Canal side walk

I spent a good part of the day walking along the Grand Union Canal today. I started by the Bede park in Leicester and headed south through Aylestone Meadows, passed a medieval packhorse bridge and ended up 6 or 7 miles later at South Wigston. It was a sunny, if blustery, day. Part of my motivation was to do with a keep fit campaign, but I also wanted to see what sort of wildlife was to be seen along the way. These two aims do not work well together, so I was not stopping to count every Coot and Mallard that I passed. I was looking out for bumblebees though, as usual.

I can't say that there were many bumblebees, but the ones I did see were mainly prospecting for nests, which is a good sign. This is probably the bees least photgenic activity as they rarely pause long enough to get into focus. After finding a cuckoo bumblebee on my lawn yesterday I am trying not to assume that every bee I see is one of the common types.

I did spot this bee refueling on dandelions at Gee's bridge, between Blaby and Aylestone.
If you want to take part in the British Waterways' Wildlife Survey 2009, you can find out more about it from the Waterscape.com website. You can report the numbers of any interesting wildlife you see along Britain's canals, rivers and reservoirs, whether you are walking or sailing. There is also a photgraphic competition, which is 'wonderfully wild'.

Have you seen this Bee?

This Bumblebee, Bombus Hypnorum is common across Europe, but new to the UK. Its presence here was first recognised only in 2001, Reading the description in the first report though makes me wonder why it took the bee so long to get here. It looks as though it may be here to stay as:

• It is widespread across the cool forest zones of the north;


• It seems to cope well in urban areas;


• It has probably increased in population in Belgium and Germany during the last century, where other bees have declined.

If you spot an example of this distictive bee in your garden, the Bumblebee Conservation Trust would be interested to hear from you as they are trying to survey its progress.

Open Access research on bumblebees

I noted the spread of research interest in bumblebees in a recent post, but htere remnains a problem for many people wanting to read such material. Most of it is locked up inside academic journals working with a subscription model. Even researchers themselves may not be able to read the results of each others work if their university does not subscribe to the right journal. For people outside universities there is almost no chance. (OK, you might be able to interest a public library in making an inter-library loan application, but you would have to wait weeks for anything to come through).
This picture is beginning to change as researchers are increasingly making copies of their research available in 'institutional repositories. These copies may not be the polished versions published in the academic journals, but they do contain all the same content.
For Bumblebee research, check out:

• University of Stirling STORRE;


• Univesity of Southampton e-Prints.

If you want a wider range of repositories you can also try:

• OpenDOAR


• Scientific Commons


• OAIster

You should be able to find examples of bumblebee research through searches on ordinary search engines, but since the above examples specialise in open access research, they may give abetter results if you are looking for academic research.

International Bumblebee research

The decline in bumblebee numbers worldwide has not gone unnoticed among researchers. Just taking the output of one publisher, Springer, over the past 5 decades one can see a huge growth in published research and a spread across the countries where bees are common. Springer's 'AuthorMapper' tool can show this graphically as a map of author locations for the articles it has published. The United Kingdom, close followed by Germany is the second most productive country for bumblebee research after the united States.

First Bumblebee of 2009 spotted

Encountered my first bumblebee of the year this lunchtime (Wednesday 25 February) while walking in the park near Tudor Road in Leicester. It was not pausing to be admired, but flying about 2 metres high along a hedge. It was big enough to be a Terrestris Queen, or at least that is what I might expect to see this time of year.
I can be pretty sure that it was not any of the American species of Bumblebee, but in case you need any help telling the difference, the Xerces Society has just issued some print and fold pocket identification guides for Affinis, Occidentalis and Terricola Bees.

Bee declines: is catastrophe on its way?

It is probably a coincidence that the University of Bath should upload a podcast on the topic of declining bee populations soon after the Sunday Times article on the same topic, since Stuart Roberts, research fellow at the University of Reading, gave his talk in autumn 2008, but the themes overlap and illustrate the concerns researchers have about bee populations. Listening to a podcast is not the same as being there, since you have to imagine what the slides would be telling you, but if you want a good introduction to this debate this podcast is well worth a listen.
Stuart Roberts: Bee decline - Countdown to catastrophe?
Introduction
There is more to 'bees' than honey. Bees are in the insect order Hymenoptera, diverging from the general insect tree at about the time of the Permian Carboniferous: 300 million years ago. The order includes sawflies, parasitic wasps, social wasps and bees. There is one species of honey bee, (Apis mellifera). But if you were to download bee clip art from the internet, you would be more likely to get a version of a bumblebee. There have been up to 25 species in the United Kingdom, though some have been so rare as to be almost invisible. There is also a group of 240 other bees, nesting underground or in old snail shells. Some bees live a parasitic life, relying on a host social bee to do all the foraging for them.
Worldwide, you can find maybe 9 species of honey bee (depending on where the species lines get drawn). There are around 250 species of bumblebee and 19,500 other bees, including some spectacular examples.
Bee decline
Bee declines have been reported in various sources, like major newspapers. Some doubts have been raised, but these have tended to focus researcher's interests in collecting evidence to demonstrate that such declines are taking place. How can we separate the facts from the widely held beliefs? Is the Honey Bee industry able to provide reliable evidence on whether such declines are taking place. Surprisingly, this is not the case as data on bee-keeping activiies has not been consistently collected. Germay has the best data-collection as this is integrated with the trading standards process (rather than the inland revenue). Sweden also sets a high standard. There are long term trends involved, but it is not clear whether the number of colonies being the same as in 1920 is evidence of stability or decline. Evidence based on regitration of bee-keepers can also be interpreted as showing the popularity and benefits of registering, rather than proving an increse in bee-keeping itself. A paper on european wide honey bee statistics may be published soonin the Apidologie journal. Overall there does seem to be a decline in honey bees across Europe.
Solitary and Bumble Bees
Amateur generated data is available from Britain and the Netherlands where it has been collected by societies like the Bees, Ants and Wasps Recording Society. 1980 can be chosen as a cut-off point for comparisons. In the UK there are more 10 X 10 kilomere squares showing a decline in the richness of species to be found than where the position is stable or increasing. The situation in the Netherlands is similar. Specialist bees are declining more rapidly than generalist foragers. 'Slow' species , with one cycle per year, were subjewct to greater declines than those which manage 2 cycles per year. These results were published in Science a copuple of years ago:
Biesmeijer (2006).Parallel declines in pollinators and insect-pollinated plants in Britain and the Netherlands. Science [0036-8075] vol:313 iss:5785 pg:351 -354
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1127863
There is a decline, most species and involved and the winners are outnumbered by the losers. The decline seems to be happening whereever researchers have been able to look.
What is driving the decline?
Some sugestions of the causes for the declines may not have much evidence behind them: mobile phone masts, car exhausts, high-tension electricity cables. More plausible causes may include the US practice of shipping bees from one coast to another wherever people are prepared to pay for pollination services; large field monocultures; pesticides and herbicides (like neo-nicotinoids); parasites like varroa mites. Colonies can collapse under such presures, but not all colonies lost are a result of 'Colony Collapse Disorder'. 45% of european bee species appear on a variety of threat lists. In the UK, as a typical country, the main drivers seem to be:

• habitat loss;
• starting off a a rare species;
• changes in host-plant dynamics (or in hosts for paracitic bees);
• climate change.

Who cares?
Bee keepers, farmers, anyone who likes strawberries: even ice-cream makers Haagen-Daz now sponsors bee research as its flavourings are all bee pollinated.
What are the impacts?
Insect pollination worldwide is worth 153 billion euros per year. 84% of european crop species rely on insect pollination. Agricultural industries would be hard hit. Flowering plants would start to be threatened.
There are things that people can do individually in their gardens and governments can achieve by re-focussing policies.
We may not yet have reached catastrophe, yet. At least the situation is being recognised and that is an important start.

Beanz Meanz Bees

The recent article in the Sunday Times on declining bumblebee numbers raised a lot of interest from US Bee researchers, (on the BOMBUS-L mailing list) not because they disagreed with it, but because of a mention of famers in Britain growing beans. Any decline in bees may cause a decline in bean production as there would not be enough pollinators to ensure a good crop. In the US the main bean crop is soya and self-pollinating, so not subject to this concern. What are the beans grown in Britain and what do we do with them?
Image from Flickr by QuintanaRoo.
Adding pasta (Orecchiette would be well suited) to this dish of fava beans, lemon and mint would make a tasty dish go further.
We grew beans in the garden last year. The crop was small, but that had more to do with their attraction to slugs and snails than the lack of pollinators. We did try growing them alongside sweet peas in the hope that the peas would attact the attention of the bees.