A Sting in the Tale

by Dave Goulson

  Shortly after I arrived I was contacted by a girl from the United States who wanted to do a PhD on bumblebees with me, and who had a wad of cash in the bank from a recent divorce and so was willing to fund herself. Eager to build up my group again, I took her on. Named Jennifer (known as Jenn) Harrison-Cripps, she lived up to two American stereotypes in that she had a very loud voice and an astonishing capacity for food, particularly chocolate-coated ginger biscuits. She also had the largest dog I have ever seen, a St Bernard that was slowly eating her house.

  In the meantime, I had been preparing the groundwork for launching the charity. I couldn’t think of a better title than the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, which had to be abbreviated to BBCT since BCT was taken by the Bat Conservation Trust. I registered BBCT as a company, and then applied for charitable status. I also opened a bank account. All of this was fairly straightforward. Rather speculatively, I filled in and posted off a very long application form for a grant of £50,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund to employ a first member of staff. I checked out how other, similar, membership-based organisations worked, and realised that new members were usually offered a range of goodies to tempt them in. By dint of some blatant copying of what other organisations provided, I came up with a metal pin badge of a bilberry bumblebee – designed using my children’s felt-tip pens – a car window sticker, a pack of wild-flower seeds, and a bumblebee identification poster. For the latter, I persuaded an artist named Tony Hopkins, who had painted the lovely bumblebee pictures for the Naturalists’ Handbook Bumblebees,36 to let me use his pictures. I designed a logo, based on a bilberry bumblebee – the bee with the large red bottom – so we could print headed paper. I also cobbled together a newsletter, for which I came up with the title of Buzzword – cheesy, but I still like it.

  I had no idea how many newsletters, pin badges and so on we would need, since I had no idea how many members we might get. It turned out that there were huge economies of scale; 500 pin badges were roughly twice the cost of 100.37 Of course the charity had no money whatsoever at this point, so I had to pay for everything out of my own pocket, gambling that I would be able to reclaim it. I decided to go for 500 of everything, and within a few days all the goodies had been delivered in a selection of large cardboard boxes, which I stacked in my office. We were ready to go, but go where?

  I wasn’t sure what to do next. How were we going to get any members? The obvious option was to advertise, but advertising in any national media was prohibitively expensive since I would have had to pay for it myself. A press release seemed like the best way forward. The university has a press office, so I drafted something about the launch of a new charity to save our beleaguered bumblebees, and they sent it out. I had no idea what to expect. The following day, Thursday 25 May 2006, I had a couple of calls from journalists on local papers who seemed interested, and finally, late in the afternoon, a call from Mike McCarthy at the Independent. I’d not heard of him at the time, but he is their environment editor. We chatted for a while, and I became quite excited as he was clearly planning to run a detailed piece. National newspaper coverage was exactly what we needed. Mike then asked me to hold for a few moments. I sat in my office at Stirling gazing at the view for quite some time before he came back on the line and dropped a bombshell. He said, ‘What would you say to the entire front page?’ I didn’t say anything immediately as I was too busy falling off my chair in surprise. Mike was essentially offering for the Independent to sponsor a very prominent launch of BBCT. He wanted pictures and lots of information, and he wanted it immediately. This, as I have since discovered, is always the way with journalists, but I was hardly going to complain.

  It turned into a long evening, but it was all worth it for the next day the Independent devoted not just the front page but the entire first three pages to bumblebees and the launch of BBCT. My phone didn’t stop ringing for days, with other journalists wanting to do follow-up pieces and members of the public wishing to join the trust. I’d set standard membership at £16 per year, slightly undercutting other similar organisations, and within a day or two cheques started to flood in. It was at this point that the inadequacy of my preparation hit home. The trust had no staff, no office and no membership database. I had what was supposed to be a full-time job as an academic, and could only moonlight for the trust for a few hours a day. I had not anticipated how long it took to type names and addresses into a spreadsheet, to put together and send out membership packs, and to deal with the myriad of telephone enquiries, emails and letters that flooded in. To exacerbate the problem, I had to go to Portugal for eleven days in early June to teach on our undergraduate biology field course in a study centre with only the most rudimentary phone and Internet connections.

  Jenn offered to step in, which was a massive relief. I left her in charge and headed off to the sun, asking her to send me email updates as to how many membership applications came in. Three days later I received an email from Jenn with a very large attachment. This wasn’t very helpful as it took about an hour to download, but when it finally did it was a picture of her holding a vast armful of envelopes. Hundreds of membership applications were flooding in.

  By the time I got back it was total chaos. It turned out that organisation was not Jenn’s strong suit, although she had done her level best. My lab was a sea of opened envelopes, cheques and letters that were spilling off shelves, falling behind cupboards and spewing across the floor. Jenn had sent off membership packs to some, but she had lost track of which ones, so some ended up getting two packs, and there may well be others whose cheques were lost and who never received a thing. Of course it wasn’t her fault; I should never have left her on her own to deal with all this, with no help and no systems in place. It took weeks to sort out, but thankfully the flood of letters slowed, and by the end of June we had 500 members and several thousand pounds in the bank. Thankfully our new members were mostly very tolerant of our ineptness.

  During late summer of 2006 I managed to tempt Ben Darvill up to Scotland with the offer of a three-year postdoctoral position, and he became heavily involved with the trust, which took some of the pressure off. Then we had a very welcome piece of news: I received a letter from the Lottery saying that they were awarding us the £50,000. We advertised for the trust’s first staff member, and were snowed under with applications. Membership was still growing slowly, bringing in a steady flow of money, and the applicants were so good that we decided to take a gamble and employ two rather than the one we had intended. As fate would have it, we ended up with Bridget England as our Scottish conservation officer, and the rather more appropriately named Lucy Southern as our England and Wales officer, albeit based in Scotland. The university kindly offered the trust an office for free, just along the corridor from myself, and we were up and running.

  Even with two full-time staff, the first couple of years were hectic. None of us really knew what we were doing. We had to work out a finance system, produce annual financial reports, sort out tax, VAT, payrolls, pensions, deal with the growing membership and the many enquiries this generated, as well as try to deliver the conservation aims of the trust. Both Lucy and Bridget were trying to each do half a dozen specialist jobs, few of which they had any experience in. Ben and I tried to advise and help as much as possible, but we had no more experience in many of these areas than they did, and in any case we were fairly well occupied with our own academic posts. It is a marvel that the trust didn’t implode, but somehow Bridget and Lucy managed to avoid any major disasters.

  I’ll spare you a blow-by-blow account of the intervening years. My role in the trust has diminished as it took flight and became self-sustaining. The trust now has eleven staff, and was recently awarded a new, much larger Lottery grant. Much more importantly, the trust has achieved far more than I could have ever dreamed of. It has 8,000 members all over the UK and a scattering overseas, and has been involved in creating in the region of 2,000 hectares of flower-rich habitat at sites from Orkney to Kent and Caithness to Pembro
keshire, most of it in our target areas where endangered bumblebee species occur. The trust hasn’t tried to buy up land to manage, which would be inordinately expensive and would require staff and machinery that at the moment we simply don’t have. In any case, the area of land needed to support a viable population of a rare bumblebee is huge – probably several square kilometres. Instead, the trust has focused on working with existing landowners and managers, raising awareness of the presence of rare species in particular areas, and encouraging creation of new patches of flower-rich habitat wherever possible. Much of the 2,000 hectares of habitat has been created through encouraging and helping farmers to enter agri-environment schemes, whereby they can apply for government funding for creation and management of flower-rich grassland.

  Most farmers have no idea that they have a rare bumblebee living nearby. For the last three years, the trust’s current Scottish conservation officer, Bob Dawson, has focused his efforts on remedying this situation in areas where the great yellow bumblebee survives. This insect is neither as big nor as yellow as one might expect from the name, but it is nonetheless quite lovely, and was once found throughout Britain. In the last sixty years it has disappeared from about 95 per cent of its UK range – there are none left in England or Wales, and it is now found only on some Hebridean islands, Orkney and on the far north coast of Caithness and Sutherland. Bob has spent much of his summers for the last three years visiting these areas and talking to crofters and farmers. Most of them had not heard of a great yellow bumblebee until Bob arrived on their doorstep, but they were delighted to find that their land might be supporting such a rare creature, and more often than not they were willing to help by making the land better for bees. Many have since developed a sense of ownership of the great yellow; they are proud to be a part of conserving its future. Pippa Rayner, Lucy Southern’s successor as English Conservation Officer has had similar experiences working with farmers in South Wales and Wiltshire to conserve the shrill carder. As the trust’s capacity grows, our long-term aim is to work outwards from these remote sites scattered across the UK, hopefully ensuring the survival of the great yellow and the shrill carder and eventually encompassing all of the areas where rare bumblebee species survive.

  On top of creating habitat, the trust has distributed more than 20,000 packs of wild-flower seed, and 4,000 copies of a little booklet I wrote on gardening for bumblebees. Gardens cover nearly 1 million hectares in the UK, so if we can make even a small fraction of them more bumblebee-friendly then we can have a major impact. Bumblebees seem to be doing pretty well in urban areas compared to the countryside, probably because there tend to be more flowers and nesting opportunities in gardens than in farmland. However, there is plenty of room for improvement; some gardens are terrible for bumblebees or any other wildlife. Low-maintenance decking, gravel, tarmac and concrete cover many, while carefully manicured lawns are also pretty much useless. Modern bedding plants have been intensively selected for size and colour, and in so doing they have lost their nectar, or become grossly misshapen or oversized so that it is impossible for bees to get to the rewards. As an example, the small, delicate wild pansy is popular with bumblebees, while the huge showy blooms of cultivated pansies are ignored. So-called ‘F1 hybrids’ are often sterile, having no pollen. ‘Double’ varieties have extra petals, which prevent bees from getting into the flower. For these reasons most of the busy lizzies, lobelias, petunias, begonias and so on that are sold as plug plants in the spring to provide an instant splash of colour are more or less useless to bees or butterflies; they have lost their original function, which was to attract pollinators.

  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 bumblebe
es. 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.