Category Archives: Bees

The strange and the familiar….. (back from) Brazil Diary 8

The first bird I identified when I arrived in Brazil on 1st November was a feral pigeon (Columba livia) foraging around the airport; the first bee I spotted, visiting flowers around FUNCAMP, was a honey bee (Apis mellifera). This tells you a lot about the widespread, near ubiquitous distribution of such species, which have been moved across much of the planet, accidentally and on purpose, by human activities. For someone who is deeply interested in biodiversity, seeing these species is both humdrum and interesting. Humdrum because they are so familiar, we see them everywhere we go, they are not exciting and exotic. Interesting because they tell us a lot about the effects that humans have on their environment, how we are altering it by the introduction of non-native species.

Away from the large cities I saw introduced species such as these less and less frequently, such is their association with humans. But of course there were also plenty of native Brazilian species that have become associated with human activities. Some of these had a familiarity about them which transcended the fact that they were species I’d never see in Britain. Black Vultures (Coragyps atratus) are the best example. I would frequently observe them perched on lamp posts in towns, scanning for food or squabbling amongst themselves, and also spotted a huge number feeding on the refuse being piled into a landfill site. Back home I associate this sort of behaviour with various species of gulls. Strange and familiar.

Back in Northampton I’ve been reflecting on my month-long visit to Brazil, catching up with colleagues, telling stories that get more impressive with each iteration. It’s been a packed couple of weeks and Brazil seems a long way away, not just geographically.

The Biodiversity Index did not win the Green Gown Award that it was short listed for, as I previously reported, but it did receive a Highly Commended citation. Green Gown have asked us to produce a video, so a few days after I returned home, and still with a bit of my brain in Brazil, I took part in a short recording session about the Biodiversity Index, which will be released shortly. The video is produced by Jo Burns and her company Amplitude Media. Jo is a graduate of the University of Northampton and this is a nice example of how the University is supporting former students as they develop their careers.

At the end of last week we also got the news that the Biodiversity Index has been shortlisted for a Guardian newspaper University Award in the sustainability category. More recognition for the work we’ve done on that project, and we are very pleased! The result will be known early next year.

As of this week our paper on “How many plants are pollinated by animal?“, published in the journal Oikos in 2011, has notched up its 100th citation according to Web of Knowledge. The less conservative Google Scholar puts it at 164, so the true answer will be somewhere in between. Clearly peers think it’s a useful bit of work. And to think it was almost rejected by Oikos, saved only by an appeal. The idea for the paper arose when I was trying to find a solid figure in the literature for the proportion of plants that are biotically pollinated. Lots of figures were being bandied about, but once you follow the reference chain back through the papers that cite them you find that numbers which are cited as solid facts disappear into speculation and guestimates. Like many of the simple and obvious questions, the assumption is that we “know” the answer. That’s no basis for science-informed policy, but I suspect that it happens all too frequently.

Je ne egret rien

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Conservation does not mean the same as preservation, despite the popular synonymy of these two words. Preservation implies that something remains the same, is static and held in the same unchanging state. One can preserve an old book, or fruit, or traditions for instance. But one cannot preserve biodiversity because species change in abundance and distribution, regardless of the activities of humans. That’s just how nature is. One could take a deep time view of such change and consider the ancient habitats and organisms that built much of Britain’s underlying geology, as I mentioned when I described some walking on the Dorset coast a while back. But even over shorter time scales that are comprehendible to humans, biodiversity changes, by the day, the month and the year.

That’s where egrets, and the pitiful punning title of this post, come in. At the end of last week Karin and I spent a long weekend on the Suffolk coast, in the village of Walberswick. It’s an old stomping ground for Karin but I don’t really know this area very well at all. We spent our time talking and reconnecting, eating local food, drinking the good local Adnams beer, walking along the beaches, through saltmarsh and reed beds, and collecting stones and sea glass (I really like sea glass and have amassed bottles of the stuff over the years that we keep on sunny windowsills – think of it as aesthetic waste management). And we looked at birds as we encountered them in these rich, diverse habitats. Final total for the weekend was a respectable 37 species, including a few I couldn’t identify, helped along by a trip to the RSPB’s Minsmere Reserve (with, it seemed, every other birder in Suffolk; we had to queue to get into some hides).

Two of the species we saw were egrets, a common name that covers several genera in the heron family Ardeiedae. As the Wikipedia entry for egrets notes: “The distinction between a heron and an egret is rather vague, and depends more on appearance than biology”, as good an argument for the importance of scientific species names as any I’ve encountered.

The first of the two species I spotted was the Little Egret (Egretta garzetta), an elegantly roaming bird that actively hunts along river margins and through marshland and flooded fields. I was able to get within 10 metres or so of a bird at Walberswick and could admire its poised movements on vivid yellow feet, contrasting with black legs to make it look like a woman wearing footless stockings, as Karin put it (she took the photograph that accompanies this entry). The second species of egret was the Great White Egret (Ardea alba), a much taller bird than the first, and an ambush hunter; like the related Grey Heron its strategy is to stand still and wait until prey comes to it.

The earliest record of a Little Egret in Britain was almost 200 years ago, in East Yorkshire in 1826. However it is not known to have bred in this country until a pair did so in Dorset in 1996. In other words, just 20 years ago this was an uncommon bird in Britain whose rare arrival would have generated a flurry of local twitching. Now it hardly gets a mention on birding sites, we are so familiar with it. Not so the Great White Egret which still raises some excitement when it appears. Although this species was also recorded as early as 1821 in Britain, Great White Egrets only began to breed in Britain in 2012 and there is considerable anticipation that it will follow the Little Egret in expanding its population in this country.

We could add other birds to this list of species which have naturally colonised Britain within living memory, such as the almost ubiquitous Collared Dove (Streptopelia decaocto) as well as insects such as the Tree Bumblebee Bombus hypnorum and the Ivy Bee Colletes hederae. Others will undoubtedly follow in the future, and perhaps the Cattle Egret will be the next member of the heron family to take up permanent residence on our shores.

Of course the flip side of new arrivals such as these is extinction, a topic that I will return to at some point as we’re currently putting the finishing touches to what I hope will be an exciting new paper on British bee and wasp extinctions. Understanding the ebbs and flows of biodiversity over time requires data to be collected and we are fortunate in Britain to have a number of active monitoring schemes that regularly survey different groups of organisms. This activity is vital if we are to be able to monitor our wildlife and to take action if we see declines, though the most recent results for the Status of Priority Species index makes grim reading: the overall abundance of threatened species in the UK declined by 68% between 1970 and 2010. It’s a complex message, though, and there are some success stories within those statistics. But the animals that have fared worst have been the insects, particularly moths and some of the bees, wasps and ants.

Against this background of monitoring and decline I was happy to accept an invitation last week to attend a Defra-sponsored meeting at the Natural History Museum in London to discuss the setting up of an insect pollinator monitoring scheme. A group of about 50 scientists and conservationists discussed what such a scheme might look like and how it could be implemented. I’ll report back in more detail about this in the future once some decisions have been made as to how to proceed.

Meetings such as this, as well as being important in their own right, provide an opportunity to catch up with old friends and colleagues and discuss their latest work, or latest child/house move/job move, as appropriate. So it was good to have a couple of beers after the meeting and chat with a few people including Dave Goulson, arguably one of the most significant scientists working in British pollinator conservation, and an outspoken critic of the current use of neonicotinoid pesticides. Dave founded the Bumblebee Conservation Trust and has produced a lot of the scientific literature on bumblebees as he describes with wit and passion in his recent book A Sting in the Tale. I’ve known Dave for over twenty years (we were PhD students together) so I was a little embarrassed to ask him to sign my copy of his book, but as a collector of signed editions I wasn’t going to let the opportunity slip. Dave mentioned that the book has been shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and I hope it wins: ok, I’m biased, and can read it in Dave’s own voice which adds enormously to the book. But it’s a great read for anyone interested in pollinators, or conservation, or just in the processes which turn a natural history obsessed kid into a professional scientist.

This will be my last blog entry from Britain for a month; on 31st October I fly out to Brazil to spend time with André Rodrigo Rech, running a short pollination biology course, speaking at the Brazilian Botanical Congress, and conducting field work. I’ll try to blog as I go along. In a happy coincidence the Great White Egret is depicted on the Brazilian five real banknote. I’ll look out for it.

Harvest of evidence

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The last entry I posted was premature in its prediction that autumn is here and for the past week we’ve enjoyed some bright, warm weather: an Indian Summer before autumn proper envelops us. Sunday afternoon was spent in the garden, digging up potatoes and planting the garlic we bought on the Isle if Wight. Neither of these crops requires pollinators, but others we’ve been harvesting this month do, including squashes, runner beans and greengages. The latter are from a mature tree that, when we took over the house in 2012, I assumed was a bog standard Victoria plum. The tree did not crop last year but has more than compensated this season with abundant deliciously sweet fruit.

All of this provides useful anecdotes for public lectures. Since appearing on Bees, Butterflies and Blooms I’ve regularly been asked to give talks to gardening societies and I try not to refuse because they are usually fun with attentive, knowledgeable audiences. At one such event earlier this year I was asked: “Is there any evidence that declining pollinators are resulting in lower crop yields in Britain?” It’s a great question that goes to the heart of evidence-based conservation and the notion that science should be informing such policies as strategies to conserve biodiversity.

As far as I’m aware there is no indication that British insect pollinated crop yields have declined. And if the evidence of our greengages, runner beans and squashes is anything to go by, there’s currently plenty of wild bees, hoverflies and other insects (we get few honeybees in this garden) to service those food plants that require their pollinating activities. But that doesn’t mean we should be complacent and monitoring is required, because the evidence from other countries is that yields are down for insect pollinated crops and hand pollination is required in some places.

Evidence should inform everything that we do and believe as scientists, gardeners, informed members of the public, whatever label we choose for ourselves. This is especially true of currently controversial issue such as the causes of global climate change or the effects of neonicotinoid pesticides on pollinator health (see Dave Goulson’s slides from a recent conference talk, for example). But we should also understand that a basic tenet of science is that it can never “prove” anything: new evidence may appear at any time that refutes our cherished notions, or disproves that pet hypothesis. We make decisions on weight of evidence not on proof. So it was depressing to read a widely publicised article about a Nigerian postgraduate student’s claims that he has “proved” that homosexual relationships are “unnatural” because only the opposite poles of magnets are attractive to one another, the same chemical compounds do not react together, and roosters only love hens. At first I thought it was a spoof but it appears that the research student is perfectly serious and, more, has been tipped to win a Nobel Prize by his equally deluded supervisors.

It’s easy to scorn the guy’s findings and point out that people aren’t magnets or simple chemical compounds and that homosexual activity is widespread in the animal world (so how do we define “unnatural”?) But Karin, as always, had a deeper and more nuanced view of this story than did I. Perhaps it’s her training in psychotherapy but whatever the reason, she gave an alternative perspective and pointed out a sad possibility. Karin suspects that the student has been manipulated by academic and political powers that have a vested interest in such “proof” because of threatened sanctions on aid. Under this scenario the student has been encouraged by the academics at the university to pursue this misguided work, which can only support the Nigerian government’s anti-gay stance. Of course the research will never be published by any reputable scientific journal and the story has harmed the University of Lagos’s international reputation. But for the narrow minded and biblically fundamentalist, the story itself will be evidence enough to shore up their own prejudices. One person’s crackpot claims is another’s decisive evidence.

Any friend of coffee is a friend of mine

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As I begin to write this post rain is pattering against the windows with increasing frequency and a brisk wind stirs the browning horse chestnut leaves that overhang the garden from a neighbouring property. Autumn is here. It’s a chilly Sunday morning and beside me is a large cup of good coffee, hot, black, and bitter, warming and stimulating in equal measure. It’s our first Sunday at home for a fortnight as last weekend was taken up by a speaking engagement in Hereford at a large bee keeping convention where coffee featured highly, as I’ll explain.

The Hereford convention wasn’t the kind of academic research conference that I’d normally attend, but I thought it would be fun to go with Karin, and I’d learn more about bee keeping (both proved to be true). For this broad audience of amateur and professional bee keepers I presented a version of my professorial inaugural lecture from earlier this year entitled “How many bees does it take to wake up in the morning? The importance of biotic pollination in a changing world”. It’s a title with multiple layers of meaning, referring to bees as ecosystem service providers, my enjoyment of my work which gets me out of bed every day, and the energising effects of a strong cup of fresh coffee first thing.

As part of that lecture I present some back-of-the-envelope calculations that are meant to put coffee production into a biodiversity perspective, rather than being a rigorous analysis, but which are nonetheless worth considering. They go like this.

Global coffee consumption in 2010 (the most recent year for which I could find figures) amounted to 93 million export bags, each weighing on average 60kg (there are larger and smaller bags used in different parts of the world, so we’ll use this figure). The export value of this crop was estimated at US$15 billion for the (largely tropical) countries that produced it. That’s the value before it’s processed and sold, which is much more difficult to calculate, though coffee retailing is clearly big business. For example, Starbucks’ total revenue for the same year was US$10.7 billion and it supports over 150,000 full time employees. So it’s lucky for us that it pays its taxes.

Although coffee is partly self pollinating, it relies on insect pollination to produce large crops, mainly involving bees of various types. I tracked down a number of studies by researchers such as Alexandra-Maria Klein and Taylor Ricketts which showed that managed honey bees are responsible for anywhere between zero and over 90% of flower visits, depending on the diversity and abundance of local wild bees (over 40 species of which are known to pollinate coffee in Costa Rica alone). At this point I throw out a question to the audience: how well do we understand this globally important agricultural ecosystem service? Do we have any idea of how many individual insects are required to support this industry? Some more calculations:

Each coffee bean is the product of a single fertilisation event following the deposition of at least one pollen grain on a flower’s stigma. The mean weight of a single coffee bean is 0.103g (I weighed a sample in preparation for the lecture) which means there are approximately 582,524 beans in a 60kg bag. Total number of coffee beans produced in 2010 is therefore 93 million bags multiplied by 582,524 beans per bag, which equals 54,174,757,281,553. In words, that’s more than 54 trillion coffee beans. As coffee is 50% self pollinating we can half that figure: coffee production requires at least 27,087,378,640,777 (over 27 trillion) pollinator visits.

But here I confess to the audience that it’s impossible to go further and answer the questions I posed above: we really have no idea how many bees are supporting the coffee industry. The problem is that there are big gaps in our knowledge of some basic aspects of the natural history of these bees and their interactions with coffee flowers. For example, how many flowers does an individual bee visit in its lifetime? How effective are different bees at pollinating the flowers? What is the minimum population size for these bees, below which they would go locally extinct? All that we can say with certainty is that the global coffee industry (and the individual productivity of many workers) is supported by a LOT of bees. Many billions is my best guestimate. Perhaps we don’t need to know the number: perhaps it’s enough to know that if we provide sufficient good quality habitat for these bees, they will provide the service. But at least it illustrates our reliance on these insects and is something to consider when you’re enjoying the first cup of the day.

Bees are not the only animals that we have to thank for coffee production as a recently published study has shown: birds in Costa Rica help to reduce the impact of an important pest of coffee. As Jana Vamosi, from whom I shamelessly stole the title of this posting, commented when I posted this link on Facebook: any friend of coffee is a friend of mine!

Garlicky archipelago

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“Garlicky” is a great word, redolent of hot, pungent flavour and nose-filling odour: a Pavlovian word that ignites the senses as it’s uttered. Perhaps I love the word because garlic is one of my favourite vegetables, a pleasure to both eat and grow. A Garlic Festival is therefore not to be missed, and my family and I had the opportunity to attend one on the Isle of Wight during a short holiday a couple of weeks ago. We were joined by university friends I’ve referred to previously, as the first one of us to reach a half century celebrated his 50th birthday. There was more to the festival than just garlic, but for me its highlight was seeing the sheer variety of different garlic types that can be grown, testament to how this vegetable has been modified from its ancient wild origins in central Asia. Karin and I bought seed bulbs of four different varieties as additions to the horticultural biodiversity of our vegetable plot, to be planted later in September. These included the notable Elephant Garlic with its massive individual cloves, which, I’ve just learned while researching that link, is not a true garlic at all but rather a variety of leek. We live and learn!

Archipelago is another great word and the time we spent on the Isle of Wight, travelling over by ferry from Southampton, served to remind me that the British Isles, with over six thousand islands of various sizes, is by any standards a significant archipelago. Since at least the explorations of Alexander von Humbloldt, island groups have been known to host unique species, isolated taxonomically and physically from their closest continental relatives. Darwin’s later researches showed that archipelagos such as the Galapagos Islands are important as natural evolutionary laboratories, and in previous posts I’ve briefly discussed his unrequited desire to visit to the Canary Islands. The Isle of Wight is too close to the continent of Europe to have evolved any unique biodiversity but I did pick up the hint of a subtle Island Biogeographic Effect whilst compiling a list of all the bird species I saw over the course of the week. The list topped out at about 30 species, which I thought was rather low. Some of the omissions surprised me (not a single blackbird, for instance) and I saw very few individuals of some other common British species. Now, it could be due to my lousy birding skills I suppose, but it could also be due to the fact that we were on an island, even though it’s less than 1500m across The Solent to the mainland at its closest point. This is close enough for bumblebees to fly to the island: I’ve seen them shadowing the ferry. But nonetheless it might be far enough to affect both the diversity and population sizes of the bird life. Enough wild speculation; I’d be interested to know what serious ornithologists who actually know something about the subject make of this.

As I finish writing this post I’m on the other great island of my home archipelago, sitting in a bar in Terminal 2 of Dublin Airport. I’ve been working at University College Dublin as external examiner for their MSc Applied Environmental Science course. It’s been a fun couple of days reading theses and interviewing chatty, engaged students, which began with a dawn alarm yesterday in order to get to the train station and then Birmingham International in time for a 0850 flight. Whilst waiting for my taxi I popped into the garden and paused to enjoy the early morning stillness before opening up the chicken coop. A large flock of black-headed gulls passed low above me, backlit by a thin sliver of moon and silent except for the shuffle of feathers. From the direction they were travelling I think they were heading from a roost on Pitsford Water and on to destinations unknown. The garden was also busy with early risen blackbirds and a couple of flitting bats, whilst a little later my taxi passed a rangy fox idly trotting through low mist on the Racecourse park. It was urban biodiversity at its most sublime.

All this talk of Northampton is making me feel homesick to be back with the family (Karin, kids, cats and chickens) and start planting garlic. But there’s just time for another Guinness before my gate opens. Sláinte!

In defence of lawns UPDATED

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Over at the Small Pond Science blog, Terry McGlynn has a thought provoking post which asks ‘Are trees the lawns of the future?‘. I won’t rehash Terry’s arguments, you can read it yourself, but I was intrigued by his stereotyping of lawns as always bad. As a keen amateur gardener and a professional with research students who have worked on garden biodiversity projects, I’d have to say that there’s lawns and there’s lawns: it all depends on how they are managed and what the purpose is of a particular lawn. Clearly there’s a continuum from high diversity, natural “lawns” (i.e. close-cropped grassland which can support significant biodiversity such as some chalk grassland and African savannah lawns) through to the high resource input, monoculture, perfectly presented lawns seen on golf courses and around important buildings. In the part of the continuum that Terry’s railing against, typical urban and suburban householder’s lawns and everything below that in terms of “naturalness”, it’s possible to manage lawns in a low-input way that is both productive and can support biodiversity.

In the house that Karin and I moved into about 18 months ago, the garden was almost wholly laid to lawn; the picture at the top shows you what it was like in early 2012. Since then we’ve dug flower borders, a vegetable patch and planted fruit trees, but kept about 50% lawn (though this will reduce as we widen borders). We don’t water or fertilise the lawn, just keep it regularly mown. I’ve not assessed it systematically but I’d estimate that, in addition to the grasses (some native, some not) there’s another 10 to 15 native plants growing in it, plus fungi which pop up every now and then. The plants include taxa which are popular nectar sources for bumble bees and solitary bees, e.g. clovers, dandelions, etc. These flower even though we mow regularly, and of course these bees pollinate our squashes, courgettes, apples, plums, etc. The local blackbirds and starlings also find food on the lawn.

I mentioned that the lawn is “productive” and that’s where the grass cuttings come in. They are either put into the compost heap, fed to our chickens, or added directly to the vegetable patch as a mulch. It’s also possible that the clover, which is a nitrogen fixing legume, is adding to the soil fertility that can be accessed by the far-reaching roots of the fruit trees. Would be an interesting hypothesis to test.

So I think it’s possible to have a lawn that adds to local biodiversity and is productive for the gardener, but I accept that we may be unusual in that regard. It’s not the kind of lawn that would make a grass obsessive proud; but that type, as Terry notes, needs a lot of input of resources, not least time.

UPDATE – a few people have asked to see a picture of how the garden looks now, so below is more or less the same shot but taken today (15th August 2013) by Karin. Comparing a British garden in February and August is clearly unfair! But hopefully you can see that we’ve done quite a bit of work to it, though as with all gardens it’s a work in progress.

A (Green) Apple for teacher – The Biodiversity Index wins an award!

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At a small ceremony attended by businesses and local authorities on Friday, the team who developed the Biodiversity Index received a Green Apple Gold Award from The Green Organisation. I proudly accepted the award on behalf of everyone and made a short speech which, in the spirit of my “reduce, reuse, recycle” policy, I’m posting here. Thanks to Bobbie Lane for the photo, Richard Moore for help with the speech, and Gareth Thomas for the notion of biodiversity as the “fourth resource”.

Ladies and gentlemen.

In June 2011 the UK National Ecosystem Assessment reported to Government that the value of the natural environment to the British economy was at least £30 billion per year in terms of the ecosystem services it provides, such as carbon storage, soil fertility, tourism and pollination.

In contrast, earlier this year the State of Nature Report by 25 of the UK’s leading wildlife organisations, suggested that 60% of animal and plant species for which we have data have declined in the past 50 years. To add to this, some recent work by my research group at the University of Northampton has shown that 23 species of pollinating bees and wasps have gone extinct in Britain since the late 19^th century.

Clearly there’s a contradiction here: at a time when we value biodiversity more than ever, it is declining at an ever-faster rate. So what can we do about this situation? How can individuals and organisations help to reverse this trend? This is one of the aims of the Biodiversity Index.

Energy, water and waste are typically the main resources actively managed by businesses and organisations, but there is growing interest in understanding and managing biodiversity as a fourth resource that is critical for society as a whole. In contrast to some of the other speakers you have heard today, the Biodiversity Index is not going to make you money. In fact, if you are in the commercial sector, it will cost you a small amount of cash to join. But the broader benefits of staff engagement with wildlife conservation, and the positive effect this will have on our country as a whole, are priceless.

The Biodiversity Index is an interactive web-based tool, developed by the University of Northampton and believed to be the first of its kind anywhere in the world. It enables organisations with little or no knowledge of biodiversity to undertake a rapid but scientific assessment of the level of plant diversity on their site and suggests ways to improve each habitat.

The Index widens access to the knowledge and tools required to make a start in improving the management of biodiversity on urban sites, with the potential to assist schools and colleges, universities, hospitals, local authorities, SMEs and larger businesses to improve the environment in which we work and live.

The tool was developed as part of the SEED Project and was launched at the Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges annual conference in April 2013. To date the Biodiversity Index has been used by over 30 UK universities and endorsed by several companies including Ricoh UK Ltd, a Global 100 sustainability company.

On behalf of the team that developed the Biodiversity Index I am delighted to accept this Green Apple Gold Award as an acknowledgment of the innovative work undertaken in this collaboration between the School of Science and Technology and the Department of Infrastructure Services at the University of Northampton.

Thank you.

Are honey bees native to Britain? And does it matter?

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It’s no secret that I’ve become frustrated over recent years by the general confusion in the media between the concerns relating to honey bee health (which are largely veterinary/husbandry problems, though pesticides may also play a role) and declines in wild pollinators, which are a wildlife conservation issue mainly due to habitat destruction, though again pesticides are probably having an impact.

That frustration came to a head last year when colleagues and I published a short letter in the influential journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution that was prompted by a throwaway remark in an earlier article stating that honey bees “are essential pollinators for the maintenance of natural biodiversity” No they are not. And you can read for yourself why we responded to that article if you follow the link above.

In a recent posting on the Adventuresinbeeland blog, Emily Heath discussed her attendance at a recent British Library event about pollinators and pesticides. I commented on the blog and in passing mentioned honey bees as being “not native” to which one respondent demurred and wrote: “I thought honey bees ARE native to Britain, although they have been bred with various breeds ……. Apis mellifera mellifera is a British native, isn’t it?”. I’ll paraphrase my response here:

The only study that I’m aware of that has addressed this question is Norman Carreck’s paper from 2008 – you can download a PDF of that article here. Norman is convinced that Apis mellifera mellifera is native to Britain but, as I interpret it, the evidence he presents is circumstantial and the earliest archaeological remains of honey bees are all associated with human settlements. Even if honey bees were originally native to Britain, the present situation, in which honey bees have been selectively bred and hybridised, is akin to using Tamworth pigs as evidence that wild boar are native.

However for me the most compelling evidence that honey bees are not native is ecological: despite their generalist nature and ability to form large colonies when managed, out in the wider countryside of Britain honey bees do not do particularly well. “Wild” honey bees are never very abundant (compared with some bumblebee species, for instance) and feral colonies in natural settings are few and far between.

This prompted a to-and-fro discussion with Emily that you can read for yourself.

Are honey bees native to Britain? The jury is out but the balance of evidence as I see it is pointing to them being a human introduction. Does it matter? In many respects, no. Honey bees are (like any other agricultural animal) a utilitarian species that provides us with a range of benefits. But in one respect it DOES matter – and that is in relation to how we formulate and put in place strategies to reverse the decline of wild pollinators such as bumblebees, hoverflies and butterflies. If honey bees become the central focus of such strategies (and funding), due to confusion in the minds of the public, MPs, policy makers, businesses, the media and other influential bodies, then wild pollinators would lose out. In my opinion that would be a great mistake. I’d be interested to know what other people think.

A coiled Spring

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April, according to T.S. Elliot, “is the cruellest month”. Not sure about that, though April 2013 proved to be both frustrating (as we in northern Europe waited for Spring to arrive) and busy, as I tried to pack in a whole set of activities. That’s my only excuse for not updating my blog, so the aim of this post is to catch up with biodiversity-related activities and observations over the past few weeks.

Just as iconic decades begin part-way through a given ten year period (the 60s didn’t really kick off until about 1963, for instance) so April for me actually began at the end of March. In the last week of that month I completed my formal teaching for the term and celebrated the first anniversary of the Nene Valley Nature Improvement Project. I also picked up my daughter Ellen from Heathrow Airport, on a two week visit back from working in China. On the way I counted over 20 red kites flying near the M40 motorway – what an incredible success story their re-introduction has been!

One of the reasons Ellen had come back was that I was due to give my inaugural professorial lecture, entitled “How many bees does it take to wake up in the morning? The importance of biotic pollination in a changing world”. Another reason was to to celebrate my eldest son Patrick’s 18th birthday the following day. Both once in a lifetime events and both had family at their heart. It was a great week.

Some leave time followed, much needed after what seemed like an endless 12 week university term, during which I hoped to plant potatoes and do some other work in the garden. But Spring refused to uncoil. The northerly winds brought cold weather that froze all vernal activity in the act. Flower and leaf buds were there waiting to unfurl; insects would occasionally appear then just as quickly disappear; and birds clearly wanted to get on with the important activities of raising young. But all was delayed. One could sense the tension, the build up of seasonal energy, biology waiting to happen.

A talk at Earlsdon Gardening Club near Coventry on Monday 8th April was well received and took my mind off the organisation of the biennial Bumblebee Working Group meeting on the 11th. This semi-formal get together of scientists, NGOs, and other Bombus-minded individuals, shifts between venues every two years. At the last meeting in 2011 I volunteered to host the next event and then put it out of my mind for 18 months. Organising a scientific meeting is always a bit of a mad panic as the day draws closer and one wonders if anyone will actually turn up. But as it turned out the event was well attended, with over 80 people listening to talks on diverse topics including the effects of neonicotinoid pesticides on bumblebee colonies; I’ve uploaded a copy of the programme.

Friday 12th April was a frantic dash around office and lab to get books, equipment and sundries organised for our annual undergraduate Tenerife Field Course, which was flying out on the following Sunday. A great time was had by all as we explored the biodiversity of Darwin’s Unrequited Isle and we came back with a wealth of great data plus not a little sunburn. No matter how often I tell students that they really need to wear a hat and use sun block, some will never listen.

Arriving from Tenerife early on Monday 22nd, I slept for a few hours then was back at the university for the oral PhD examination of Hilary Erenler, whose work I have mentioned previously. These exams are always stressfull for both student and supervisors but in the event Hils performed wonderfully and passed with only minor amendments. A great result! Now looking forward to publishing some papers from that work.

April ended, and May began, with a change in the weather. Much warmer winds blew in from the south west and life suddenly erupted: pressure had been removed from the coiled Spring. Lots of pollinators appeared in our garden including: Anthophora plumipes, one of my favourites for its glossy, black females and aggressively flower patrolling males; the relatively newly arrived Bombus hypnorum; the bee fly Bombylius major; and several different butterflies.

Clearly it’s time to plant those potatoes!

A (bird) book for bedtime (and a bit about bees besides)

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Biodiversity as it’s generally defined and conceived includes not only diversity of species and habitats, but also diversity within species, often (but not always) genetic in origin. Eddie Izzard’s new two-part television series Meet the Izzards neatly captures the idea of genetic diversity, and how it informs our understanding of the past evolution and prehistorical dispersal of a large, bipedal mammalian omnivore. “Cultural biodiversity” in Homo sapiens is less easy to define in this way as it has probably only a limited genetic component and is passed from individual to individual by copying and refining. Other species have “culture”, for example New Caledonian crows and chimpanzees, but human cultural diversity is more varied than that of any other species.

Take book reading as an example. Some individuals of our species never read. Others read only one book. Incessantly. And then argue about what it means with others who read the same book. Other individuals gorge on a book a day or snack on one a month, or manage on a starvation diet of one per year. I’m a two book nibbler. Normally I always have a novel and a volume of non-fiction on the go. The novel is for last thing at night when I need to turn off my mind and do some easy reading; a few pages then it’s time to sleep. Nibble, nibble. The non-fiction is for the morning, if I wake up early enough, or weekends if they are free; or train journeys. Still nibbling, but this time on more solid fare.

As with all cultural diversity, none of this is inflexible and at the moment I’m also reading a non-fiction book at night: Fighting for Birds: 25 years. in nature conservation by Mark Avery, former Conservation Director of the RSPB. Mark kindly came to give a talk at the university recently and brought copies of his book to sign and sell. It was a stimulating lecture and feedback from the students who attended was very positive. For those students who didn’t make it (and there were a lot) I have to ask: why are you paying thousands of pounds a year to not turn up to events that will inspire, educate and develop you? You had the chance of bending the ear of a very prominent British conservationist. At the very least you could have asked: “How do I get to do the job that you do?” You’re currently investing a LOT of money in your future and, frankly, wasted opportunities such as this are the equivalent of failing to claim a share dividend.

Back to the book. Although Mark claims Fighting for Birds is not an autobiography, it is very autobiographical in scope and provides some great personal insights into the RSPB and the development of bird (and broader) conservation in the UK and the EU. His description of the battles fought over the fate of the Flow Country brought back memories of writing an essay on that topic during my undergraduate years in the late 1980s. I’ve still not visited that part of Scotland but I have in mind a road trip this summer that may take it in. The RSPB is one of our partners on the Nene Valley Nature Improvement Area project so I was particularly interested in finding out more about what makes our most important wildlife charity tick. Mark is an engaging and candid writer, forthright in his opinions political and ecological (and their interactions) as you can see from his blog.

By pure coincidence, this week Mark hosted a guest blogger in the shape of Matt Shardlow, Chief Executive of Buglife, talking about the current controversies over banning the group of pesticides known as neonicotinoids. Matt puts forward a compelling case for withdrawing these chemicals from general use. I don’t dispute anything he says about the role of neonicotinoids in bee deaths (though there is some debate about dosage levels used in some of the published studies and how this might translate into effects in the field). But it does concern me that this new focus on pesticides is taking the spotlight off habitat loss, particularly grasslands, which is a far more important threat to pollinator populations. There is a real danger that this single issue will be seen as an easy fix by government when a broader reform of farming practices is what’s really required. The decline of wild bees and other pollinators can be tracked back to long before the introduction of neonicotinoids. There were some silly comments on the blog about neonics currently being the single most important conservation issue. This is short sighted hyperbole and (again coincidently) Lynn Dicks has written an interesting piece on the subject of rhetoric, lies and over-the-top claims in the journal Nature.

The decline and extinction of pollinators in the UK has been an ongoing process since the 19th century. I’d hate to see the government think that it’s “fixed” the pollinator problem by banning some pesticides, a much simpler task than protecting and restoring habitats, and encouraging farmers to manage their land more sensitively. With 70% of the UK’s land dedicated to farming, human (agri)culture has got to be a key element in conserving biodiversity.