bumblebees store only a small amount of nectar for food. While buzzing from bloom to bloom gathering sugary nectar to eat, bees transfer pollen grains, fertilising plants as they go.

Some of my most interesting discoveries originated from watching bees for the fun of it. I noticed that they often flew close to a flower, but at the last minute would veer away without touching it, as though something was wrong. They might do this several times before landing to drink the nectar or collect the pollen.

I wondered what was wrong with the flowers they avoided? It took almost five years to unravel with my PhD student, Jane Stout. We found the flowers the bees avoided tended to have little nectar in them, but we also found that they weren’t able to directly sense nectar levels in flowers. It turns out that bees leave behind a smelly footprint when they land that other bees can detect, alerting them to the fact that the flower is likely to be empty. It saves them perhaps half a second, which may not sound like much, but a bee may visit 10,000 flowers in a day, so it all adds up. As one entomologist once said, for bees, “time is honey.” This discovery was new to science – yet bees have been doing it for as long as we’ve been growing flowers.

Who knows what you might see if you take the time to look? Recent years have seen a surge in ‘citizen science’, where scientists work with the public to gather data.

The Bumblebee Conservation Trust runs BeeWalks – volunteers take a monthly walk along the same route, counting and identifying bumblebees. This information will enable us to see how numbers are changing over time, and how this varies across the country.

It’s easy to feel helpless when faced with the terrible environmental issues that beset our planet, but we can all help to save our bees. Grow flowers rich in nectar and pollen and your bees will be better able to shake off infections. Make sure they’re pesticide-free and you’ll dilute the effects of any poisons picked up elsewhere. Together, we can make sure that our bees have a future.

Taken from Gardening for Bumblebees: A Practical Guide to Creating a Paradise for Pollinators by Dave Goulson (Square Peg)