Category Archives: Butterflies

Pollinator-flower interactions in gardens during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown of 2020: the data paper has just been published!

During the lockdown period of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, many pollination ecologists were stuck at home: universities and research institutes were closed and restrictions on travel meant that it was not possible to get out and do field work. In order to keep active and motivated, and to turn adversity into an opportunity, an ad hoc network of more than 70 researchers from 15 different countries (see the map above) decided to collect standardised data on the plant-pollinator networks in their own gardens and nearby public spaces.

When combined with information about location, size of garden, floral diversity, how the garden is managed, and so forth, this would provide some useful data about how gardens support pollinators. For those with kids at home it could also be a good way of getting them out into fresh air and giving them something to do!

Following discussions, several different protocols were instigated which depended upon the time available to the researchers, including one that mirrored the UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme’s FIT (Flower-Insect Timed) counts.

The resulting data set of almost 47,000 visits by insects and birds to flowers, as well as information about flowers that were never visited, is freely available and will be an invaluable resource for pollination ecologists. For example, analysing the links between ornamental flowers that share pollinators with fruits and vegetables such as apples and beans, will allow us to make recommendations for the best plants to grow in home gardens that can increase yields of crops.

There’s an old saying about turning adversity into a positive outcome: “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”, and the researchers were pleased to find that there’s one record of Citrus limon in the data set!

The paper describing the data set has just been published in the Journal of Pollination Ecology and you can download a PDF of the paper and the associated data for free by following this link.

Sincere thanks to all of my co-authors for their commitment to the project!

Published today: a new children’s book about bees and other pollinators!

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One of the projects with which I’ve been involved over the last year has been advising on a new book for children about bees and other pollinators, called Can We Really Help The Bees? Written by Katie Daynes and wonderfully illustrated by Róisín Hahessy, it tells the story of what happens when a swarm of bees comes to the window to let a group of children know that they, and their friends the other pollinators, are in trouble. Can they help? Yes they can!

It’s been a real pleasure working with Katie and Róisín on this project for Usborne Publishing and seeing the ideas, text, and illustrations evolve over time. I’ve written a short post over at the Usborne blog with some ideas about how to get children involved in helping the pollinators, and I think that it’s worth repeating one of the things that I wrote: everyone can make a difference to the wildlife around us and no one is too young to be involved!

Because of my involvement with Can We Really Help The Bees? I wasn’t able to include it on my curated list of the best books about bees and other pollinators at the Shepherd site. But it definitely should be on there and is highly recommended!

The value of butterfly specimens for understanding species extinctions – a new study just published.

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The Chequered Skipper Reintroduction Project has featured in several posts over the last few years – see here and here – and University of Northampton PhD researcher Jamie Wildman has been working hard to complete his thesis under the less-than-ideal conditions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The first paper from the project has just been published and it deals with Jamie’s monumental efforts to bring together all of the scattered data relating to preserved Chequered Skipper specimens held in museums and private collections. An existing database contained just 266 records; Jamie’s efforts increased that by an order of magnitude, adding a further 3,533 new records that document where and when specimens were collected, and by whom.

This 1,328 % increase in data means that we now know much more about the historical distribution of this butterfly and how that changed over time.

The Chequered Skipper went extinct in England in 1976 and this enhanced database will allow us to understand why that extinction occurred. This initial paper documents the strategy used to find the additional records as a road map for how others might proceed in the future. The full reference with a link to the paper is here:

Wildman, J.P., Ollerton, J., Bourn, N.A.D., Brereton, T.M., Moore, J.L. & McCollin, D. (2022) The value of museum and other uncollated data in reconstructing the decline of the chequered skipper butterfly Carterocephalus palaemon (Pallas, 1771). Journal of Natural Science Collections 10: 31-44

This is the abstract:

The chequered skipper butterfly Carterocephalus palaemon (Pallas, 1771) was declared extinct in England in 1976 after suffering a precipitous decline in range and abundance during the 20th Century. By searching and collating museum and other records, we show how a deeper understanding of this decline can be achieved, thus furthering conservation objectives. A preexisting Butterflies for the New Millennium (BNM) database of United Kingdom butterfly species records, created by Butterfly Conservation in conjunction with the Biological Records Centre (BRC), contained 266 historic C. palaemon records from England. United Kingdom (UK) museums and natural history societies were contacted for specimen data, and these sources added 2175 new records to the BNM. Owners of private specimen collections were also contacted, and these collections accounted for a further 465 records. Specimens originating from UK museums, other institutions, and private collections represent 2640 (71%) of total new records. Other sources, such as personal accounts held in museums, published and unpublished texts produced an additional 894 records. A further 437 records from museums, private collections, and other sources were considered partial and omitted from the data due to limited or misleading date and/or locality information. In summary, data from UK museums and other sources has infilled English C. palaemon distribution prior to 1976, offering further insight into potential environmental and anthropogenic drivers of decline at key sites. The quality and quantity of data obtained using the method outlined in this study suggests similar work could be carried out for other extinct or declining butterfly species to improve our knowledge of habitat requirements and historical distribution via modelling, identify causes of decline, and provide valuable information for potential reintroductions.

Growing a butterfly garden? Olivia shows the way!

New article just published: ‘Pollinators and pollination: myths, misunderstandings and much more to discover’

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My first (and hopefully not my last) article for the magazine British Wildlife has just appeared in the April issue. Entitled ‘Pollinators and pollination: myths, misunderstandings and much more to discover’ you can get a preview here: https://www.britishwildlife.com/article/volume-32-number-5-page-316-323

The article focuses on some of the myths and misunderstandings that I dealt with in my book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society. It also points out that, even in a place like Britain with a long tradition of natural history study, there’s still much for the patient observer to discover. If you’re interested in a PDF, drop me a line via the Contact page.

“Bee Together” with YDMT – pollinator online talks during January and February

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As I write a slow haze of fine snow is falling, covering our garden with a thin white dusting. Spring feels a long way off, despite the emerging spears of daffodil leaves. But you can get a taste of what the new season will bring by signing up for a short series of free evening online talks on the topic of pollinators that has been organised by the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust – here’s the link for the Bee Together programme – and here’s more details of the talks:

Thursday January 28 at 7pm: Pollinators and Pollination: Nature and Society
An overview of the diversity of pollinators in Britain, why they are important, and the threats to that diversity with Jeff Ollerton.

Thursday February 18 (7pm): The B-Lines Project
Buglife’s B-Lines network is an imaginative solution to the problem of the loss of flowers and pollinators. B-Lines are a series of ‘insect pathways’ running through our countryside and towns, along which Buglife are restoring and creating a series of wildflower-rich habitat stepping stones. Catherine Jones talks about mapping the recently completed B-Lines map and some of the projects that have already created habitat for pollinators.

Thursday February 25 (7pm): The Hidden Lives of Garden Bees
Brigit Strawbridge Howard will explain some of the basic differences between bumblebees, solitary bees, and honeybees – including lifecycles and nesting behaviour; the problems they all face; and, most important, what we can do to help. Brigit is a wildlife gardener, amateur naturalist and advocate of bees. She writes and campaigns to raise awareness of the importance of native wild bees, and is the author of Dancing with Bees: A Journey Back to Nature.

I hope to see some of you there: Happy New Year everyone!

The chapter titles for my book: Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society

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A few people have asked me about what’s covered in my book which is being published by Pelagic and is currently in production. Here’s the chapter titles:

Preface

1 The importance of pollinators and pollination

2 More than just bees: the diversity of pollinators

3 To be a flower

4 Fidelity and promiscuity in Darwin’s entangled bank

5 The evolution of pollination strategies

6 A matter of time: from daily cycles to climate change

7 Agricultural perspectives

8 Urban environments

9 The significance of gardens

10 The shifting fates of pollinators

11 New bees on the block

12 Managing, restoring and connecting habitats

13 The politics of pollination

14 Studying pollinators and pollination

As you can see it’s a very wide-ranging overview of the subject, and written to be accessible to both specialists and non-specialists alike. To quote what I wrote in the Preface:

“While the book is aimed at a very broad audience, and is intended to be comprehensible to anyone with an interest in science and the environment, and their intersection with human societies, I hope it will also be of interest to those dealing professionally with plants and pollinators. The subject is vast, and those working on bee or hoverfly biology, for example, or plant reproductive ecology, may learn something new about topics adjacent to their specialisms. I certainly learned a lot from writing the book.”

The book is about 100,000 words in length, lots of illustrations, and there will be an index. My copy editor reckons there’s 450 references cited, though I haven’t counted. I do know that they run to 28 pages in the manuscript, and that’s with 11pt text. All going well it will be published before Christmas.

Pollinators and pollination in the UK: an introductory workshop – 26th August

Get a 30% discount if you pre-order my new book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society

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PollinatorsandPollination-frontcover

In the next few months my new book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society will be published. As you can imagine, I’m very excited! The book is currently available to pre-order: you can find full details here at the Pelagic Publishing website. If you do pre-order it you can claim a 30% discount by using the pre-publication offer code POLLINATOR.

As with my blog, the book is aimed at a very broad audience including the interested public, gardeners, conservationists, and scientists working in the various sub-fields of pollinator and pollination research. The chapter titles are as follows:

Preface and Acknowledgements
1. The importance of pollinators and pollination
2. More than just bees: the diversity of pollinators
3. To be a flower
4. Fidelity and promiscuity in Darwin’s entangled bank
5. The evolution of pollination strategies
6. A matter of time: from daily cycles to climate change
7. Agricultural perspectives
8. Urban environments
9. The significance of gardens
10. Shifting fates of pollinators
11. New bees on the block
12. Managing, restoring and connecting habitats
13. The politics of pollination
14. Studying pollinators and pollination
References
Index

Garden plant-pollinator surveys: progress so far

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The network of pollination ecologists and insect specialists who have confirmed that they are surveying plant-pollinator networks in their gardens now stands at 50. As the map above shows, most are in the UK, Ireland and mainland Europe, but the Americas are also becoming well represented, we have a couple of people surveying in North Africa, and three in Australia. An x-y plot of the coordinates of the gardens shows the spread a little better:

Some people have started to send me data already, which is great; if you’re surveying and haven’t let me know your latitude and longitude, please do so, preferably decimalised – you can convert degrees/minutes/seconds to decimal here: https://www.latlong.net/degrees-minutes-seconds-to-decimal-degrees

I’ve managed 13 formal 15 minute surveys so far, plus have a few ad hoc observations that I am keeping separate, and I will be continuing my data collection for the foreseeable future. I’ve started playing with the data as you can see below. This is a plot made using the bipartite package in R, with plants to the left and pollinators to the right. The size of the bars is proportional to the number of pollinators/plants a taxon connects to. In the plants you can immediately see the dominance of apple (Malus domestica) and greengage (Prunus domestica), which attract a wide variety of insects to their flowers. Of the pollinators, the hairy-footed flower bee (Anthophora plumipes) and dark-edged beefly (Bombylius major) are especially common and generalist in their flower visits. It will be really interesting to see how this changes over the season, and how our fruit and vegetables are connected into the wider network via pollinators that they share with the ornamental and native plants.

If you are experienced at surveying pollinators and want to get involved, follow that first link and check out the protocol and FAQs, and please do email me: jeff.ollerton [at] northampton.ac.uk