A Sting in the Tale (30 page)

Sad though all this is, it means that there is an opportunity to change gardens for the better. There are many flowers which are easy to grow and that are also great for bees. Many of the trust's members are keen gardeners, and vie with one another to attract the most bumblebees to their garden. In general, old-fashioned cottage garden perennials are the ones to go for, particularly garden herbs – lupins, hollyhocks, scabious, lavender, chives, sage, thyme and rosemary and so on. Most are easy to grow and low maintenance, so they are well suited to busy modern lifestyles – gardening for wildlife is easy. They are also beautiful, although perhaps not as showy as annual bedding plants. A wildlife-friendly garden does not have to be a chaotic mass of nettles and brambles.

Many gardeners do not realise the deficiencies of the bedding plants that they grow, and are happy to modify their habits once the benefits of more traditional plants are explained – it is just a matter of raising awareness. To try to get the message across, the trust is working with seed companies and garden centres to produce ranges of bee-friendly plants and has had stands at major gardening shows such as Hampton Court Flower Show. I bought a professionally made bumblebee outfit for such events, which is great at drawing attention to the bumblebee stand, but incredibly hot to wear for long. Younger children either love it or are terrified; on one occasion a small girl burst into tears when she saw me in the suit, so I pulled off the oversized head to reassure her that it was just a person inside. Unfortunately this made it worse, either because my face was more scary than that of the bee or because she thought that someone was stuck inside a giant bee, perhaps having been eaten.

Children are, of course, the gardeners, farmers and politicians of the future, so if we can encourage them to appreciate the importance of wildlife from an early age – rather than making them petrified of huge bees – perhaps we can influence the direction of society in the long term. To this end, we have developed an education pack aimed at primary schools in Scotland, which has gone out to over 200 schools and involved over 10,000 children in bumblebee-related activities.

On top of these activities, the trust has put on bumblebee identification walks, given talks in village halls, and organised ‘farm days' for farmers to learn more about bumblebees. Many of these are run by trust staff but some of our more enthusiastic members have put on their own events. The trust staff have met with MPs and government ministers, and even been invited to Number 10. There have been at least two bumblebee-themed weddings, with all the guests wearing bumblebee pin badges and the cake decorated with marzipan bumblebees. Somehow we have discovered and tapped into a groundswell of affection for bumblebees which continues to grow.

For me, one of the most exciting new developments for the trust is the development of a ‘citizen science' scheme to monitor bumblebee populations over time. Called ‘Beewalks', this scheme is modelled on a similar and enormously successful butterfly monitoring scheme that has been running for nearly forty years. I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that we do not yet know which UK bumblebees are still declining, and which are not. Range declines, such as that of the great yellow, are easily recorded. But for widespread species such as the common carder, or the buff-tailed bumblebee, I cannot say whether they are less abundant now than they were ten or a hundred years ago. Logic suggests that they probably are, but there are no numbers to analyse and compare. Crucially, we do not know what the current trajectory is. This is vital information if we are to prioritise conservation efforts on the species that most need them, and if we are to measure the success of our conservation efforts. It thus seemed to me that we desperately needed to start counting bees as soon as possible, and so we launched Beewalks in 2010, advertising it to trust members, and 125 volunteers quickly signed up. They are required to walk a fixed route once per month during the spring and summer, counting how many of each bumblebee species they see, and then send in the data to Leanne Casey, my PhD student, who is coordinating the scheme. The aim is for Beewalks to continue indefinitely, and for the number of volunteers to grow, so that in the fullness of time we can build up a picture of the changing numbers of all of our bumblebee species across the UK.

After a faltering start, I am sure that the trust will continue to grow. I have no idea how large the membership base may one day become, and I cannot be certain that the trust will succeed in preventing further extinctions of bumblebees. There is much more to do. Perhaps the trust should one day be looking to spread its wings and start working overseas, for there are plenty of bumblebees elsewhere that need help, and in many countries there is precious little awareness of their plight.

Two things I do know. Firstly, the trust has raised awareness of bumblebees and their decline. Due to the many articles in the media that the trust has managed to generate since our launch in the
Independent
, there are now rather few people in the UK who are not at least dimly aware that bumblebees are in trouble and in need of our help. Secondly, there are also now many places in Britain where one can walk in a meadow full of flowers and happy bees, which would not be there were it not for the hard work of Lucy, Bridget, Bob and Pippa.

Conservation is not something that should be left to others. It is easy to get depressed and despondent at the impending extinction of the polar bear or the tiger, or at the horrific progress of deforestation in the tropics. Perhaps governments or scientists or organisations such as WWF can do something to help address these situations, but as an individual it is very hard to know where to start – it all seems so remote and dauntingly complex. In contrast, conserving bumblebees is something anyone can do. A single lavender bush on a patio or in a window box will attract and feed bumblebees, even in the heart of a city. Anyone with a garden can help enormously – plant some comfrey, viper's bugloss, foxgloves, chives, aquilegia and so on, and you will see the results almost immediately. If you are lucky enough to be a farmer, or a policy-maker, the warden of a nature reserve, or a planner in the local council, you can make a world of difference. This is not just about bumblebees, but about creating a future environment for our children to enjoy, where there are still flowers, bees, butterflies and birds, and healthy crops to eat.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Return of the Queen

The presence of short-haired bumblebees in New Zealand had inspired a plan to bring them back to the UK. Mick and I had learned a fair bit about the sorts of plants that they needed by visiting them in New Zealand. In 2008 I arranged a meeting with the key players at the RSPB's headquarters in Bedfordshire (a beautiful and vast old stately home strangely known as the Lodge). Natural England's invertebrate specialist David Sheppard was there, along with Jane Sears from the RSPB, Mike Edwards and Paul Lee from an organisation known as Hymettus (which provides specialist advice on the conservation of bees, wasps and ants), and Brian Banks from Swift Ecology, a consultancy based in Kent. The final stronghold for the short-haired bumblebee had been Dungeness, with the very last British one seen there in 1988, so it made sense for this to be the first release site, should a reintroduction go ahead. It might seem odd that the RSPB was involved, but a substantial chunk of Dungeness is owned and managed by it as a nature reserve. It is perhaps not widely appreciated, but the RSPB makes great efforts to conserve species other than just birds, and had already been busy improving habitats for bumblebees on the reserve. Between us, we discussed what we knew about the short-haired bumblebee, and managed to convince ourselves that there was a realistic chance of success, so long as funding could be secured. It was clear that synchronising the bee with the UK climate was going to be a substantial obstacle, but we came up with a number of possible solutions to this. In the following weeks, David Sheppard pitched the idea to his bosses at Natural England and, to everyone's delight, they agreed to fund a three-year project, with sufficient money for a dedicated project officer.

We advertised the post and soon after appointed Nikki Gammans, a loquacious freckle-faced redhead from Essex. She had recently finished a PhD on ant biology, and had been involved in translocating rare ants back to sites from which they had died out, so she was well suited to the job; those of us who were on the interview panel had some reservations as to whether she would be able to relate to farmers since she had no farming background or experience, but they turned out to be ill-founded.

The first stage of the project had to be to create enough habitat for short-haired bumblebees to survive. After all, they had died out for a reason, and it would be very depressing and rather pointless to go to the expense of shipping them halfway round the world if they were just going to die out again.

Dungeness is a rather strange place. It has a peculiar, brooding atmosphere, no doubt in part due to the ugly concrete structure of the nuclear power plant that looms above it. Because of the extraordinary flatness of the landscape, the reactor and chimneys are always in view. Ecologically speaking, it is a very unusual habitat, one of the largest expanses of shingle in the world. It has been used for gravel extraction for many years, creating lots of shallow pools that are much loved by wading birds. One might imagine that shingle would be a fairly bleak and inhospitable habitat for bees, but in fact the shingle is swathed in an extraordinary diversity of flowers in spring and early summer. Because there are very few nutrients, legumes, which can fix their own nitrogen via root nodules, thrive, providing lots of the flowers that bumblebees adore. The shifting shingle provides a great habitat for viper's bugloss, a plant that also thrives on the stony overgrazed sheep pastures and pebble-strewn lake shores of New Zealand where we had found it to be a favourite with short-haired bumblebees. Why then had short-haired bumblebees died out here in the first place? Our best guess was that they had suffered due to changes on Romney Marsh, which encircles Dungeness on the landward side. The Marsh was once filled with flower-rich water meadows and hay meadows, which had been largely destroyed by intensive farming. The area of flower-rich shingle was probably not enough to support a viable short-haired bumblebee population, particularly since in dry years the flowers tend to die off on the shingle before bumblebee nests have completed their annual cycle. Thus the key to success with this reintroduction would be to replace some of this lost habitat on Romney Marsh and the surrounding area.

We could not be sure exactly how much good habitat would be needed, but there was no doubt that the more we could create the better the chances would be that the bees would survive. Thankfully, Brian Banks and local Natural England staff had been working for some years to encourage landowners in the area to improve habitats for bumblebees; although the short-haired bumblebee had died out, there were still other rare species in the area, such as the moss carder and brown-banded carder bumblebees. Together with the work done by the RSPB, there was already a fair bit of flower-rich habitat in the area – certainly more than there had been in 1988 when the short-haired bumblebee disappeared. Nikki set about creating more, working with local landowners, particularly farmers, to encourage them to put in pollen-and-nectar strips, or clover leys, or to sow wild-flower meadows. She organised ‘farm days', when farmers could meet on a farm and see examples of flower-rich habitat and learn about short-haired bumblebees and the project. Just as the crofters in remote regions of Scotland quickly engaged with the idea of helping great yellows, so many farmers in Kent seemed genuinely excited at being involved in a project to bring back this extinct bee. A local wind-farm company also came on board, agreeing to sow a vast expanse of flowers under their turbines. In no time at all, patches of flowers were springing up all over Romney Marsh and around.

The next phase of the project was to investigate how we might get the bees back from New Zealand and into sync with the UK seasons. Queen bees are fairly easy to find and catch when they emerge from hibernation, since they spend several weeks flying about looking for somewhere to nest. Mick and I had seen short-haired bumblebee queens on our visit. But in New Zealand, these queens emerge from hibernation in December; if we caught them then and brought them back to the UK it would be midwinter and they would quickly freeze to death. Catching young newly mated queen bees at the end of the New Zealand summer (March) would be ideal, as these could be briefly hibernated, brought back and released in the UK three months later in June. The problem with this plan was that queens dive into hibernation underground almost as soon as they have finished mating, so they are seldom seen at the end of the summer. For a rare species such as the short-haired bumblebee in New Zealand, we were not optimistic that we would find enough by that route.

Of course the queens that were used for the original introduction to New Zealand were dug out of the ground while hibernating – if that were possible during the New Zealand autumn, then they could be brought back to the UK while still hibernating and woken up early in June. However, in New Zealand we had seen only small numbers of short-haired bumblebees scattered across a vast area of stony countryside. We had no idea where to dig for the hibernating queens, since there was no obvious equivalent of the ditch sides from which short-haired bumblebee queens were originally dug in Kent. Digging holes randomly to look for queens would be a back-breaking and utterly futile exercise. What then to do?

The ideal solution would be to catch nest-searching queens in the New Zealand spring (December) and persuade them to rear nests in captivity. If a number of nests could be reared then both new queens and males would be produced in March, and these could be mated in cages, the queens put into hibernation and then shipped back to the UK in refrigerated conditions for release in June. This would have been very easy for buff-tailed bumblebees, which breed readily in captivity. Unfortunately many other bumblebee species are extraordinarily hard to breed in captivity, and very little information was available as to how to breed short-haired bumblebees. Nikki did track down a Czech bumblebee enthusiast, Vladimír Ptacek, who had reared one or two short-haired bumblebee nests, and she visited him to find out the details. He had done it by placing young nests in large cages full of flowering clover so that the bees could collect their own food. This was all very well but meant that the rearing would have to be done in New Zealand, for we would not be able to provide stands of flowering clover in the British winter. While investigating the possibilities we stumbled across contact details for a Rosemary Reid who lived in Christchurch on South Island and who bred bumblebees semi-professionally, selling the nests to farmers. She had apparently bred short-haired bumblebees in the past, and was willing to rear our bees for us, for a price. We agreed that Nikki would go to New Zealand to catch the queens in December 2009, and supply them to Rosemary to set up the captive breeding programme.