Tag Archives: Bees

A bee in a hurry, a plant at its leisure – for Biodiversity Day 2016

Male B lap on Salvia cropped P1120309 Happy Biodiversity Day everyone! In celebration I thought I’d share with you my entry for this year’s University of Northampton Images of Research competition, the winners of which have just been announced (I wasn’t one of them, but congratulations to those who were).

Here’s the text I wrote to accompany the image:

Sometimes it’s difficult to photograph fast-moving bees, but this blurred image of a male Red-tailed Bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius) captures something of the essence of why plants use pollinators such as bees. Plants are static and cannot go searching for mates, so they sit and wait and use pollen vectors to move their male gametes to the flowers of other plants of the same species. Sometimes this involves wind or water currents; but for most plants this means using animal pollinators.

The bumblebee has been caught with its tongue extended, having just loaded up on nectar to fuel its search for virgin queen bumblebees with which to mate. The plant is a cultivated salvia variety growing in my garden: some of my research group’s work has involved studying pollinator diversity in urban and rural gardens, with a view to understanding the role of these artificial environments for conserving pollinators.

Pollinators at RHS Chelsea Flower Show

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Pollinators, as regular readers of this blog will know, are diverse and important, both ecologically and agriculturally. But that diversity is declining and it’s an issue that deserves greater publicity and action.

To that end, for the past eight months I’ve been advising a team from the British Ecological Society (BES) on the content for a display at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show which is running all next week. The display is called “Animal Attraction: The Garden and Beyond” – if you follow that link you’ll get a sense of what the display is all about, but in essence there are three key messages that the BES is trying to get across:

Celebrating the diversity of pollinators (not just bees!) both in the UK and globally.
Flowers have evolved many different ways of attracting and rewarding pollinators, leading to the fantastic diversity of floral form that gardeners appreciate.
Planting a diversity of flowers in your garden can only be a good thing for helping conserve pollinator populations.

As you can see from my wristband, I’ll be helping to staff the stand all day Tuesday 24th May, so if you’re at the show come and say hello and take a look at what the BES team has produced.

The European Bee Course 2016

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Note: I’m not directly involved with this course, I’m just advertising it on behalf of the organisers; please direct any queries to them – details are on the application form (link at the end).

All of the following text is directly taken from the information that I was sent:

Are you interested in European bees? Join our Super-B training school in Marseille, France in May!

Aim?

We aim (i) to provide a global overview on the Systematics and the Ecology of European bees including the up-to-date methods; (ii) to train to recognize the morphology of the main European genera by using keys; (iii) to collect wild bees in the field with standard technics (net, pan trap, aspirator); (iv) to prepare a collection of pinned specimens.

THE BEE COURSE is designed primarily for botanists, conservation biologists, pollination ecologists, and other biologists whose research, training, or teaching responsibilities require a greater understanding of bee taxonomy. It emphasizes the classification and identification of more than seventy bee genera of Europe, and the general information provided is applicable to the global bee fauna. Lectures include background information on the biology of bees, their floral relationships, their importance in maintaining and/or improving floral diversity, inventory strategies, and the significance of oligolecty (i.e., taxonomic floral specialization). Field trips acquaint participants with collecting and sampling techniques; associated lab work provides instruction on specimen identification, preparation and labelling.

Where?

France, Marseilles, in the beautiful site of the national park of the Calanques: http://sciences.univ-amu.fr/sites-geographiques/site-luminy

Budget?

Super-B budget covers the invitation of the trainers and material. Applicants have to pay for their flights, accommodation (130 euros) and meals (60 euros). A Super-B Grant of 600 EUR is available, this covers all expenses for the course and approximately 300 EUR for a flight.

When?

Arrival the evening of the 16^th of May after 6pm, departure the evening of the 20^th of May

Who?

Co-organised by the University of Mons (Denis Michez) and the University of Aix Marseilles (Benoît Geslin).

5 supervisors: Denis Michez (UMons, Belgium), Nicolas Vereecken (ULB, Belgium), Murat Aytekin (Hacettepe University, Turkey), Stuart Roberts (BWARS, UK) and Benoît Geslin (Université d’Aix-Marseille, France).

15 students, PhD & postdoc in relevant fields will have priority, but undergraduate student can apply.

Program?

16^th of May from 6pm

Arrival, move to the location with minibus

17^th of May

10am: Welcome and presentation of the organization and the goal. Denis Michez

11am: Systematics and diversity of European bees. Denis Michez

12am: Lunch

1pm: Practical courses, determination of bees among insects. All trainers

4pm: Lecture, up-to-date methods to study Bee Systematics. Murat Aytekin

6pm: Dinner

18^th of May

10am: How to collect, prepare and determine specimens of long-tongued versus short-tongued bees. Denis Michez

12am: Lunch

1pm: Field trip

4pm: Preparation of the collected material

6pm: Dinner

19^th of May

10am: Ecology of bees. Christophe Praz

11am: Bee community. Nicolas Vereecken

12am: Lunch

1pm: Field trip

4pm: Preparation of the collected material

6pm: Dinner

20^th of May

10am: Determination of the collected material

12am: Lunch

1pm: Analysis of the data

3pm: Last word

4pm: Departure

Framework?

Cost project Super-B: http://superb-project.eu/

SUPER-B is a COST Action that will bring together scientific and societal communities involved in the conservation and sustainable management of ecosystem services mediated by pollinators. >70 of our crops need insects for optimal pollination; these include many fruits, nuts, oil crops, fibres and vegetables with some producing no yield without insect pollination. The direct economic value of crop pollination by insects in the EU is >14 billion euro annually. Moreover, >80 of wild plant species benefit from animal pollinators for fruit and seed production, making pollination a key service for ecosystem and biodiversity maintenance.

SUPER-B will combine scientific evidence (existing and new knowledge) and social feedback for developing conservation strategies for pollinators. Specifically, the Action will (1) identify the role of insect pollination in agriculture and other ecosystems; (2) clarify best practices for mitigation of pollination loss, and (3) compare and contrast important drivers of pollinator loss (wild and managed species). SUPER-B will contribute towards maintaining natural ecosystems and achieving sustainable use of pollinators in agricultural production. Its results are relevant to all European countries and will be disseminated to a wide community of beneficiaries (scientists, farmers, beekeepers, industry, policy-makers, NGOs and the public).

Here’s the application form for the course:

Bee_course_Cost_Application_form (2)

Six bees, one stone: recent pollinator-related talks and workshops

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BBKA lecture April 2016 As I write this I’m painfully conscious that (a) it’s a couple of weeks since I last posted on the blog; and (b) I have a long list of things to complete before I head off to Tenerife for ten days of field work on Friday. The absence of posting has been due to my current work load, including the number of conferences, talks and workshops I’ve been involved with in the past month, which seems to have taken up a disproportionate amount of my time. It’s all been interesting and useful, however, and reflects the rising activity stemming from the National Pollinator Strategy, and increasing interest in pollinators more broadly. I’ve certainly learned a lot and hopefully my own expertise contributed to the success of these events.

In this post I thought I’d briefly summarise what I’ve been up to recently, in the process expanding the numerical and phylogenetic parameters of “killing two birds with one stone“:

16th March – took part in a workshop to map the latest phase of Buglife’s B-Lines across Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. This was a really interesting exercise and I felt that we’d actually achieved rather a lot by the end of the day. Once the final maps are completed I’ll post a link so you can see where the routes go through these counties and how they meet up.

23rd March – spoke at a one-day conference on “delivering biodiversity” organised by the Environmental Association of Universities and Colleges at the University of Worcester. Although I was talking about our bird surveys on the University of Northampton’s new Waterside Campus, pollinators did receive some attention during a workshop on creating wildflower meadows. I’ll post an update on the Waterside work once we’ve completed the next set of spring surveys.

30th March – spoke at the Bumblebee Working Group at the University of Sussex – have already posted an account of that.

6th April – took part in a”Pollinator Experts Elicitation” workshop at the University of Warwick, along with a group of nine other academics, and members of stakeholder groups such as FERA and the NFU. Run as part of Warwick’s Food and Behavioural Science Global Research priority groups, the organisers, from the university’s Department of Statistics, used the Delphi Method to assess the likelihood of sustaining pollinator populations under different scenarios of disease, climate change, and habitat degradation. It was a fascinating process and interesting to see how often experts’ views converged on the same opinion. Also rather humbling to see the degree of our uncertainty in our forecasts. The workshop garnered quite a bit of media attention including pieces on the BBC’s Midlands Today and the Farming Today programmes.

8th-9th April – delivered two lectures at the British Beekeepers Association’s Spring Convention at Harper Adams University. Rather disconcerting to be the least-informed person in the room, given my limited knowledge of bee keeping, but they were a friendly and curious lot with good-sized audiences for my talks on the diversity of bees to be found in urban settings, and the global diversity and functional importance of pollinators.

13th April – spoke to a very receptive audience at the Friends of Linford Lakes Nature Reserve near Milton Keynes, on the topic of “Bees for dinner? The importance of pollinators in a changing world“. Great evening and lots of interesting questions afterwards, though my talk was a bit too long (must cut it for next time).

That’s it for now, hope to do some posts from Tenerife while we are there.

IUCN Bumblebee Specialist Group annual report 2015

Special issue of Leaf Litter devoted to pollinators

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Leaf Litter

A short while ago I was interviewed by an American journalist as part of a special issue of the online newsletter Leaf Litter devoted to pollinators. Produced by a conservation planning and ecological restoration organisation called Biohabitats, this special issue includes:

» Thoughts on Pollinators
» Expert Q&A: Jeff Ollerton
» Expert Q&A: Jerome Rozen
» Expert Q&A: Eugenie Regan
» Inspiration: Promising Progress With Pollinator Habitat
» Non-Profit Spotlight: The Xerces Society
» Video: An ecological planner walks into a cider mill…
» How Saving Pollinators Can Save Water and Fish Resources
» Biohabitats Projects, Places, and People

Here’s a link to Leaf Litter.

What’s wrong with the New Scientist story about “Bumblebees deployed to spray crops with pesticides”?

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Here’s a link to the story:

Bumblebees deployed to spray crops with pesticides

There’s at least three things wrong with this story:

The accompanying image is of a honey bee, not a bumblebee.
Bumblebees have nests, not hives.
It’s a dumb idea. For a whole set of reasons, some of which are mentioned by scientists who were interviewed for the story. I’d add another one: these bees will visit a lot of other flowers besides the ones that are being targeted, potentially spreading the bio-control fungus far and wide in the environment. Is that really a good idea?

Two of these things are within the control of New Scientist.

Thanks to my colleague Dr Wanda McCormick for pointing out the story.

Pollination syndromes: a brief update on recent developments, and news that Stefan Vogel has passed away

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In a recent post I discussed the current debates about “pollination syndromes”, which I described as “sets of flower characteristics that have repeatedly evolved in different plant families due to the convergent selection pressures applied by some groups of pollinators”.

The authors of the Ecology Letters paper that I discussed (Rosas-Guerrero et al. 2014) have now replied to our original critique of their approach and you can read that reply (Aguilar et al. 2015) in Journal of Pollination Ecology by following this link. Readers can make up their own minds as to whether the authors have responded adequately to our concerns, but I just briefly wanted to raise three points.

The first is that much of these authors’ response is focused on an earlier paper of ours (Ollerton et al. 2009) rather than on our critique per se. Nick Waser, Mary Price and myself have therefore written a second response that deals with some of the misunderstandings apparent in that piece; it’s available to download here.

The second point relates to the existing literature on pollination syndromes and pollinator effectiveness used by Rosas-Guerrero et al. (2014); as we demonstrated in our critique this is clearly a biased data set that is skewed towards groups of plants with relatively large flowers, “interesting” pollination systems, and text book examples of classical pollination syndromes such as bird and bat pollination. Researchers who study flowers and their pollinators choose their subjects based on a whole set of criteria, but random selection is not one of them. However as far as we can judge, Aguilar et al. (2015) seem to be arguing that drawing strong, “universal” conclusions about syndromes from this highly biased data set is perfectly acceptable because of the statistical rigour of formal meta-analysis. I’d re-iterate our main point that no amount of statistical rigour and exhaustive literature searching can take into account inherent biases within the primary data (i.e. the literature itself).

Finally, Aguilar et al. (2015) claim that “human disturbance of natural habitats has caused disruptions in patterns of mutualistic interactions that may partly explain the presence of the diverse pollinator assemblages that are frequently found in pollination studies”. It seems to us to be disingenuous to argue that pollination syndromes are universally valid and then to essentially concede that there are lots of wrong visitors (“secondary” pollinators), and to explain that with the idea that everything is disturbed in the Anthropocene. If this is really the case then we probably need to throw out a lot of our understanding of evolutionary ecology as a whole, not just studies of plant-pollinator interactions.

Clearly we don’t accept this argument and in fact it has echoes of arguments that have been going on since the 19th century (Waser et al. 2011): more than 130 years ago the Darwinian biologist Hermann Muller was criticising Federico Delpino (one of the original architects of the idea of pollination syndromes) for ignoring the “wrong” flower visitors. Interestingly, Delpino was a fundamentally a teleologist who saw purpose in nature, expressed through (as he perceived them) the highly ordered relationships between flowers and pollinators.

As we discuss in the Waser et al. (2011) paper, Stefan Vogel was another prominent pollination biologist, and advocate of the importance of pollination syndromes, who was also fundamentally teleological in his thinking. I was sad to learn that Stefan passed away very recently, in what I believe is his 90th year. I was fortunate enough to meet Stefan at a symposium in honour of his 80th birthday at the International Botanical Congress in Vienna in 2005. He graciously signed my copy of The Role of Scent Glands in Pollination and said, with a twinkle in his eye, “you and I have probably got a lot to discuss”. Unfortunately we never got the opportunity, but later I dedicated our 2009 paper on Ceropegia pollination to him “in honour of his pioneering work on pollination” in the genus. Stefan’s legacy of research, particularly in the tropical regions of South America, is a fitting tribute to his memory.

Pollination syndromes clearly continue to attract much interest in the scientific literature, and just this week I was intrigued to see a paper by John Benning showing that a species of Ericaceae that looks as though it “should” be pollinated by bees is actually moth pollinated. No doubt the discussion of the evolutionary extent and predictability of pollination syndromes will continue for some time to come.

A new bee for Northamptonshire!

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Back in the summer I produced a series of posts for Pollinator Awareness Week highlighting the pollinators to be found in our own urban garden in Northampton. One of those posts was of what I believed to be the Little flower bee (Anthophora bimaculata), a species which at the time I’d never previously seen. I noted that this was a new urban record for Northampton as my PhD student Muzafar Sirohi had not recorded it during his bee surveys, which I discussed earlier this year.

Some time later I checked the bee records on the National Biodiversity Network (NBN) Gateway site and realised that not only was this the first urban record of the species in Northampton, it was actually the first record for the county of Northamptonshire as a whole! The record has recently been accepted on iRecord and will be added to the NBN records.

Of course this is personally exciting (a new record for a large county found in our back garden) and it adds a significant regional record to the currently known distribution of the species. The map on the BWARS account of Anthophora bimaculata shows that the species is predominantly southern in its distribution, with a few eastern and western outliers. This new record places the species firmly in the centre of England, confirming that it is more widespread than previously assumed.

There are two possible explanations for the discovery of this bee in Northamptonshire. One is that it’s a very recent range expansion and the species is becoming more common and widespread, perhaps as a result of climate change. The second is that it’s always been present in Northamptonshire, but just never recorded. At the moment it’s impossible to decide between these two possibilities as there’s evidence to support both. Not only did Muzafar not record A. bimaculata in his surveys in 2012, neither did Dr Hilary Erenler, Dr Sam Tarrant or Kathryn Harrold in their pollinator surveys in the region between 2007 and 2015. Having said that, we do know that Northamptonshire is a historically under-recorded county for bees as it has no County Recorder for Hymenoptera, and both Hilary and Muzafar recorded species new to Northamptonshire, which I hope to report on at a later stage.

Differentiating between these two scenarios will be difficult and may be impossible unless we can discover previously unknown historical specimens of this bee that were collected in the county, or the species continues to expand in its range.

Understanding the distribution of pollinators such as bees is a key component of initiatives such as the National Pollinator Strategy – if we don’t know where the things we are trying to conserve actually are, how can we conserve them? So it’s very pleasing to be able to make a small contribution to that process from the comfort of our own garden!

Who is feeding the honey bee bullshit machine?

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This morning I received an email from Public Policy Exchange (PPE) inviting me to a conference in London in November entitled “Biodiversity and Local Partnerships: Halting the Decline of the Honey Bee in the UK”

The opening statement on the website and the official flyer convinced me that the organisers have been misinformed; all of it is wrong:

“Healthy honey bee populations are vital to food and crop production, and the natural environment. In the UK, honey bees are responsible for 80% of pollination, and a third of the food we eat is pollinated by bees.”

Where are they getting this information from? Who is feeding organisations like the PPE this kind of bullshit? Is it bee keeping organisations? I’d really like to know.

Honeybees are responsible for only one third of the crop pollination in the UK (Breeze et al. 2011), and a very small proportion of the wild plant pollination. Wild bees, hoverflies, butterflies, and other pollinators are much more important than honeybees, and collectively they are responsible for this pollination, not just managed honeybees. No one is denying that honey bees are important, but there is absolutely nothing to gain (and a lot to lose in terms of science credibility) by over-playing their importance, as I’ve argued in the peer-reviewed literature.

It’s not as if this is the only recent example, The Daily Express online has recently been equally ignorant of the facts, and didn’t even get the right bee in the accompanying image.

It’s interesting that the PPE website also uses the infamous not-Einstein quote, though they cite the author as “unknown”. With good reason, because that’s bullshit too.

I won’t be attending the conference.