The Forgotten Bumblebee

Quite rightly, there's been a huge fuss recently over the decline of the honey bee, which has suffered both from pesticide over-use, the varroa mite, and other ills.  Without the honey bee, so the argument went, our crops wouldn't be pollinated, our fruit trees would become barren, and nice things like the countryside's flowers would join the general extinction.  It's a worrying scenario.

But something has been forgotten in all this: the humble bumblebee.  Fortunately, this has been rectified recently in an excellent article in the 11th August edition of the New Scientist, The Plight of the Bumblebee, which sets out to put the position straight.

There are 250 species of bumblebee, compared to one honey bee, and twenty-five of these are found in the UK.  Bumblebees inhabit a huge range of environments - one even lives in the Arctic.  Their colony numbers are small compared to a typical honey bee colony of over 10,000, but they operate in much worse weather than honey bees, they pollinate in a quite different way and, therefore, deal with many wild plants the honey bee doesn't touch, so they are now said to pollinate something like two-thirds of our cultivated crops.

But the bumblebee, just like the honey bee, is under threat.  Their problem seems to come from the loss of variety in our habitats, as we move to more and more intensively cultivated land.  As a result, only four or five of our native bumblebee species are still common.

Ever since reading the article, The Diary has been out trying to photograph bumblebees.  There are plenty around as we move towards autumn, especially on the knapweed.  We found three species, which are shown above.  The top picture is of the bumblebee which gets most notice as it is large, dopey, rather bad at flying, and tends to fall into things like one's beer.  The second looks exactly the same but is much smaller, and the third has a very smart orangey coat.

The article also points out that much of the pollinating is done by even less acknowledged insects such as the hover fly, of which there are some 6,000 species worldwide.

Finally, it reports that someone has done a study which has calculated that pollinators, of whichever sort, contributed about £510 million to the UK agricultural economy in 2009 by doing the pollination of our vital crops for us.  In southwest China pesticides have ruined the countryside to such an extent that fruit trees now have to be pollinated by human hand.  If we had to do that in this country, it would, so the report somehow calculated, cost £1.8 billion.