Category Archives: Bees

Connecting soils and pollinators: the ProPollSoil project kicks off in Germany!

The ProPollSoil project officially got underway on 1st October, and this week (16th–20th November) our consortium gathered in Freising, Germany, for the kick-off meeting hosted by the Technical University of Munich. It was an inspiring start: dozens of experts from across Europe coming together to explore two big questions: How does the health of our soils shape the fate of pollinators? And how do pollinators influence soil health?

Most people think of pollination as something that happens in the air or on flowers, but for many species the story begins underground. Thousands of bees, hoverflies, beetles and wasps depend on soil to nest, overwinter, or complete parts of their life cycle. For example, around half of the solitary bee species in Britain and Ireland are what we term “ground nesting” and make their nests in different types of soil. Yet soil conditions—structure, temperature, contaminants, farming practices—are changing rapidly. As part of the EU’s Mission Soil programme, ProPollSoil aims to understand these hidden links so we can better protect the pollinators that support our food systems and ecosystems.

The project brings together specialists in entomology, soil science, ecology, modelling, agriculture, economics, and communication, forming a truly interdisciplinary team. Through desk-based reviews, fieldwork, lab experiments, monitoring and advanced modelling techniques, we’ll be investigating how soil influences pollinator survival and what we can do to improve it.

ProPollSoil is built around six key goals, including identifying the soil conditions that help pollinators thrive, testing innovative ways to monitor soil-dependent species, evaluating how different land-use and farming practices affect pollinators, and developing practical soil-management solutions—from reduced tillage to cleaner soils—that can slow or reverse their decline.

My own role mainly focuses on understanding the state of our current knowledge of the biology and ecology of soil-dependent pollinators and their interactions with soils, other invertebrates, and plants. I’ll also be working on integrating information about pollinators’ soil dependencies into the European Atlas of Plant-Pollinator Associations (EuroAPPA), part of the related Butterfly Project, whose kick-off meeting I documented on the blog earlier this year.

Together, these efforts will help build a clearer, more complete understanding of how life belowground supports life aboveground. It’s an exciting journey, and we’re only just getting started!

My sincere thanks to all of the ProPollSoil consortium members whose passion and expertise made for a stimulating few days in Germany. And a special shout-out for the team from Poland who brought with them some delicious, PropPollSoil branded sweets:

Pollinators and politics in China

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Last week I returned from a 14 day visit to China to colleagues at the Kunming Institute of Botany in Yunnan, part of a three-year commitment to working there that I documented on the blog last year, starting here. Some of my recent trip involved a long weekend in the city of Nantong, just north of Shanghai, where I was an invited speaker at the International Pollinator Insect Biology and Pollination Symposium. During a full day of talks from researchers and practitioners, via the excellent simultaneous interpretation service provided by the organisers, we learned about recent developments in the world of Chinese honey bees and wild pollinators. There were also international guest speakers from Australia, Argentina, and the UK, in person and online.

Too much was presented to give you a full account of the meeting – if you’re interested in details I’ve uploaded a copy of the English version of the symposium brochure here – but several themes emerged that I think are worth noting.

First of all, a number of speakers commented on the growing realisation in China that the value of crop pollination services by honey bees (both the native Asian Apis cerana and the European A. mellifera) far outweighs the value of the hive products such as honey, wax and royal jelly – see this from the 2021 study by Shibonage K Mashilingi and colleagues:

The total economic value of pollination amounted to US$ 106.08 billion in 2010, representing 19.12% of the total production value of Chinese agriculture

In comparison, the global honey market was valued at just US$ 9.01 billion in 2022. That such an understanding of the much greater economic value of pollinators to agriculture was relatively slow in coming is perhaps not surprising – it’s easier to weigh a physical product than it is to assess the contribution of bees and other insects to an apple harvest, for instance. But this awareness is a crucial step towards understanding the many reasons why pollinators need protection.

Which leads me to my next point: there was considerable political interest in the conference and in the topic more broadly. The meeting opened with almost an hour of introductory remarks by high-ranking Chinese officials, including the Vice Mayor of the regional government, the Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and the Secretary General of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China. All of them commented on the importance of pollination to both crops and wild plants, and the need to reduce the amount pesticides being used in Chinese agriculture. I can’t recall ever being in a pollination symposium in any other country where there was such a political presence. I think that it says a lot about the Chinese willingness to translate science and technology into government policy and actions.

At the end of the opening session I had the chance to talk briefly with Liu Jian, former Vice Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China. Via an interpreter we agreed on the importance of pesticide reduction for protecting pollinators, a theme he had emphasised strongly in his talk, and I presented him with a copy of my book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society:

Following the opening addresses there was a talk by the President of the Apicultural Science Association of China, Prof. Peng Wenjun, who gave us “An overview of the development of China’s bee pollination industry”. He described pollinators as the “invisible pillar” of agriculture, which is a wonderful phrase, and set out a strategy for greater integration of government policies, science, and technological innovation in order to support both managed and wild pollinators.

The first set of talks ended about 6pm, then it was back to the hotel for a quick dinner, before returning to the venue for a set of 15 shorter, but no less excellent, talks by postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers. This over-ran slightly and finally drew to a close at about 10pm, signalling the end of a very long, but very stimulating, day.

The following morning we were up early for a tour of some local agricultural facilities, including a high-tech glasshouse demonstration project and a loquat orchard that included trees which are thought to be around 300 years old. The thing that links these two contrasting agricultural systems is the requirement for managed pollinators to produce a crop: bumblebees (Bombus spp.) in the case of glasshouse tomatoes and the Asian honey bee (Apis cerana) for the winter-flowering loquat. Here are some photographs from that trip:

My sincere thanks to the organisers of the symposium for the invitation to speak and to my colleagues Zong-Xin Ren, Scarlett Howard, Yuansheng Fu, and Carlos Matallana-Puerto for their companionship on the trip. I’m grateful also to our personal translator-guides Yang and Gao who surprised us at the airport and made us feel so welcome:

Do birds pollinate the iconic Golden Lotus? A new study suggests that they do!

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The Golden Lotus (Musella lasiocarpa) is one of China’s most iconic plants — a striking member of the banana family (Musaceae) that seems to bloom forever. Its brilliant yellow, lotus-like bracts have long made it a favourite of subtropical gardeners, though it also has utility as a food and fibre crop, and is associated with Chinese Buddhism. As you can see above it often features stylistically in Chinese temples, and in my visits to Yunnan we frequently encounter it during fieldwork on farms, planted to support terraced fields:

But despite its fame, one mystery has lingered for decades: what actually pollinates it?

Until now, Musella was thought to rely mainly on insects, particularly bees, for pollination. That assumption made it something of an outlier within the banana family, where most species are pollinated by birds or bats. But a new study, in which I was involved as part of an international team of predominantly Chinese and Brazilian researchers, has turned that view on its head.

By combining careful field observations with citizen science records, our team found that the Golden Lotus is regularly visited by an impressive diversity of birds — twelve species from five different families. As I documented in my recent book Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationships, many of these visitors, such as bulbuls and sunbirds, are known nectar-feeders, and their behaviour at the flowers suggests that they are acting as effective pollinators. This discovery significantly expands what we know about the pollination ecology of the Golden Lotus, and places it firmly within the broader pattern of bird pollination that characterises much of the banana family.

Interestingly, the plant’s features — large, robust, vividly coloured bracts, abundant accessible nectar, and long-lived blooms — make perfect sense in this new light. These are traits that favour bird pollination rather than the short, concentrated visits typical of bees.

But the significance goes beyond one species. Bird pollination plays a vital, and often overlooked, role in China’s native flora, linking ecosystems from tropical rainforests to mountain valleys. Understanding these relationships is important not only for biodiversity conservation but also for horticulture — helping gardeners and landscape designers to create spaces that attract and sustain pollinators of all kinds.

The Golden Lotus has always been celebrated for its beauty and longevity. Now, we can add another layer to its story: a reminder that even the most familiar plants can still surprise us, and that nature’s partnerships are often more complex — and more colourful — than we imagine.

Here’s the reference with a link to the paper, which is open access:

Albuquerque-Lima, S., Ferreira, B. H. d. S., Rech, A. R., Ollerton, J., Lunau, K., Smagghe, G., Li, K.-Q., Oliveira, P. E., & Ren, Z.-X. (2025). Beyond Bees: Evidence of Bird Visitation and Putative Pollination in the Golden Lotus (Musella lasiocarpa)—One of the Six Buddhist Flowers—Through Field Surveys and Citizen Science. Plants, 14(20), 3157. https://doi.org/10.3390/plants14203157

Pollinators need more space and 10% habitat is not enough says a new study just published in Science

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Pollinators such as wild bees, butterflies, and hoverflies are in trouble worldwide. A major new study, published in Science and led by Gabriella Bishop and other scientists at Wageningen University & Research, shows that the oft-quoted figure of 10% semi-natural habitat in farmland landscapes is far too little to safeguard pollinators. Instead, the evidence points to a need for somewhere between 16% and 37% habitat cover, depending on the type of pollinator, if we are serious about halting declines. Suitable habitats include hedgerows, patches of woodland, species-rich grasslands, and flowering margins, and as a general rule, hoverflies need less of it whilst bumblebees and butterflies require more.

I was fortunate to play a part in this global assessment, contributing an unpublished dataset collected with my former PhD student, Sam Tarrant, who studied plant-pollinator interactions on restored landfill and established grassland sites. Seeing those data joined with dozens of other studies from around the world underlines something we have known for years: no single dataset, however carefully gathered, can give us the whole picture. To really understand what is happening to biodiversity—and to design conservation solutions that work—we need these kinds of global, mega-author syntheses that draw together evidence from many landscapes, taxa, and approaches.

The message from this analysis is stark but hopeful. More habitat means more pollinators, across all groups. Richer habitats with abundant flowers give an additional boost, but the overriding priority must be to increase the sheer area of natural habitat in farmed landscapes. Small-scale fixes like wildflower strips offer short-term benefits, but without enough space they can’t deliver recovery at scale. Long-term, secure habitat creation—on the order of decades, not seasons—is what pollinators, farmers, and ecosystems need.

Although the policy debate in Europe provided the backdrop for this study, the lessons (and the data) are global. Wherever agriculture dominates, the health of pollinator populations—and by extension our food security and biodiversity—depends on our willingness to give these insects the space and quality of habitat they require.

Looking ahead, we need to think bigger and work together. That means more international collaborations, more sharing of data, and more commitment to long-term solutions that transcend borders. The image at the start of this post is from my trip back to China in July this year. I deliberately chose it because, as you’ll see from the map below which is taken from the paper, there was no suitable data available for the study from that country. Or from Africa. Or Australasia. Or from most of tropical South America. That shows that as pollination ecologists we need to coordinate more in advance on these types of syntheses, and maximise the value of the kinds of data that we collect. The main take away from this study, however, is that if we want to reverse the declines in biodiversity, scientists, policymakers, businesses, farmers, and citizens all have a role to play. Pollinators remind us that nature is interconnected and global—our conservation efforts must be, too.

Here’s the full reference with a link to the study:

Bishop, G.A., Kleijn, D., Albrecht, M., Bartomeus, I., Isaacs, R., Kremen, C., Magrach, A., Ponisio, L.C., Potts, S.G., Scheper, J., Smith, H.G., Tscharntke, T., Albrecht, J., Badenhausser, I., Åström, J., Báldi, A., Basu, P., Berggren, N., Beyer, N., Blüthgen, R., Bommarco, B.J., Brosi, H., Cohen, L.J., Cole, K.R., Denning, M., Devoto, J., Ekroos, F., Fornoff, B.L., Foster, M.A.K., Gillespie, J.L., Gonzalez-Andujar, J.P., González-Varo, J.P., Goulson, D., Grass, I., Hass, A.L., Herrera, J.M., Holzschuh, A., Hopfenmüller, S., Izquierdo, J., Jauker, B., Kallioniemi, E.P., Kirsch, F., Klein, A.-M., Kovács-Hostyánszki, A., Krauss, J., Krimmer, E., Kunin, B., Laha, S.A.M., Lindström, Y., Mandelik, G., Marcacci, D.I., McCracken, M., Monasterolo, L.A., Morandin, J., Morrison, S., Mudri Stojnic, J., Ollerton, J., Persson, A.S., Phillips, B.B., Piko, J.I., Power, E.F., Quinlan, G.M., Rundlöf, M., Raderschall, C.A., Riggi, L.G.A., Roberts, S.P.M., Roth, T., Senapathi, D., Stanley, D.A., Steffan-Dewenter, I., Stout, J.C., Sutter, L., Tanis, M.F., Tarrant, S., van Kolfschoten, L., Vanbergen, A.J., Vilà, M., von Königslöw, V., Vujic, A., WallisDeVries, M.F., Wen, A., Westphal, C., Wickens, J.B., Wickens, V.J., Wilkinson, N.I., Wood, T.J., Fijen, T.P.M. (2025) Critical habitat thresholds for effective pollinator conservation in agricultural landscapes. Science 389: 1314-1319

Here’s the abstract:

Biodiversity in human-dominated landscapes is declining, but evidence-based conservation targets to guide international policies for such landscapes are lacking. We present a framework for informing habitat conservation policies based on the enhancement of habitat quantity and quality and define thresholds of habitat quantity at which it becomes effective to also prioritize habitat quality. We applied this framework to insect pollinators, an important part 5 of agroecosystem biodiversity, by synthesizing 59 studies from 19 countries. Given low habitat quality, hoverflies had the lowest threshold at 6% semi-natural habitat cover, followed by solitary bees (16%), bumble bees (18%), and butterflies (37%). These figures represent minimum habitat thresholds in agricultural landscapes, but when habitat quantity is restricted, marked increases in quality are required to reach similar outcomes.

Surveying for Pollinators: join me for an online live webinar on 2nd October!

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On Thursday, October 2 at 6:30pm, I’m running an online webinar on the theme of Surveying for Pollinators. Follow that link for more details and to book a ticket.

Here’s an overview of what I’ll be covering:

Pollinators like bees, butterflies, hoverflies and even beetles play a vital role in keeping our ecosystems thriving. They help plants reproduce, support biodiversity, boost food production, and contribute billions to the global economy. Beyond their ecological importance, they’re also excellent indicators of environmental health — when pollinators are doing well, nature usually is too.

But how do we actually find out what’s happening with pollinators?

In this webinar, we’ll explore the fascinating world of pollinator surveys — from simple, hands-on methods anyone can try, to more advanced techniques used by experienced entomologists and ecologists. You’ll get an overview of popular approaches, including:

Flower-Insect Timed Counts – A quick and accessible method inspired by the UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme (PoMS).
Transect Walks – Great for spotting pollinators along a fixed route and comparing habitats.
Plant-focused sampling – for when you really want to delve deep into the pollinators of a species.
Trapping methods – including pan traps, vane traps, Malaise traps, and moth traps.
Camera Traps – A non-intrusive way to capture who’s visiting flowers when you’re not looking.

We’ll break down the pros and cons of each technique, which approaches are best suited to the question being asked, what to consider before starting your own survey, and how your efforts can feed into national monitoring schemes like PoMS, the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme, and BeeWalk.

Whether you’re a curious beginner, a budding citizen scientist, a research student, or a conservation professional, this session will give you the knowledge and tools to design a pollinator survey that fits your goals — and helps protect the buzz behind biodiversity.

The 90-minute event will consist of a 1-hour presentation followed by a Q&A with the tutor using questions provided by the live audience.

The presentations will be recorded and shared with those who booked, alongside Q&A transcripts and relevant links following the event via a password-protected website.

(Bee) Sex in the city: a new study shows how urban life skews pollinator populations

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Bees are among the most important pollinators in the natural world, quietly sustaining ecosystems and food production. While honeybees often steal the spotlight, a vast number of solitary and primitively eusocial bees play equally vital roles. But across both urban and natural landscapes, many of these species are facing worrying declines.

As cities expand, they’re increasingly being seen not just as threats to biodiversity, but as potential refuges for pollinators. Yet urban environments are very different from natural ones. The heat generated by buildings and concrete – known as the urban heat island effect – and the way green spaces are managed (often with little consideration for flowering plants) could be affecting bees in ways we’re only beginning to understand.

As part of a recent study led by my former PhD student Muzafar Sirohi, we explored how urban conditions might be influencing the timing of bee emergence and the sex ratios of different species. This work formed part of Muzafar’s PhD research, and I was pleased to be part of the team that supported and collaborated on the project.

We found that several solitary bee species were producing females before males – a reversal of the more typical pattern known as ‘protandry’, where males emerge first. Most bees in the families Apidae and Megachilidae did follow the usual male-first pattern, but there were some interesting exceptions, including Nomada marshamella and Nomada fabriciana. Soil-nesting species also showed a lot of variation in emergence timing, likely influenced by microclimatic differences in urban soils.

When we looked at overall sex ratios, patterns varied across bee families. In Halictidae, females were more common, whereas Apidae and Megachilidae were skewed towards males. Interestingly, the Colletidae family showed no strong bias either way. However, in five species from the Andrenidae and Halictidae families, we saw a clear difference between urban and natural environments: urban populations had a higher proportion of males.

This could suggest that urban habitats – especially those with limited floral resources due to mowing, paving, or the removal of wild plants – may not be supporting as many female bees. Since females are the ones responsible for nest-building and potentially pollination, as they visit more flowers, this imbalance could have long-term effects on bee populations and the pollination services they provide.

Our study adds to the growing body of evidence that urban environments can support pollinators – but only if managed thoughtfully. Cities need more than just green space: they need flowering plants, nesting habitats, and careful planning that recognises the delicate balance of bee ecology. With the right actions, we can make urban areas part of the solution to pollinator decline.

Here’s the reference with a link to the study:

Sirohi, M.H., Jackson, J. & Ollerton, J. (2025) Sex ratios and sex-biased emergence of solitary and primitively eusocial bees in urban settings and nature conservation areas. Ethology Ecology & Evolution (in press)

Here’s the abstract:

Solitary and primitively eusocial bees are essential pollinators of plants. However, recent observations indicate a decline in their populations in both urban and natural environments. Urban areas are increasingly recognized as potential habitats for bee conservation. Nonetheless, these urban habitats can influence the taxonomic and functional diversity of bee populations. Therefore, we hypothesize that the distinctive warmer climate of urban areas – resulting from the urban heat island effect – along with the potential scarcity of floral resources, contributes to shifts in emergence patterns and the sex ratio of solitary and primitively eusocial bees. We found that many solitary bee species produced females before males. Additionally, most species within the Apidae family were recorded as protandrous, with the exceptions of Nomada marshamella and Nomada fabriciana. All species of Megachilidae were found to be protandrous. We also observed significant variation in the emergence patterns of soil-nesting species. Notably, we did not find any relationship between sociality and nesting preferences in relation to sex-biased emergence. The overall sex ratio varied among different bee species and families. In Halictidae family, sex ratios were biased towards females, while the Apidae and Megachilidae families exhibited a skewed ratio towards males. The sex ratio in the Colletidae family did not show any significant difference. However, among the Andrenidae and Halictidae families, we identified five species with significantly different sex ratios between urban and nature areas, with a higher proportion of males observed in urban sites. This suggests that these species may have been affected by limited food resources, potentially due to urban management practices such as the removal of floral resources. This could lead to increased competition for resources among the species.

A new study shows how garden flowers keep city pollinators flying all year round

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When we think of cities, gardens might not be the first thing that comes to mind. But these green patches — whether in private yards, parks, or balconies — play a surprisingly important role in supporting urban wildlife. Among their most crucial guests? Pollinators like bees, butterflies, and even birds and bats.

In a new study just published, I teamed up with some Brazilian colleagues to explore how the different features of garden flowers help sustain pollinators throughout the year in a subtropical urban garden. While we’ve long known that garden flowers provide food for pollinators, what’s less clear is how specific floral traits — like shape, flowering time, and type of nectar or pollen — influence who visits which plants and when.

To get a clearer picture, we conducted weekly surveys of pollinators visiting garden flowers over the course of a year. We paid close attention to traits such as the depth of flower, the kind of resources offered (nectar vs. pollen), how closely related different plants were, and when they flowered.

What we found was striking: the network of interactions between flowers and pollinators was highly organized. Plants grouped into clusters, or “modules,” that tended to share similar physical traits and evolutionary histories — but interestingly, not the same flowering times. This meant that within each module, different plants flowered at different times of year, effectively staggering their blooms so that there was always something on offer for pollinators.

Even more intriguing was the discovery that most plants had just a few connections in the network, usually restricted to a single module. These “peripheral” plants accounted for over 85% of all pollinator visits. Meanwhile, a few special species acted as bridges between modules — their role in linking different parts of the network made them key to its stability. These connector species didn’t flower at the same time, which helped to maintain a steady supply of food for pollinators across seasons.

Not all interactions between plants and pollinators are “legitimate” in the sense of leading to pollination. Some animals visit flowers just for the food, without helping with reproduction. But our study found that these interactions still played a valuable role in supporting a diverse pollinator community.

So what does all this mean for urban gardeners and city planners?

First, it highlights how important it is to plant a variety of flowers that bloom at different times of year. Second, it shows that even seemingly minor plants or interactions can contribute to the ecological resilience of urban green spaces. And finally, it underscores that thoughtful planting — considering things like flower shape, blooming schedules, and diversity — can help keep pollinators thriving, even in the heart of the city.

Urban gardens aren’t just pretty — they’re powerful allies in the fight to support biodiversity.

The study was led by Brazilian research student Luis de Sousa Perugini. Here’s the reference with a link to the paper:

de Sousa Perugini, L.G., Jorge, L.R., Ollerton, J., Milaneze‑Gutierre, M.A. & Rech, A.R. (2025) High modularity of plant-pollinator interactions in an urban garden is driven by phenological continuity and flower morphology. Urban Ecosystems 28, 126

Here’s the abstract:

Garden flowers play a vital role in urban environments, supporting pollinator communities. Yet, the extent to which floral traits shape urban pollination networks remains poorly understood. This study investigated how garden plants shape year-round pollination networks, sampled in weekly surveys in an urban subtropical garden. We focused on the role of floral morphology (corolla depth), type of resource, relatedness, and phenology in the organization of interactions. We determined whether modularity and species roles were influenced by these floral traits, comparing if legitimate pollination, illegitimate (i.e. non-pollinating) interactions and all interactions had similar drivers. All networks were modular, and in the overall network plants within the same module were morphologically and phylogenetically similar while their phenology was significantly overdispersed throughout the year. Peripheral species, those with few interactions and restricted to a single module, dominated all networks, representing over 85% of interactions. We found that phenology was related to the species role of overall network connectors (species that connect modules) and legitimate module hubs (species that connect their own modules). Both showed no overlap in their flowering periods, providing floral resources at different times of the year. Each module functioned as a distinct unit, showing year-round availability of resources to support its pollinators. This suggests that resource continuity and trait-based filtering may shape pollinator assemblages influencing ecological resilience in urban habitats. Even interactions that do not contribute to plant reproduction can sustain a diverse fauna, highlighting the importance of these interactions in urban green space planning and management.

Have we passed “peak honey bee” in Britain? An update of hive numbers for World Bee Day 2025

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Since publishing what I believe are the most comprehensive data on the number of honey bee hives in Britain in my book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society, I’ve posted occasional updates on my blog as more recent data become available. I believe that the last of these was in 2022 – see Have honey bees declined in Britain? An update of the numbers – so it feels like it’s time for another. And what’s more appropriate than to post this on World Bee Day 2025?!

Rather than the complex, multi-coloured graph that I’ve produced in the past, I’ve decided to streamline the presentation and simply fit a smoothed LOESS line with a 95% confidence ribbon to the (sometimes contradictory) data points, in order to show the overall trend (see the graph above). If you compare it with the 2022 update you’ll see that the general message from the data is the same: a peak in numbers of hives in the late 1940s (which may or may not be an artefact*), then a steep decline into the 1970s and 1980s, followed by recovery from the 1990s onwards. Note that I’ve removed the two very early data points because I don’t think that they are at all accurate.

The most recent data (2015 to 2024) come from the National Bee Unit which relies on beekeepers to submit their own records, but are probably no less accurate than some of the other data that’s available! If we take a close look at that time period we see something interesting – honey bee hive numbers are decreasing:

What are we to make of this? In an analogy with peak oil, why do we seem to have passed ‘peak honey bee’? If this is a real pattern (and only time will tell) I suspect that it’s because of at least two factors. The first is that interest in beekeeping reached a peak in the early 2020s, after which some initial enthusiasts discovered that beekeeping is actually quite a technical and demanding hobby, and gave it up. The second factor is that word has spread that , globally, managed Western honey bees are not declining, and too many bee hives in an area can have negative impacts on other, wild pollinators. This may have impacted those people who were persuaded by “Save the Bee” campaigns to take up the hobby, to give up beekeeping.

There could well be other reasons that I’ve not considered and, as always, I’d be interested in your thoughts – please leave a comment below. I’ll finish by saying that I make no judgement on this. There’s no doubt that there are too many hives in some parts of Britain, especially in London, and if the trend I describe reduces the pressures on wild pollinators, that’s a good thing. At the same time, honey bees are important agricultural pollinators in some circumstances, especially where there’s mass-flowering crops that require huge numbers of pollinating bees to be available over a short time period. And I like honey as much as the next person.

Happy World Bee Day to my readers!

*There’s a long-standing suggestion that beekeepers in the post-war years inflated the number of hives that they kept in order to obtain a larger sugar ration.

Mindful Mow May!

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As April comes to a close, many people with gardens will be considering having a No Mow May in which, to quote Plantlife, you ‘pack away the lawnmower, let wildflowers grow freely and help nature’. On the face of it this is a positive thing and (hopefully) it gets people thinking a bit more about the impact of gardening practices on wildlife. However, I do worry that its message is too simplistic, as I’ll explain in the rest of this post. Let me say at the outset that I’m using the word ‘mindful’ in its sense of ‘paying attention to’, rather than in relation to mental health mindfulness. Though there are certainly connections between lawns and both meanings of this word, for example mindfully watching pollinators in your garden.

I’ve previously written about the garden that Karin and I developed in Northampton, including a ‘defence’ of its lawn. During the lockdown spring and summer of 2020, when I coordinated a loose consortium of scientists to collect standardised data on the flowers and pollinators in their own garden, our lawn was one of the areas that I surveyed. In that year, as every year, we had no intention of not mowing the lawn, but of mowing it in a mindful way that left some flowering patches of the main nectar sources: Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale), White Clover (Trifolium repens), and Daisy (Bellis perennis). It also allowed a patch of Common Ragwort (Jacobaea vulgaris), and the Cinnabar Moths (Tyria jacobaeae) that depend on it, to come back year after year.

In the graph below you can see the nectar production of dandelions, clovers and daisies over the course of the late spring to late summer. For each species, I have multiplied the number of flower heads I counted by the average amount of nectar sugar per flower head from the data collected by the Agriland project. Clover produces 48.97 micrograms of sugar per day, by far the highest amount of the three. Daisy produces the least, just 0.84 micrograms, and dandelion is in the middle with 22.57 micrograms.

Because these species vary in their peak flowering, there’s a continuous supply of nectar in the lawn over this time period and mowing does impact the immediate availability of nectar. Using green shading, I’ve marked the two days when I know for certain the lawn was mown and you can see that there’s an immediate drop in the nectar. Here you can also seen that both dandelions and daisies re-flower quite soon afterwards – it’s not a permanent effect by any means. The same is probably true of clover later in the season, but unfortunately I didn’t record the exact mowing dates.

The important thing to appreciate here is that without mowing, these three species would probably disappear from the lawn because all require that grasses are suppressed in order for them to flourish. Not only that, but most ground-nesting bee species need either very short turf or bare soil in which to nest. And most bees, at least in the UK, are ground-nesting.

The image at the top of this post is from my book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society, and it shows two views of the same grassy, south-facing bank in Kettering, Northamptonshire. I included it because it’s a nice example of the mindful approach to lawn mowing that I am describing: bees are able to nest in the low-cut turf and collect the nectar and pollen from the flowers in the unmown areas. Later in the season that unmown area will be cut. This is referred to as ‘matrix mowing’, which is to say that by cutting some areas and leaving others, you create a matrix of different lawn lengths that has a greater overall benefit than is obtained by either cutting everything at the same time or cutting nothing for a whole month. It’s even better if you have the space to leave some patches unmown for a year or two. That way you create longer grassy areas in which insects can over winter and some bumblebees can nest.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that I know of only one published study that’s assessed the impact on No Mow May on pollinators, and that study was retracted shortly after it appeared. If I’ve missed other studies please do let me know in the comments.

I’ll finish with the Royal Horticultural Society, which was in the news recently with an announcement that it’s collaborated with gardener Monty Don to come up with ‘hard-wearing flower lawn that is good for pollinators, dogs and people’. This is hardly rocket surgery, it’s the sort of diverse, low-input, low maintenance lawn that many of us have been advocating for years, but if it brings these ideas to popular attention, so much the better.

So, consider engaging in Mindful Mow May (and April, and June, and all the other months!) As always, feel free to comment below or get in touch with me via my Contact page.

Project ‘Butterfly’ takes flight in Paris!

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At the end of last week I joined researchers from across Europe and beyond who gathered at Norway House on the campus of the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, for the official launch of the EU-funded project ‘Butterfly’. This bold, four-year interdisciplinary initiative is focused on the future of pollinators and the ecosystems that depend on them, and is one of a series of projects that have spun out from the EU’s Pollinators Initiative.

Over two days of lively discussion, the project’s key themes came into focus: the urgent need to restore pollinator populations, the value of integrating ecological and economic data, and the importance of including people—farmers, citizens, policymakers—in shaping practical, long-term solutions to pollinator decline.

Connecting Science and Policy

I arrived in Paris early Wednesday evening to be fresh for the meeting’s opening session the following morning. This set the stage by grounding the project in real-world policy contexts, including the EU Pollinators Initiative and the Nature Restoration Law. These frameworks are increasingly recognising the vital role pollinators play not just in nature, but in the economy and public well-being.

Nine Work Packages, One Mission

Participants got a crash course in the project’s structure through short presentations from each of the nine work packages. These range from ecological modelling and ecosystem valuation to resilience thinking, communication tools, and understanding human relationships with pollinators. A strong emphasis was placed on collaboration—how each work package connects with the others and contributes to the project’s broader vision. For example, one of my roles will be to work closely with Maria Clara Castellanos and her team at the University of Sussex on the integration of the UK-focused Database of Pollinator Interactions (DoPI) and the Global Biotic Interactions (GloBI) platform, to create an online European Atlas of Plant-Pollinator Associations (EuroAPPA). This in turn will feed plant-pollinator data into the modelling and economic valuation tasks in some of the other work packages.

Living Labs and Global Perspectives

One of the most exciting aspects of the Butterfly project is the network of “Living Labs” being established across Europe and the test sites in overseas territories. From Murcia to Martinique, each site represents a unique ecological and cultural landscape with its own pollination challenges. These test sites, some of which are shared with a parallel project called RestPoll, will serve as experimental spaces to co-develop and test strategies for enhancing pollinator resilience in real-world contexts. Another of my roles in the project is to help with the field work on the Caribbean island of Curaçao, where we will be assessing birds and bats as pollinators, as well as insects.

Thematic Sessions and Cross-Pollination

The meeting featured targeted discussion sessions on everything from economic modelling chains and ecosystem indicators to human dimensions like eco-literacy, historical agency, and “slow hope.” Again, one of my contributions will be to the work package dedicated to understanding and reacting to the human dimensions of pollinator decline, where I hope to provide a case study that builds on the work I published almost a decade ago on how the auction prices of holly and mistletoe are a reflection of the work of wild pollinators. In the evening we had a “cross-pollination” networking buffet dinner, themed around pollinator-dependent food crops, that provided an opportunity for participants to mix across disciplines, brainstorm, and spark new collaborations in an informal setting.

Laying the Groundwork for Action

Day two shifted toward practicalities—data sharing, financial management, ethics, and stakeholder engagement—as well as discussions about how Butterfly will connect with other major EU-funded projects, including VALOR, which is Butterfly’s partner and with which we will closely collaborate. Thematic sessions continued to dive deep into topics like mainstreaming pollinator stewardship and developing indicators to track the societal impacts of pollinator loss.

Looking Ahead

The meeting wrapped up with a plenary session with the project’s Advisory Board, reinforcing the importance of external perspectives in guiding the project’s evolution. Dinner that evening was an informal affair (not funded by the project!) at a really wonderful, traditionally French restaurant – Le Temps des Cerises – where service was slow, the food and wine were delicious, and the conversations continued to flow.

For those of us who stayed an extra day, a field visit on Saturday offered a first-hand look at urban pollinator research at the Jardin Écologique within the Jardin des Plantes—a fitting reminder of why this work matters! Here’s some photographs from that trip:

My sincere thanks to all of the colleagues who made the Butterfly kick-off meeting such a success: I look forward to working with you all over the next four years! Particular thanks to Paolo Biella who allowed me to use the photo at the top of the post, of a female mason bee outside our venue. We kept an eye on her during the meeting and I’m pleased to report that she successfully sealed up her nest. May her offspring thrive!

If you’d like to delve deeper into Butterfly’s objectives, here’s the project summary from our funding application:

Butterfly aims to significantly enhance society’s capacity to appraise, foresee, and respond to the threats posed by cascading impacts of pollinator decline. To reach that goal it will establish a test system of geographically well spread multi-actor communities across sectors for co-creating proactive pollinator restoration solutions and: (1) collect, integrate, manage and share ecological and spatial information on a wide range of known and lesser known pollinators and pollination services provided for wild and cultivated plants, across Europe and selected overseas territories; (2) advance the monetary and non-monetary valuation of marketed and not marketed direct and indirect ecosystem functions and services provided by pollinators, and advance ecosystem accounting; (3) comprehensively model and quantify the macro-economic implications of pollinator decline and country-specific economic butterfly effects of dependencies on pollinators, and assess policy options and scenarios; (4) assess how five key biomass supply chains (food/micronutrients, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, biomaterials, biomass energy) depend on pollination and co-create pollinator restoration options that increase resilience of these supply chains; (5) devise, co-create, test and implement transferable tools, interactive atlases and guidelines that enable systematic mainstreaming of proactive pollinator stewardship in vulnerable sectors; (6) conceive indicators for human dimensions and assess and exploit the socio-cultural capacity of the concepts: ‘pollinator stewardship’, ‘ecoliteracy’, ‘historical agency’ and ‘slow hope’ in reversing pollinator decline. It will inform EU policy processes and build strategic alliances for high-level impact. The Butterfly network of Living Labs will accelerate knowledge transfer and uptake of new business models and serve as breeding place for multi-actor co-creation of knowledge and sustainable solutions, paving the way to pollinator stewardship in all sectors.