A Sting in the Tale

by Dave Goulson

  In mid-April 2012 Nikki travelled over to Sweden, armed with her butterfly net and a large box of hair curlers. We all knew that this was really too early for short-haired bumblebees, which don’t usually emerge from hibernation until well into May, but Nikki was champing at the bit and didn’t want to miss them if it turned out to be an unusual year and the queens emerged early. We had gathered all the necessary permissions to capture the bees in Sweden, but nonetheless a local conservationist somehow got the impression that we had not, and by the power of social media quickly mounted a campaign to prevent the capture going ahead. There was a brief storm of media interest in the Swedish newspapers, in which we were described as ‘typical British imperialists’, amongst many other things, but thankfully this quickly died away when it was discovered that we did have both formal permission and the support of local bumblebee experts.

  For reasons we do not fully understand, short-haired bumblebees seem to be thriving in southern Sweden, unaffected by the problems that have beset them elsewhere in Europe. Nikki had no trouble catching queens, most of which were feeding on white dead-nettle along the verges of country lanes. By 10 May, eighty-nine of them were safely housed in hair curlers in the camper van and were on their way back to the UK. Nikki handed them over to Mark Brown, who held the queens in quarantine for a fortnight while he carefully examined their faeces to determine if any of the bees were carrying infections. During this period a few of them died, with a parasitoid wasp named Syntretus bursting from their bodies. A few more were found to be infected with gut diseases and had to be humanely destroyed. On 28 May, Nikki picked up the remaining fifty-one healthy bees and drove them to Dungeness for their big day.

  An excited crowd had gathered at the appointed spot, on the edge of a field full of clover. The respective press offices of Natural England, the RSPB and the Bumblebee Conservation Trust had done a great job and there were swarms of journalists and camera teams, as well as local conservationists, farmers and staff of the various organisations. Nikki had placed a few of the queens in clear plastic boxes, but kept them cool and in the dark until the last moment so that they did not become flustered and bash themselves about trying to escape. When the cameras were ready, and to a hush from the audience, Nikki revealed the first queen bee. Shutters clicked eagerly, and then the lid was opened. The queen buzzed her wings once or twice experimentally, warming her flight muscles while she tasted the air with her antennae. And after a moment or two, she flew away. For the first time in twenty-four years, a short-haired bumblebee was on the wing in England.

  The story was much the same with the rest. A few paused to feed on the clover, but then they were off, heading away across the flat fields. And that was the last we saw of them. Of course this was exactly what we might have expected them to do, but nonetheless it seemed rather anticlimactic. Slowly, with nothing left to look at, the crowd of people dispersed and it was all over, at least as far as the media was concerned.

  For the rest of the summer, Nikki and her team of volunteers searched for the queens and their offspring, but none were seen. The summer of 2012 was spectacularly wet and awful, which was unfortunate and may have led to the demise of our precious Swedish bees, or it may not. Queen bees are powerful fliers and we have no idea how far they might have gone, or what their fates were. They could have been more or less anywhere in south Kent or east Sussex, and looking for fifty-one bees across several hundred square miles of countryside is a thankless task. It would be easier if the short-haired bumblebee were a distinctive species, but they do look rather similar to several other native species so only an experienced person is likely to notice one, and there aren’t many experienced bee spotters. In fact, many members of the public claimed to have seen one having read about the release in the papers, and some sent in photographs of what turned out to be other bumblebee species. None of the sightings could be confirmed.

  As I write this last chapter, in a very wet January 2013, we have no idea if there are short-haired bumblebees alive in the UK. If there are, they will be the daughters of the queens that were released, tucked away somewhere underground awaiting the spring. If they become established somewhere in Kent then their numbers should increase, and before long we are bound to see them. Whatever happens, the funding from Natural England is ongoing for the moment and Nikki plans to release more queens from Sweden in 2013. Success is far from certain; this has never been done before. If all goes well, at some point we should see workers, and then we will know that a queen has successfully built a nest. Better still would be to see males and fresh young queens in late summer. The long-term plan is to develop further sites, starting with north Kent, with the eventual aim of establishing a network of linked populations in the south-east of England. To do this will necessitate creating massive amounts of new habitat, which will benefit other bumblebees, the wild flowers on which they depend, and many other wild creatures. Although these bees may never come back from New Zealand, the rather peculiar series of events that led to the existence of British short-haired bumblebees on the other side of the world has stimulated a project that has resulted in sweeping benefits for wildlife in one corner of England, and perhaps these benefits can spread. This rather nondescript bee is acting as a flagship for conservation efforts in the region, and bumblebees can do the same for conservation across the UK and beyond. Their direct relevance to man through crop pollination makes it very easy to explain the importance of conserving them, and from there it is but a small step to explaining that our survival and wellbeing is inextricably linked to that of all the wonderful diversity of life on earth. We need worms to create soil; flies and beetles and fungi to break down dung; ladybirds and hoverflies to eat greenfly; bees and butterflies to pollinate plants; plants to provide food, oxygen, fuel and medicines and hold the soil together; and bacteria to help plants fix nitrogen and to help cows to digest grass. We have barely begun to understand the complexity of interactions between living creatures on earth, yet we often choose to squander the irreplaceable, to discard those things that both keep us alive and make life worth living. Perhaps if we learn to save a bee today we can save the world tomorrow?

  The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, ‘What good is it?’ If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.

  Aldo Leopold

  Notes

  Chapter 1. The Short-haired Bumblebee

  1. One day I must go to Chile to see the legendary Bombus dahlbomii, the world’s biggest bumblebee, a monstrous fluffy ginger beast that lives in the high Andes and on the chilly tundra of Tierra del Fuego.

  2. Their delicious pies became something of a daily treat for us in New Zealand – I can particularly recommend the venison pies in Arrowtown if you happen to be passing, but you might want to skip the possum pies of Hokitika.

  Chapter 2. The Bumblebee Year

  3. It is lucky for us that Sladen was so precocious, as he didn’t live long. In 1912, the year he published The Humble-bee, Sladen was offered and accepted a job as an entomologist in Canada, where he worked mainly on honeybees rather than bumblebees. Sadly, after a hot day’s work with his bees on Duck Island in Lake Ontario, he took a dip in the lake to cool off, suffered a heart attack, and died at the age of forty-five.

  4. Gender in plants is a much more complicated business than in most animals. A few plants such as pussy willows and red campions are either male or female. However, most plants are hermaphrodites, having both male and female reproductive organs in the same flower, which poses the danger that they might accidentally mate with themselves.

  5. As will be explained later, a quirk of the genetics of bumblebees means that it is very easy for the queen to control the sex of her offspring by laying either unfertilised eggs, which become sons, or fertilised eggs, which become daughters. It is probably a good thing that huma
ns are unable to do this.

  Chapter 3. The Hot-blooded Bumblebee

  6. Younger readers might struggle to imagine a world where orders were sent by post rather than placed online, and 28 days was considered a reasonable turnaround time for delivery.

  7. In addition to being a ground-breaking and prodigiously productive scientist, Bernd Heinrich was a phenomenal marathon runner, with a best time of 2 hours, 22 minutes and 34 seconds, only narrowly missing the US Olympic team at the age of forty. He went on to set the American record for 100 miles, for 100 kilometres, and for the furthest distance run on a track in 24 hours (156 miles, 1,388 yards!). Quite how anyone could face running around a track this many times is something of a mystery to me. However, I have recently taken up marathon running myself and have found that I am quite good at it (best time about 3 hours so far), so perhaps there is something about studying bumblebees which makes one good at long-distance running.

  Chapter 4. A Brief History of Bees

  8. The record holder is not a bee, but a hawkmoth, Xanthopan morganii, which has a tongue of about 30 centimetres long (the moth itself being 6 centimetres long). This moth feeds upon the Madagascar star orchid Angraecum sesquipedale, in which nectar is hidden at the base of spurs 30 centimetres deep, in a beautiful example of co-evolution. Upon being sent examples of the orchid in 1862, Charles Darwin predicted that there must exist a moth with a tongue long enough to feed upon it, but it was not until 1903 that the moth was finally discovered.

  Chapter 5. Finding the Way Home

  9. The pollen grains of many plants have distinctive and beautifully sculptured symmetrical patterns when viewed down a microscope. Borage pollen grains resemble oval pillows with a series of parallel grooves running from end to end.

  Chapter 6. Comfrey and Smelly Feet

  10. Bird’s-foot trefoil is so named because the seed pods look remarkably like the three-toed foot of a bird, not because they smell of birds’ feet!

  Chapter 7. Tasmanian Devils

  11. Much loved by honeybees but unpalatable to grazing animals, Patterson’s curse was introduced to Australia in the 1880s by Jane Patterson, an early settler. She innocently brought the seeds from Europe so that she could grow the pretty flowers in her garden, but the plants rapidly spread into the surrounding pasture. The latest estimates suggest that this one weed now costs Australian farmers $30 million per year.

  12. There is a wonderful honey shop in the tiny village of Chudleigh in northern Tasmania. It sells over fifty local varieties, all of which are laid out for tasting, and a huge range of other bee- and honey-related products, including a baby’s bee outfit which I couldn’t resist buying for my youngest son, and in which he looked ridiculously cute.

  13. This wonderful beast lives for most of its life as a ‘rat-tailed’ maggot in a puddle of rainwater formed in the heart of a rotting pine tree stump, and nowhere else. The maggots have a telescopic breathing tube attached to the rear end which earns them their unappealing name – as maggots go they are actually rather cute. Sadly there seems to be only one tiny population of this fly left in Britain, but Ellie has been busy breeding them in captivity and chopping holes in pine stumps elsewhere to release them into.

  14. A must-see in northern Tasmania, Priscilla is to be found at the Pub in the Paddock in the remote village of Pyengana. For $1 you can buy a watered-down beer which she will enthusiastically guzzle from the bottle while grunting contentedly.

  Chapter 8. Quinn and Toby the Bumblebee Sniffer Dogs

  15. Termites are wood-boring insects that can destroy a timber-framed house in no time at all. They are fascinating creatures, not least because they are rather like miniature cows – just as a cow has a rumen, the stomach in which it digests the cellulose in grass by fermenting it in a warm broth of bacteria, so termites have a ‘paunch’, a special stomach in which they digest the cellulose in the timber they consume.

  16. Machair is a rare and very beautiful habitat found only in the west of Scotland and Ireland. It is made of flat plains of wind-blown shell-sand upon which grow the most stunning swards of flowers. It is now a last refuge for a range of rare creatures such as corncrake and the great yellow bumblebee, which have been unable to cope with farming changes on the mainland of Britain.

  Chapter 9. Bee Wars

  17. One little-known species, Bombus wilmattae, which lives in the mountains of Mexico and Guatemala, has recently proved to be the exception, with about 80 per cent of males produced by workers, but as yet we do not know why.

  Chapter 10. Cuckoo Bumblebees

  18. This is not something I do for fun; every entomologist needs a reference collection of pinned bees to refer to when identifying tricky specimens.

  Chapter 11. Bee Enemies

  19. Beekeeping is not a traditional activity in the Sinai because for most of the year there are very few flowers so honeybees do not thrive. However, in recent years some enterprising individuals have taken to keeping honeybees which they feed with sugar syrup. The bees recycle this into honey, which the beekeepers harvest and then sell to unsuspecting tourists as ‘traditional’ Bedouin honey.

  20. Crab spiders are so named for their rather crab-like appearance, being flattened with their legs protruding at the side, but their most striking characteristic is their colour. These are sit-and-wait predators that perch on flowers, waiting for insects to visit. They are coloured to match the petals, many species being white or bright yellow. My logical mind tells me that they are quite beautiful, but they still give me the willies.

  Chapter 12. The Birds and the Bees

  21. You are probably thinking that this doesn’t sound very nice. Of course the males were humanely killed before their heads were squashed. I should also remind you that there are always many more males than are needed to mate with the small number of queens, so this would not have done any harm to the local population.

  22. My name was mentioned in a few newspaper articles about this new bee. I subsequently received a storm of emails and letters describing creatures which the authors presumed were tree bumblebees. The summer of 2001 happened to be a good year for hummingbird hawkmoths in the UK, and I received many accounts of a hovering insect with a very long tongue which was surely a tree bumblebee. One lady described how she had been terrorised at night by an insect ‘with huge staring eyes’ which had attempted to get in through her bedroom window. I guess this was also a large moth of some sort – their eyes can reflect light like a cat’s – but she was sure that it was a tree bumblebee.

  Chapter 13. Does Size Matter?

  23. Anyone with even a passing interest in ants should consider reading the marvellous Journey to the Ants by Bert Hölldobler and the legendary biologist E. O. Wilson.

  24. My students often object when I suggest that human behaviour might in part be explicable in evolutionary terms, but many human emotions – which drive behaviours – such as romantic or parental love, or jealousy, have a clear purpose and are readily explained in terms of natural selection.

  25. I once spent a morning with a class of eight-year-old Spanish children, attempting to imbue them with an enthusiasm for insects. We walked out on to the nearby flowery hillside where I armed each of them with a butterfly net and a pooter. I was pleased to see that the children were in tremendous high spirits, laughing uproariously as I tried to explain how to use the pooter in my very poor Spanish, when their embarrassed teacher whispered in my ear that puta is the slang word for prostitute, going on to explain that it is also widely used as the equivalent of the F-word in English.

  26. Measuring the length of a bee’s tongue is a fiddly business. They don’t readily agree to it, so they need to be anaesthetised or cooled in a fridge before the tongue is carefully unfolded and measured with callipers.

  Chapter 14. Ketchup and Turkish Immigrants

  27. I couldn’t find out the Japanese common name of this bee, but in Korea it goes by the rather musical name of Sap-po-lo-dwi-yeong-beol.

  28. This is an intere
sting issue. Examining the DNA from old specimens, and comparing it to that of their present-day descendants, can provide exciting insights into how species have evolved and been affected by the environmental changes of the last hundred years or so. At present, obtaining DNA requires the removal of a small part of the body – usually a foot in the case of insects – and some museums have become loath to allow this. Not so long ago the techniques were less sophisticated and a whole leg was needed. Some particularly important specimens are now lacking many of their limbs, which is very sad. The museums argue that genetic techniques advance almost daily, and that anything we can do today could probably be done much better tomorrow, perhaps with less damage to the specimens. I can see their point, but it can be very frustrating when answers are needed now rather than later, and also this argument could be used indefinitely.

  Chapter 15. Chez Les Bourdons

  29. Campions are fascinating for a range of reasons. Each plant is either male or female, unlike most plants which are hermaphrodites. They suffer from sexually transmitted diseases, fungi with the oddly appropriate name of smuts, the purple spores of which are spread from flower to flower by bees, and which force infected female plants into a transsexual imitation of a male. Red and white campions will hybridise to produce pink offspring, but some unknown mechanism manages to prevent the two species from merging into one – the subject of my long-term and prematurely aborted experiment.