A Sting in the Tale

by Dave Goulson

  On the other hand, this is not the only option. Gillian’s data provides clear evidence that, just as in Sechuan and parts of Canada, we no longer have enough wild bees to pollinate our crops, but that probably wasn’t always the case. Not long ago we had many more bees, and farmers managed very well without buying in extra. We used to have more bees because farming was different – farms had more flowers, and used fewer pesticides. Commercial bumblebees are expensive, so that large soft-fruit farms are spending several thousand pounds per year on them. What if this money was spent instead on boosting wild bumblebee numbers, by planting strips of wild flowers, or providing them with nesting habitat? Could this provide a more effective and infinitely more environmentally friendly alternative to using commercial bumblebees, at least for outdoor crops?

  I don’t yet know the answer to this question, but two of my PhD students are trying to find out. Ciaran Ellis and Hannah Feltham are working together to evaluate the effectiveness and economic outcome of alternative strategies. Planting strips of wild flowers near fruit crops ought to increase wild bumblebee numbers, but it might draw bees away from the crops, which is the last thing the farmer would want. It also requires money for seed, diesel for the tractor to prepare the ground, sow the seed and manage the strips, and farm labour. On the other hand, if it works and is cost effective it would be marvellous to be able to go to farmers with evidence that they can make more money by growing wild flowers on their farm.

  I think it is unlikely that we can come up with a scheme that would completely do away with the need for commercial bumblebees for raspberries in polytunnels, not least because some varieties are grown that flower in March and April, when very few wild bumblebees are on the wing in Perthshire. But we might be able to reduce the number of nests that have to be bought, and perhaps do away with the need for them entirely in July and August when wild bumblebees are most abundant.

  Aside from the costs and risks associated with commercial bumblebees, there is one more good reason for farmers to ensure that they do not forget about the services offered for free by wild bees. Most commercial bumblebees come from a very small number of factories, and only one species is available in Europe. If anything should happen to the supply of commercial buff-tails, such as a major outbreak of a disease in one or more of the factories, then many farmers would not be able to get hold of them and the price per nest would skyrocket. If there were also no wild bees, then crops would fail, and some farmers would go bankrupt. This is not just idle conjecture – Colony Collapse Disorder in the USA led to a massive rise in the cost of hiring honeybee hives for crop pollination because so few were available, and hence had a huge financial impact on farmers. Depending entirely on one commercial species is an inherently risky strategy; putting all one’s eggs in one basket. Wild bees can be viewed as a backup strategy, an insurance policy in case supplies of commercial bees should fail.

  When you next squirt Heinz tomato ketchup on to your fish and chips, reflect on the nature of the modern world. Your ketchup was most likely made in a factory in the Netherlands from tomatoes grown in Spain, pollinated by Turkish bees reared in a factory in Slovakia. I’m sure that our food supply chain doesn’t need to be quite so convoluted. You might also reflect that every cucumber, aubergine, runner bean, blackcurrant and pepper that you eat was almost certainly pollinated by a bumblebee, perhaps reared in a factory, or perhaps a wild bee. A tin of baked beans largely comprises navy beans that were pollinated by bumblebees, and a sauce made from bumblebee-pollinated tomatoes. We owe these little creatures for all that they give us …

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Chez Les Bourdons

  To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,

  One clover, and a bee,

  And revery.

  The revery alone will do,

  If bees are few.

  Emily Dickinson

  There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.

  Aldo Leopold (American environmentalist)

  I have always hankered after owning some land that I could manage as my own private nature reserve. Gardening for wildlife has been a lifelong occupation, but I really fancied something bigger and more ambitious than my quarter-acre suburban garden. On an academic salary, buying a substantial area of land in the UK was not an option, so I found myself looking further afield. At the time, in 2002, I lived in Southampton, and with a ferry port nearby in Portsmouth the obvious option was France.

  I spent many happy hours surfing the Internet, looking at all manner of fantastic French properties. I failed to resist clicking on the link for the dilapidated twenty-bedroom chateau near the Loire, available for the price of a three-bed semi in the home counties, or looking longingly at the pictures of a rustic farm with 400 hectares of mountainous forest and scrub in the Cévennes, but neither was terribly practical and, relatively cheap though they were, they were beyond my very limited budget. In the end I narrowed my search down to the Charente, a peaceful backwater of rural France between Limoges and Poitiers, about halfway down France and west of centre. I’d holidayed in the area as a boy – my family invariably spent two weeks camping in France every summer – and I remembered catching exquisitely beautiful white admiral butterflies in the lovely oak forests with which the area abounds, as well as spending many happy days rock-pooling and playing French cricket on the great beaches of the west coast. Property also happened to be absurdly cheap, and the area is within a day’s drive of the Channel ferry ports.

  So it was that in a cold and wet October I found myself on a one-week whistle-stop tour of estate agents in the Charente. I’d booked in advance with them, and arranged to view a number of properties that I had seen on the Net and which looked of interest. My father came with me – I think my wife Lara had had a word with him and given him strict instructions to prevent me from buying anything too ridiculous. It was a hectic schedule – we visited a different agent in a different town every day, and then spent our evenings driving on to the next town. Most of the properties I had seen on the Internet had been sold years earlier – it seemed that French estate agents updated their sites only every decade or so, such is the pace of life in rural France.

  The French countryside is absolutely littered with beautiful but dilapidated and neglected old houses, usually built of stone, with heavy oak beams and hand-made clay tiles. Many are already more or less beyond repair. In England these old piles would fetch an arm and a leg and perhaps a kidney too with folk paying a premium for the privilege of spending a year or two in a mobile home in the garden while having them reconstructed – but in France they cost very little and even at such low prices they don’t sell. There is not much rural employment, and in any case it seems that the French don’t want these draughty old properties, understandably preferring to live in cosy modern housing. Most sales of older, rural properties are to Brits looking for an idyllic holiday home or a new life in the country, but many of them end up back on the market within a few years as the upkeep is considerable, while those looking for a new life are often driven home by the difficulties of integrating into the local community, or the lack of viable ways to earn an adequate living. So it is that the market for rural property stagnates, and one by one the lovely old houses are falling down.

  All of this was good news for me. I didn’t plan to make a living in France – I just wanted somewhere to grow flowers and feed bees.

  Despite my insistence that I had a very limited budget and was only interested in properties with land, the agents enthusiastically showed my father and me around all sorts of unsuitable properties, many on the verge of collapse, and often with only a small garden. Blind optimism and selective deafness seem to be prerequisites for employment as a French estate agent, perhaps because they sell so few properties. The many derelict and boarded-up heaps included an abandoned shoe factory somewhere near the town of Piégut, with machinery sti
ll in place, and a fourteen-bedroom chateau on the edge of Fontenay-le-Comte. The latter was being sold by an ancient couple who lived in just two rooms, all that they could afford to heat, while the rest of the building fell down around them. I felt very sorry for them, and it would have made a wonderful renovation project for someone with a bottomless pocket, but it was not what I was after.

  On the fifth morning, after a night at a charmless motel called L’Escargot, built on the banks of a busy dual carriageway, we visited an agent in the oddly named village Champagne-Mouton. It was a damp, misty morning, and the estate agent’s was closed when we arrived at the appointed time, so we went for a walk through the eerily silent back lanes of the village, startling a cow which was the only sign of life. When we got back the agency was open and we were briefly greeted by a rather unfriendly Englishman, but no sooner had we walked in the door than he muttered something about an errand and disappeared. His surly Russian wife spoke no English or French, so far as I could tell, but she made us a lukewarm instant coffee and then disappeared into a back room.

  When the agent returned an hour or so later he seemed distracted and more than a little put out at the bother of showing us anything at all. In an unusual approach to his trade, and at marked odds with the approach of his French counterparts in other agencies, he tried to deter us from viewing any of his properties, emphasising their many failings, but in the end he begrudgingly agreed to show us a couple. The first was an old farm with 13 hectares near the village of Épenède, one of very few properties I’d seen on the Internet which was actually still for sale. The mist had not cleared by the time we arrived and, as we had come to expect, the place was in a parlous state. As we approached the end of the no-through lane that accessed it, we were greeted by a ferocious black dog that howled and hurled itself towards us, fortunately restrained by a long length of chain attaching it to a stone barn. Pieces of rusting, broken-down farm machinery littered the yard, many of them having lain there so long that they were encrusted with ivy, and had begun to sink slowly into the mud. The owner, a Monsieur Poupard, proudly showed us around.

  The main house was a long, low, stone rectangle, with living accommodation on the ground floor and hay storage above. He lived in three small rooms, with only a stone sink to wash in – his loo was in an outside shed and consisted of a plank with a hole in it over a bucket. Poupard himself was a tiny, weather-beaten man in the ubiquitous blue overalls worn by all French farmers, with a flat cap pulled low over his eyes. He’d lived in the property all his life, but had clearly not maintained it. The window glass was mostly broken, with old fertiliser sacks nailed over the broken panes to keep the wind out. Successive generations of sacks had frayed and split in the wind, so he had nailed layer after layer on top over the decades. The front door was rotted away at the bottom, the gaps patched with flattened, rusty tin cans. The clay-tiled roof leaked so badly that there were pools of water on the floor – his old iron bed-frame was standing in an inch of fetid water. The house was surrounded by a collection of barns and outbuildings, most of which appeared to be in an even worse state of repair than the main house. The largest barn had holes in the tile roof through which an albatross could comfortably soar, and was clearly in imminent danger of collapse.

  As we explored the upstairs of the main house, with Poupard taking care to steer us around the more rotten floorboards for fear we might fall straight through into the pool in his bedroom, we startled a barn owl from its roost on an old beam. I excitedly ran down the stairs and outside to watch as it circled the house; it eventually alighted in an oak tree next to the drive. I hadn’t seen a barn owl in years. Poupard followed me out, looking at me rather curiously. He had obviously not expected me to be quite so interested in owls. Since we were outside, he pointed out the boundaries to the property – distant lines of oaks barely visible through the mist. The farm was situated in the midst of a sloping field which to me, someone who had never previously owned more than a quarter of an acre, seemed unimaginably vast.

  I can’t entirely explain why, but I was enchanted. I think the owl swung it. I guess the asking price had something to do with it, since it was of such a paltry magnitude that it wouldn’t have been enough to buy a studio flat in Falkirk. My father did his level best to talk me out of it, and clearly thought that I had lost my marbles. He kept rubbing his head, which is a sure sign that he is worried. Undeterred, after sleeping on the decision, I offered the asking price the next day and Poupard accepted with alacrity. The legal formalities took a few months, and in February 2003 I drove back to sign the paperwork. After the signing I went to look over my new property, and I must admit that I began to have second thoughts. In the depths of winter it was colder, damper, and more formidably uninhabitable than ever it had appeared before. Icy rain was sheeting down from the west. Lara was with me, six months pregnant with our second boy Jedd, and she narrowly missed being savaged by the baying hound that threw itself towards her until violently pulled short by its chain. Finn, our eldest, was just a toddler and he backed away from the dog, tripped over on some rusting metal and fell in the mud, where he proceeded to burst into tears. Lara had not seen the property before and was, understandably, less than impressed.

  I returned in March with my father for a ten-day blitz to make the place a little more habitable, and I have been slowly working on it whenever I get the chance ever since. My father often comes down with me to help out and, although his DIY skills are woeful, it is great to have the company. We now have, wonder of wonders, a flushing indoor toilet, sinks with hot running water, even a shower, and a roof that leaks only occasionally. Poupard would scarcely recognise it.

  On those first trips down with my father we camped in the garden – much more pleasant than attempting to sleep in the house. For a toilet, we simply took a spade into the edge of the field and dug a hole – far more appealing than Poupard’s external facilities. On one such occasion, late in the first summer after buying the property, I was squatting behind the hedge, surveying the rather splendid view across the fields, when I heard a distinctive high-pitched buzz. There were tall pink willowherbs in flower along the field margin, and there, foraging, I was delighted to see a shrill carder bumblebee. It was a rather beautiful male, with straw-yellow stripes and a reddish bottom, busying himself collecting nectar. This species is a great rarity in the UK – I had only ever seen them on the wilds of Salisbury Plain and in the Somerset Levels, and even there they are hard to find. To have them living on my farm in France was wonderful, and as soon as was convenient I rushed to tell my father.

  Chez Nauche – the official name of the farm – is the most peaceful place. Outside the front door, the only evidence that there are other humans in the world are the vapour trails in the blue sky above, and the occasional distant chug of a farmer’s tractor. Wall lizards scurry along the south-facing front of the house, snatching flies and fighting territorial battles. At night, garden dormice – beautiful and incredibly agile creatures with the face markings of a miniature badger – churr at one another while eating grapes from the vines I have trained over the walls, while glow-worms emit their phosphorescent green light from among the cracks in the old flagstone path. My boys have grown up spending a month-long holiday here every summer, catching mantises and butterflies in the meadow, building tree houses, and swimming in the local lakes and rivers when the afternoon heat becomes too much.

  The changes I have wrought on the house are nothing compared to what has happened with the meadow. When I bought the property, the land had been under arable crops until very recently. Poupard had put the field down to grass the year before, but it was more or less a monoculture of false oat grass, a tall, coarse, emerald-green grass. Old plastic sacks of ammonium nitrate were strewn around in the barns, so it was clear that the fields had been fertilised, although I doubt Poupard would have put on more than the bare minimum as fertilisers are costly. Nonetheless, even small amounts are disastrous for flowers – they encourage coarse grasses to gro
w fast and tall, squeezing out all but the toughest herbaceous plants. Only along the edges of the drive and the hedge bottoms were there any flowers, and hence there were few bees and butterflies.

  There is no easy way to reduce the fertility of soil in a meadow, yet it is impossible to recreate a rich flower community without first doing so. One option is to scrape off and remove the topsoil, but for such a large area this would have meant removing thousands of tonnes of soil and hence would have been prohibitively costly, as well as posing the considerable problem of where to dispose of it. An alternative is to deep plough, a tricky technique whereby the ploughman flips the top 2 feet or so of soil upside down, burying the more fertile topsoil under a thick layer of less fertile subsoil. Both methods require that one then sow a wild-flower mix, preferably using locally sourced seed. Such seed mixes cost several thousand pounds per acre; enough to sow the fields at Chez Nauche would have cost considerably more than the property itself.

  There is a third option, but it requires considerable patience. If the hay is cut and removed each year, then some of the fertility is removed with it. So long as no more fertilisers are added, year-on-year removal of the hay results in a slow decline in fertility, and allows wild flowers to gradually creep back. I managed to contact a local farmer, Monsieur Fonteneau, who maintains a herd of 350 hungry goats, and he agreed to harvest my hay each year to provide winter fodder for his animals. Every July, he and his sons cut the hay and bind it into vast cylinders, removing about 80 tonnes of material and with it a small amount of the nitrogen and other artificial nutrients added by Poupard. Each year, out of politeness, Monsieur Fonteneau will pop in to exchange pleasantries. He is usually accompanied by one or more of his rotund boys whom he is training up to take over the family business. I offer them each a bottle of cold beer, which they drink while I rapidly exhaust my feeble repertoire of French farming-related conversation. None of them speaks a word of English, or if they do they have never let on, and my French is dimly remembered from lessons at school. To prepare for Fonteneau’s annual visit I have rehearsed a number of conversational gambits, such as ‘Le foin est bon cette année?’ (The hay is good this year?) and ‘Comment sont les chèvres?’ (How are the goats?). Of course I rarely understand the answers, although I believe that his goats may have recently suffered from some sort of bloat. It is all a little awkward, but fortunately Fonteneau et fils drink fast; we smile, we shake hands, and we all breathe a sigh of relief that the conversation is over for another year.