Saturday 5 October 2013

A Sting in the Tale by Dave Goulson


Everyone likes bumble bees, don't  they? They are so plump and furry and vibratey like tiny flying cats with too many legs... So I have been reading this amusing book about them by the founder of the bumble bee trust.

I enjoyed the section on Dave's childhood attempts to help bees which frequently ended disasterously. Such as the time he finds some soggy ones struggling along after heavy rain, decides to dry them out on the kitchen hot plate and accidently grills them.

Much of the book deals with the challenges faced by bumble bees. These basically boil down to manmade problems caused by modern agriculture (loss of hedgerows and flower meadows) and the shortcomings of the bees that make them particularly vulnerable. Only the queen bees can hibernate to survive the winter... so a whole hive of bees has to find enough flowers throughout the spring and summer to make a few queens. Then the queens are unfortunately a bit rubbish at finding holes to hibernate in. They can get damp and go mouldy, or drown in wet winters or fall prey to a variety of fascinatingly disgusting parasites.

One useful but rather disappointing piece of information to come out of this book is that bees don't seem to particularly like the little encourage-the-bees houses for them that you can buy in garden centres. This is a shame as I'd like to provide bees with some quality accommodation, but at least it has saved me some money. Apparently the best we can do is to hope that bees decide to come and live in out walls or under our sheds.

Much of the day-to-day business of scientific bumble bee research turns out to be coming up with good ideas and then watching them fail. For example at one point Dave and his phd students reason that if dogs can be trained to sniff out drugs or explosives it should be possible to train them to find bumble bee nests. And so a couple of bumble bee sniffer dogs are expensively trained and paired with handlers. Although the dogs are able to demonstrate their skill in tests, when they actualy get out into the countryside they prove to be rather less good at finding bumble bee nests than their handlers. Effectively the sniffer dogs function as affable companions to human bee finders.

It would have been nice to have had a bumble bee identification chart so I knew which bee he was on about at any given time, but I guess you can look them up on the bumblebee trust website. And besides, Dave himself admits that some species can only really be told apart by cutting their toes off and sending them for DNA analysis.

The first and last chapters of the book deal with Dave's involvement in a project to reintroduce the short-haired bumble bee which has become extinct in Britain. I got quite excited a while ago when I spotted a story on the BBC, saying that these bees had been "successfully reintroduced". Unfortunately when I looked more closely this turned out to mean "haven't all died yet" rather than that a self-sustaining population had been estblished. Hang in there short haired bumble bees! And try not to go mouldy over winter...

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