A stinging tale
When I was born in 1965 the British shorthaired bumblebee was still quite widespread. A hundred years earlier, it was common in the south and east of England, but by the time I went to university in 1984 it was nearly extinct. I never saw one before they vanished.
Here’s why: it’s Adolf Hitler’s fault. To be fair, it wasn’t entirely his fault, but he has to carry some of the blame. One hundred years ago, farming was not mechanised. Without mechanisation, fields tended to be small. The working horses and other farm livestock needed hay for the winter, so most farmers had hay meadows. Artificial fertilisers weren’t available, just a bit of animal dung. So, root crops and cereals intermixed with clover leys and permanent hay meadows. No artificial fertilisers, no pesticides. Lots and lots of happy bees.
Roll forward to 1940 and the war meant we found ourselves isolated. Obtaining supplies from across the Atlantic and mainland Europe was perilous, with U-boats taking a heavy toll on shipping convoys. As a result, the government launched a Dig for Victory campaign. Patches of land previously deemed too small to bother with were now ploughed and sown with crops, hedges were ripped out and marshes were drained.
From a bumblebee’s perspective, the war era led to some other unfortunate developments. The chemical dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) was first made in 1874, but its incredibly high toxicity to insects wasn’t discovered until 1939, when the Allies used it to combat the malaria-spreading mosquito. After the war, it became a readily and cheaply available agricultural insecticide. It was 20 years before its devastating effects on the environment began to be recognised.
Meanwhile, intensive farming destroyed almost all the flower-rich habitats in the UK, and 98 per cent of our lowland hay meadows disappeared. The shorthaired bumblebee died out because its habitats were swept away. It wasn’t all that fussy, it just needed enough flowers to feed on: no flowers equals no bees.
Luckily for the short-haired bumblebee, back in the 1870s, New Zealand farmers found that the red clover, which they had imported from Britain as a fodder crop for horses and cattle, did not set much seed. As a result, they had to continually import more seed from Europe at considerable expense, rather than collecting and sowing their own. In the end, Mr SG Farr, secretary of the Canterbury Acclimatisation Society, arranged for some bumblebees to be shipped over.
A total of 282 hibernating queens were obtained and placed on the SS Tongariro, which left London in December 1884 and arrived in Christchurch on 8 January (high summer in New Zealand). When they were warmed up, 48 queens proved still to be alive. They were fed honey and flew away. A further consignment of 260 queens was sent. Of these, 49 were still alive and were released.
British bumblebees flourish in New Zealand to this day. On their long boat trip they also left behind many of the diseases and parasites that attack them in their native land, which probably helped considerably. The presence of British short-haired bumblebees in New Zealand provided a unique and exciting opportunity: could we once again have short-haired bumblebees buzzing across the British landscape?
So it was that in January 2003, I found myself in New Zealand with a friend and colleague, Mick Hanley, in search of the short-haired bumblebee. Our mission was to find out more about the food plants and habitats of this elusive bee, to pave the way for an attempt at reintroduction. We needed to know which flowers it favoured for collecting pollen, which for nectar, and which habitats it was found in. Ideally, we wanted to find out where it liked to nest. Once we knew, it might be possible to recreate a suitable habitat in Britain.
I caught sight of my first short-haired bumblebee at a disused rubble tip in Twizel. She was a plump worker, the brownish stripes on her abdomen giving her a slightly grubby appearance in flight. If I’m honest, the short-haired bumblebee is not the most beautiful insect in the world. They have, as you might surmise, rather short hair. The females are mostly black with a number of yellowish-brown stripes, sometimes with a greenish tinge, and a scruffy white tail. But after flying 12,000 miles and searching for five days, we were thrilled. We saw five more before the day was out.
We watched the flowers they visited and whether they were collecting pollen or nectar on each flower – nectar they drink with their long tongues, pollen they gather with their hairy legs and store in sticky balls in the pollen baskets on their hind legs. Short-haired bumblebees have long tongues, so prefer deep flowers. They adore Viper’s Bugloss for nectar, and also sometimes collect its purple pollen. Their favourite pollen source seems to be the red clover, still often grown as a ley crop in New Zealand. We also saw them visiting Bird’s foot trefoil, St John’s wort and thistles, but they seemed to have a pretty narrow diet. Try as we might we could find no nests, although we were struck by the fact that almost every short-haired bumblebee we found was close to a lake, and the shores of all the lakes have stony banks.
We took genetic samples to test if they were inbred – a technique that involves snipping a ‘toe’ off the bee (not really a toe, strictly speaking the final tarsal segment). As you might imagine, they don’t like this, but experiments on more common bumblebee species have shown that it neither shortens their lifespan nor reduces their ability to gather food for the nest, so although we felt rather mean, we were able to console ourselves that we weren’t doing any real harm. By the time we returned to the UK (with a bag full of little pots containing pickled bumblebee toes), we felt we had learnt quite a bit about the short-haired bumblebee. So far as we could tell, it does not need anything particularly unusual to survive – lots of red clover and Viper’s Bugloss would go a long way and it shouldn’t be too difficult to create big patches of these kinds of flowers.
A bigger question was how to get the bees back. Going in the other direction, the hibernating queens had been dug from the ground in autumn. The short-haired bumblebee must have been much more common in Kent in the 1880s than it is now in New Zealand because I think you could probably dig all winter long without finding a single one. We could catch queens in December and January in New Zealand as they came out of hibernation, but if we brought them back to the UK at that time of year there would be no flowers and they would die. Nor would it be possible to put them back into hibernation as they would have just woken from an eight-month sleep – they wouldn’t survive another six months and then have the energy to build a nest. Clearly some thought needed to be applied if we were ever to get them back living in the wild in Britain.
Extracted from A Sting In The Tale by Dave Goulson, published by Vintage, priced £8.99. For more information: www.bumblebeeconservation.org
Here’s why: it’s Adolf Hitler’s fault. To be fair, it wasn’t entirely his fault, but he has to carry some of the blame. One hundred years ago, farming was not mechanised. Without mechanisation, fields tended to be small. The working horses and other farm livestock needed hay for the winter, so most farmers had hay meadows. Artificial fertilisers weren’t available, just a bit of animal dung. So, root crops and cereals intermixed with clover leys and permanent hay meadows. No artificial fertilisers, no pesticides. Lots and lots of happy bees.
Roll forward to 1940 and the war meant we found ourselves isolated. Obtaining supplies from across the Atlantic and mainland Europe was perilous, with U-boats taking a heavy toll on shipping convoys. As a result, the government launched a Dig for Victory campaign. Patches of land previously deemed too small to bother with were now ploughed and sown with crops, hedges were ripped out and marshes were drained.
From a bumblebee’s perspective, the war era led to some other unfortunate developments. The chemical dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) was first made in 1874, but its incredibly high toxicity to insects wasn’t discovered until 1939, when the Allies used it to combat the malaria-spreading mosquito. After the war, it became a readily and cheaply available agricultural insecticide. It was 20 years before its devastating effects on the environment began to be recognised.
Meanwhile, intensive farming destroyed almost all the flower-rich habitats in the UK, and 98 per cent of our lowland hay meadows disappeared. The shorthaired bumblebee died out because its habitats were swept away. It wasn’t all that fussy, it just needed enough flowers to feed on: no flowers equals no bees.
Luckily for the short-haired bumblebee, back in the 1870s, New Zealand farmers found that the red clover, which they had imported from Britain as a fodder crop for horses and cattle, did not set much seed. As a result, they had to continually import more seed from Europe at considerable expense, rather than collecting and sowing their own. In the end, Mr SG Farr, secretary of the Canterbury Acclimatisation Society, arranged for some bumblebees to be shipped over.
A total of 282 hibernating queens were obtained and placed on the SS Tongariro, which left London in December 1884 and arrived in Christchurch on 8 January (high summer in New Zealand). When they were warmed up, 48 queens proved still to be alive. They were fed honey and flew away. A further consignment of 260 queens was sent. Of these, 49 were still alive and were released.
British bumblebees flourish in New Zealand to this day. On their long boat trip they also left behind many of the diseases and parasites that attack them in their native land, which probably helped considerably. The presence of British short-haired bumblebees in New Zealand provided a unique and exciting opportunity: could we once again have short-haired bumblebees buzzing across the British landscape?
I caught sight of my first short-haired bumblebee at a disused rubble tip in Twizel. She was a plump worker, the brownish stripes on her abdomen giving her a slightly grubby appearance in flight. If I’m honest, the short-haired bumblebee is not the most beautiful insect in the world. They have, as you might surmise, rather short hair. The females are mostly black with a number of yellowish-brown stripes, sometimes with a greenish tinge, and a scruffy white tail. But after flying 12,000 miles and searching for five days, we were thrilled. We saw five more before the day was out.
We watched the flowers they visited and whether they were collecting pollen or nectar on each flower – nectar they drink with their long tongues, pollen they gather with their hairy legs and store in sticky balls in the pollen baskets on their hind legs. Short-haired bumblebees have long tongues, so prefer deep flowers. They adore Viper’s Bugloss for nectar, and also sometimes collect its purple pollen. Their favourite pollen source seems to be the red clover, still often grown as a ley crop in New Zealand. We also saw them visiting Bird’s foot trefoil, St John’s wort and thistles, but they seemed to have a pretty narrow diet. Try as we might we could find no nests, although we were struck by the fact that almost every short-haired bumblebee we found was close to a lake, and the shores of all the lakes have stony banks.
We took genetic samples to test if they were inbred – a technique that involves snipping a ‘toe’ off the bee (not really a toe, strictly speaking the final tarsal segment). As you might imagine, they don’t like this, but experiments on more common bumblebee species have shown that it neither shortens their lifespan nor reduces their ability to gather food for the nest, so although we felt rather mean, we were able to console ourselves that we weren’t doing any real harm. By the time we returned to the UK (with a bag full of little pots containing pickled bumblebee toes), we felt we had learnt quite a bit about the short-haired bumblebee. So far as we could tell, it does not need anything particularly unusual to survive – lots of red clover and Viper’s Bugloss would go a long way and it shouldn’t be too difficult to create big patches of these kinds of flowers.
A bigger question was how to get the bees back. Going in the other direction, the hibernating queens had been dug from the ground in autumn. The short-haired bumblebee must have been much more common in Kent in the 1880s than it is now in New Zealand because I think you could probably dig all winter long without finding a single one. We could catch queens in December and January in New Zealand as they came out of hibernation, but if we brought them back to the UK at that time of year there would be no flowers and they would die. Nor would it be possible to put them back into hibernation as they would have just woken from an eight-month sleep – they wouldn’t survive another six months and then have the energy to build a nest. Clearly some thought needed to be applied if we were ever to get them back living in the wild in Britain.
Extracted from A Sting In The Tale by Dave Goulson, published by Vintage, priced £8.99. For more information: www.bumblebeeconservation.org