by Dave Goulson
fn3 They are named carpenter bees because they chew holes in wood to make tunnels in which to nest. Many years ago, when we had just left university, my old schoolfriend Dave (the pigeon poo thief) and I decided to cycle across the Sahara Desert to Cameroon in West Africa. It was a ridiculous venture, and not entirely successful, although we did have some great experiences and got a good part of the way there. One difficulty when camping in the desert was finding sufficient fuel for a campfire on which to cook dinner. We often resorted to burning dried camel dung, which worked quite well except that it left a horribly sticky tar on the underside of our cooking pot. On one memorable occasion, as dusk was settling in and we were setting up camp for the evening we noticed a clump of brittle, leafless shrubs from which we snapped numerous branches, sufficient to treat ourselves to a good blaze to keep off the evening chill. Sadly, in the twilight we had not noticed that the branches were hollow and packed with hibernating carpenter bees. As soon as the fire began to catch the branches began to emit an unexpected buzzing noise, shortly after which the large black bees started to try to escape. Smoking, singed and angry bees were soon hurtling in all directions, making our evening under the desert stars much less restful than we might have hoped.
fn4 Argentinian cuisine seemed to involve almost no vegetables – huge steaks and chips being the standard fare. Breakfast in the various hostels and hotels we stayed in invariably consisted of sugary croissant-like pastries known as medialuna, slices of cake, and a peculiarly grim and unnaturally brightly coloured orange squash. I felt in danger of going down with beriberi or scurvy by the end of the trip.
fn5 In A Sting in the Tale I describe how bumblebees were introduced to New Zealand from Kent in 1885, and attempts to reintroduce the short-haired bumblebee, a species which has since gone extinct in the UK, back from New Zealand to its last known British haunt at Dungeness.
fn6 There is some debate about this, with some contending that syphilis occurred in Europe before the rediscovery of the Americas, but the first clear account of the disease in Europe is from 1494 in Naples, appearing suspiciously hot on the heels of the first European explorers returning from the Americas.
Chapter 5: California and Franklin’s Bumblebee
fn1 Globally, we produce a mind-boggling two trillion tomatoes every year, most of them pollinated by bumblebees.
fn2 Tom Murray, who led this work, subsequently received threats of legal action from the commercial bumblebee rearers if he did not withdraw his paper, but fortunately he did not and the threats turned out to be hollow.
fn3 Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. has the limited but important claim to fame that he was the first person to work out how to artificially inseminate honeybee queens – a rather fiddly business as you might guess, but one which is enormously useful if you wish to selectively breed honeybees for particular traits.
fn4 In 2010, Robbin and the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation submitted a petition to the US Fish and Wildlife Service to list Franklin’s bumblebee as an endangered species. The Fish and Wildlife Service are so snowed under with litigation and petitions that, five years later, they have not yet had time to assess the case, so Franklin’s is not yet formally recognised as being endangered, let alone extinct.
Chapter 6: Ecuador and the Battling Bumblebees
fn1 These elegant creatures have a trick that enables them to be amongst the longest-lived of butterflies, with the adults being on the wing for three months or more. Most butterflies can only drink nectar, but Heliconius butterflies also gather pollen on their proboscis, exuding enzymes to digest it and then sucking up the resulting protein-rich soup. In some Heliconius butterflies the males seek out female pupae and mate with them before they have hatched into adults, which seems like a morally questionable tactic.
fn2 All bees, ants and wasps share a common ancestor that lived about 240 million years ago and was a solitary creature. Since then, full sociality in which one or more queens are aided by sterile workers has evolved at least eleven separate times, giving us honeybees, bumblebees, ants, common wasps and so on. How and why this has happened so many times in this one group of related insects remains something of a puzzle, and so studying those bees and wasps which are halfway between the two states might provide some clues as to the answers.
fn3 Heroically or idiotically, depending on your point of view, an American entomologist named Justin O. Schmidt deliberately got himself stung by seventy-eight species of insect so that he could rank and describe the pain they produced. The tarantula hawk wasp came out joint top with the bullet ant. He colourfully described the pain as ‘immediate, excruciating pain that simply shuts down one’s ability to do anything, except, perhaps, scream. Mental discipline simply does not work in these situations.’ His description of the sting of the bullet ant, a giant ant species also native to South America, was ‘pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.’ Clearly both are best avoided. Schmidt’s work was published in 1990, and subsequently inspired his fellow entomologist Michael L. Smith to deliberately get stung by honeybees on twenty-five different parts of his anatomy, his goal to find out which parts were most sensitive. It turns out that the most painful parts of the body are the nostril, the upper lip and the penis. For their magnificently selfless if somewhat pointless endeavours, Schmidt and Smith were jointly awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in 2015, a parody of the Nobel Prize scheme.
fn4 Spectacled bears are actually the most docile of bears, and naturally eat a largely vegetarian diet of bromeliads, palm hearts and berries. There is only one recorded case of a spectacled bear killing a human – the human concerned was a hunter, and had just shot the bear, which was up a tree at the time. The dying bear fell on top of the hunter and squashed him. Just occasionally in life (and death), justice can be satisfyingly swift.
fn5 I shouldn’t be rude about British birds – many are beautiful and all are fascinating – but I became disillusioned by birdwatching as a boy because I could never be quite certain which small warbler, lark or finch I had glimpsed, and I didn’t have an ear for distinguishing between their songs. If you are tempted to take up birdwatching, I strongly recommend finding an expert who can help you, as otherwise you may be in for a frustrating experience. Alternatively, take a trip to Ecuador.
fn6 Although of course I never did. The odds of seeing any of these creatures are slim, and if I had been lucky enough to glimpse one it would have been far more interested in melting back into the forest than in attacking me. In reality, going for a walk in any city is far more dangerous than exploring the rainforest, though our familiarity with cars and muggers breeds contempt for the more realistic dangers they pose. Should you be wondering, the eyelash viper is a venomous, small yellow arboreal viper which sports a splendid pair of Denis Healey-style eyebrows.
Chapter 7: Brownfield Rainforests of the Thames Estuary
fn1 The usual argument that is trotted out is that we need thousands more houses to make housing more affordable so that young people can get on the property ladder, but does anyone really believe that building 100,000 new homes will actually reduce house prices? I suspect that the real motivation is that huge housing developments create massive profits for the powerful companies involved in house building, road construction, and so on.
fn2 I was later to discover that a family had lived there for several years, constructing shelters from bits of corrugated tin sheeting that they scavenged from nearby factories. However, I’m still not clear as to whether someone is actually buried there.
fn3 Weevils are a family of vegetarian beetles with endearingly elongate and down-curved snouts, which with a little imagination resemble an elephant’s trunk. These generally innocuous and inconspicuous little creatures are spectacularly successful, for there are 40,000 known species.
fn4 Wick is an old Saxon word for a shed in which cheese was made and matured. There was presumably once a settlement at Canvey Wick, or at the very least an active c
heesemaker, but now the name refers only to the brownfield site which has no human inhabitants.
fn5 Another sad example of a futile translocation is the movement of hedgehogs from the Uists to mainland Scotland. Hedgehogs are not native to these Scottish islands, but were foolishly introduced by a well-meaning gardener who thought that they would eat his slugs. Instead, they quite reasonably preferred to eat the tasty eggs of the many rare, ground-nesting birds that live in the Outer Hebrides, and they proliferated at the birds’ expense. In understandable preference to culling them, a hugely expensive attempt to catch and relocate them to the mainland has been undertaken – thus far moving 1,600 hogs. This is well-meant work being undertaken by wonderful people, but what happens to those hedgehogs? They are being released into mainland Britain where the hedgehog population has been in free-fall for years. The causes of the decline aren’t certain – roadkill and the effects of pesticide on their prey seem likely culprits – but the harsh truth is that the relocated hedgehogs face a pretty bleak future, and one might question whether the money this exercise has cost couldn’t have been more wisely spent.
fn6 Bombardier beetles gain their name from their preposterously unlikely defence mechanism. Their abdomen contains a large chamber into which they secrete hydroquinones and hydrogen peroxide, both highly reactive and noxious chemicals. This chamber links to a smaller reaction chamber which contains chemical catalysts. When the beetle is under attack she squirts the noxious chemicals into the reaction chamber where the catalysts cause an explosive reaction, blasting a cloud of boiling benzoquinones out of her back end with an audible pop – definitely not something to try at home. The beetle can twist her abdomen to direct the boiling, foul-smelling chemical at her assailant – I once picked one up and the evil blast it produced scorched the skin on my fingertips brown. I can’t help but wonder if once or twice in their evolutionary history these beetles haven’t blown themselves up by accident.
fn7 The present system involves a cursory survey of the ecology of the site, heavily focused on a handful of seemingly randomly chosen species, notably great crested newts and any species of bat – lovely creatures, but not obviously more in need of protection than many other beasts. These surveys usually pay scant attention to insects and other invertebrates, and are often carried out by people without the necessary specialist knowledge to spot rare and important species if they are present.
Chapter 8: Knepp Castle and the Forgotten Bees
fn1 The Department for the Environment, Farming & Rural Affairs.
fn2 My former PhD student Georgina Harper came up with an alternative idea. She carried out genetic studies of all of the Adonis blue butterfly populations in the UK, and came to the surprising conclusion that they all had a common ancestor – they were all descended from a single female – that lived perhaps 240 years ago, and was closely related to the Adonis blues of northern France. Perhaps this female was blown across the Channel in a storm, or it might be that this species was deliberately introduced to the UK by a butterfly enthusiast in the 1700s. It just so happens that the timing corresponds with the era when studying and collecting butterflies became a fashionable hobby. Interestingly, Adonis blues were not described as a species in the UK until 1775, long after most other butterflies, and despite the fact that this is a very pretty species which lives in the south where most butterfly collectors were active. Of course it is highly improbable that all of our grassland insects and plant species were brought in by man after we had cleared the forests, but perhaps a few of the more striking ones were.
fn3 The word elk in North American parlance refers to a species of deer very closely related to the European red deer. We use the word elk to describe a completely different animal, known to North Americans as a moose. In situations like this it quickly becomes clear why Carl Linnaeus’s system of standardised Latin names avoids a lot of confusion.
fn4 As a child I once tried keeping one of these magnificent molluscs in a freshwater aquarium in my bedroom, but since they are filter feeders it had little chance of surviving in such a confined space and it inevitably died. Since it lived in the mud at the bottom I didn’t immediately realise, until the stench of decay began to seep through my room.
fn5 In 2013 the Daily Mail reported the sighting of wolves in the Netherlands under the heading, First killer beast turns up in Holland for 150 years. I’d take a wild stab in the dark and guess that the Mail won’t be supporting the reintroduction of wolves to Britain. Shame on them.
fn6 Beavers can carry a nasty tapeworm, Echinococcus multilocularis, which can infect people and is fatal, so an obvious precaution we need to take before importing beavers is to ensure that they are tapeworm-free. This is easy enough, as there are plenty of parts of Europe, such as Norway, which have beavers but where the tapeworm is absent.
fn7 Just as they continue to campaign against any restrictions on their use of neonicotinoid insecticides, a group of highly toxic and environmentally persistent pesticides that appear to be playing a significant role in declines of bees and other farmland wildlife.
fn8 This isn’t actually a real title, should you be tempted to rush out and buy a copy, but some genuine ones are scarcely less obscure. If you’re in the market for an identification to British bees, I would strongly recommend the excellent Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland by Steven Falk, with lovely illustrations by the renowned wildlife artist Richard Lewington.
fn9 There are actually quite a few feral ‘wild’ boar living in the wild in the UK, escapees from farms – they are masters of escapology. There are small populations in the West Country, East Sussex and perhaps as many as 500 in the Forest of Dean. There has been great controversy over their repeated culling, justified on the grounds that they damage trees (last time I looked, trees seemed to cope elsewhere in Europe) and that they dig up amenity grasslands (in my view perhaps no bad thing). Don’t wild boar have as much right to live here as we do?
fn10 Until recently, most of our ‘solitary’ bees had no common name, but in an attempt to encourage people to show more interest in them, and to make them seem more accessible to the amateur, common names have been invented for them. This isn’t everyone’s cup of tea – Tom is a purist, scornful of the need for such dumbing down.
fn11 Though the song of the nightingale is admittedly impressive, I personally think that you cannot better the song of a blackbird on an early spring morning.
fn12 ‘Glamorous camping’ in an eclectic collection of rather comfortable tents and shepherd’s huts.
fn13 There is a fascinating website, farmsubsidy.org, which tells you exactly how much subsidy every ‘farmer’ in the EU gets each year. You’ll be perplexed to hear that the sugar producers Tate & Lyle are the biggest UK recipient, having received no less than €594,270,084 of ‘farming subsidy’ over the last fifteen years (yes, that is the correct number of digits). They don’t actually do any farming whatsoever – they simply buy sugar cane from tropical countries and process it into refined sugar. We also give similarly astronomic sums to companies who grow and process sugar beet, a crop that is grown in intensive monocultures with the application of many pesticides, all to produce a substance that is fundamentally bad for us, and which is one of the main contributors to the epidemic of diabetes that is helping to cripple our National Health Service. Perhaps this is not the wisest expenditure of taxpayers’ money.
