Have you heard the buzz?
The world is currently reeling from a financial body blow, while a more sinister threat is going on largely unnoticed. As the economy is going into a spin, and traders are realising that they can seemingly get away with anything, a potentially more serious threat to our existence is occurring in the United States and it comes in a far more disarming guise than fiscal shenanigans.
Bees, honey bees in fact, are currently facing an unknown threat, which has wiped out over a third of the American colonies of bees and looks in no danger of abating. “So what?” You might think, “I can live without fuzzy buzzing things and honey, I’ll survive”. But would you?
Albert Einstein, regularly acknowledged as a bit of a brain box, is said to have claimed that if bees were to disappear from earth man would follow suit in four years. Depressing stuff from the Austrian Physicist. Whether the great man really did say these words – and it’s hotly contested, I am going to use this as the beginnings of my article this week. Regardless of the accuracy of the quotations, more importantly the accuracy of the bee decline is something we should be very worried about indeed.
Bees belong to the order Hymenoptera, which includes wasps and ants, and come in a staggering array of shapes, sizes, social structures and colours. The yellow and black rotund figure from colouring books and cartoons is the honey bee and the most familiar to most of us, however recent estimates suggest there are more bee species on the planet than all the bird and mammal species COMBINED! Now that’s diversity.
But out of all these 1600 or so species, it is just one species Apis mellifera that we have come to rely on for pollinating crops, as well as providing us with sweet, invigorating honey. And over the pond, in America not Bystock, apiculturalists are experiencing sudden and inexplicable colony collapses, known as CCD or Colony Collapse Disorder. It’s a ‘disorder’ as no-one is sure what the cause is, various theories exist from viruses, fungal infections or mites to mobile phone masts and global warming, to a combination of all or any of these. People are somewhat stumped.
And it is a serious issue. All commercial crops which require pollination to fruit are pollinated by bee hives, placed within the crop. The largest greenhouse on earth, not the Eden Project but a tomato hothouse in East Anglia has bees living within it permanently pollinating the tomato flowers. So if honey bees were to decline and die out, our agricultural system would be in pandemonium. Crops would go un-mated and therefore not fruit, and at a time when we are balanced on something of a knife edge of global food production, this could be just the thing to tip us over the edge into global famine.
Now, CCD is currently only being recorded in the US, and only in honey bees. Bumble bees are in decline in this country and it is for a much more easily recognisable reason – habitat loss. There is plenty we can do for our thirty or so species of native bumble, and it requires a quick trip to the pet shop.
Back in the summer I wrote an article here about how to identify bumble bees, and seeing as you can log on to my Exmouth Journal blog and re-read that, I will not cover this ground again. Instead, I will explain how you can easily provide bumble bee homes for next summer, and give them a chance to settle in.
A bumble box can be any water tight container, with a suitably sized hole cut in the side, at the bottom of the box. Ice cream tubs are perfect, a marge tub if that is what is to hand, you can buy them from garden centres and pet shops, but its easy to fashion you own. The hole needs to be about the size of a ten pence piece, similar in size to a mouse hole – which is what it is going to pretend to be.
Bumble bees live in small colonies, which build through the summer, servicing a large egg-producing queen who is the only bee to have survived the previous winter. They use old mouse burrows as nesting holes and providing a couple of these in your boarders and under flower beds is no bad thing, especially if you have fruit trees to pollinate.
The secret ingredient is mouse wee. Seriously, no respectable bumble bee will nest without it. And the easiest way to collect this – oh dear I have a weird image in mind of me, a mouse and a tiny sample tube – is to ask for some old mouse bedding from your local pet shop. Pop this into the box, close the lid and place it out of the way. Remember where you put it and watch out for activity early next spring.
Threats can come in all shapes and sizes, and it’s often not the big, loud, expensive ones which do the most damage – the plague was carried by fleas! I suppose its what makes natural history so absorbing, studying the intricate links between everything that shares this earth. But bees typify the best form of sustainability. In foraging for their food they not only get a good meal for themselves and their progeny (or at least their sisters), but they add to next year’s nectar and pollen resource by fertilising the nectar creator. We could do well to emulate their behaviour, not sit idly by and watch their demise.