Bee Quest

by Dave Goulson

  Salisbury Plain has an atmosphere all of its own, and one that changes minute by minute. History seems closer to the surface on the Plain, less obscured by recent change than almost anywhere else in Britain. Under grey skies it can be bleak, windswept and lonely – and so it was that first morning. Aside from the track I was on, there was hardly a sign that another human had ever come by. Indeed, the view can have changed little since the land was first cleared of trees some 5,000 years ago. I pulled over, took out my net, and began to walk. The Plain is slightly elevated above the surrounding landscape, so that the distant horizon seems to drop away, enhancing the impression that you are in an other-worldly place, raised above the crowded hubbub of everyday life. Rolling, empty grassland stretched in all directions, broken only by the occasional small clump of scrubby hawthorns or windswept, distorted beech trees. It was cool and windy, and as a result there were very few bees about, but the flowers were extraordinary. There were great swathes of familiar meadow and downland flowers such as red and white clover, lady’s bedstraw, hawkbits, bird’s-foot trefoil, ox-eye daisy, rock-rose, tormentil and salad burnet, but also a bewildering variety of less familiar species, some that I had never encountered before. Sainfoin grew in abundance, its delicate pink flower spikes swaying in the breeze. This member of the pea family was once widely grown as a fodder crop, but has fallen out of favour with farmers who no longer need nitrogen-fixing legumes in their crop rotation; to this day, Salisbury Plain is the only place in the UK I have seen sainfoin growing wild. There were many other unusual legumes – kidney vetch, dyer’s greenweed, horseshoe vetch. The sward was dotted with ant mounds, Dalek-shaped hummocks veiled in purple thyme. In the disturbed areas near the tracks were huge patches of red bartsia, a scraggy little plant with nondescript purplish flowers, but much loved by bees. Tall blue spikes of viper’s bugloss and the heavily-scented yellow spires of wild mignonette also lined the dusty tracks. Betony and black horehound sprouted from around the occasional patches of hawthorn and blackthorn scrub. This was bee paradise – and it seemed to go on for ever.

  In fairness, as I explored I was soon to find that not all of the Plain is so rich in flowers. There are patches of arable land, some areas that have been ‘improved’ by adding fertilisers, some where the scrub has encroached and there is little but hawthorn. But the overall effect is a mosaic of flower-rich patches, some of them huge, within which it is always going to be easy for bees, butterflies and hoverflies to find some of their favourite flowers on which to feed. The Plain is the most flower-rich area I have ever explored in Britain – only parts of the machair in the Outer Hebrides give it a run for its money in terms of the density of wildflowers, but they are quite a bit smaller in extent.

  As I walked, the sun began to break through, and the gusty wind dropped a little. A skylark began to sing high overhead. In moments the atmosphere changed from brooding and desolate to peaceful, enchantingly unspoiled, the warmth raising the mingled scents of a myriad herbs from the rabbit-cropped turf. The first bumblebee appeared, a worker white-tailed bumblebee visiting the sainfoin for nectar, and then as I dropped into a slightly sheltered fold in the land it suddenly seemed that there were bees everywhere, the swaying flowers humming with activity.

  I had hoped to be falling over rare species, but initially all I could find were species I could see in my back garden in Southampton – lots of red-tails, white-tails, garden bumblebees and common carders. I caught the common carders for close inspection, as records showed that there should be both moss carders and brown-banded carders on the Plain, rare species that I had never seen, but all three carder bee species are very similar. According to the books, all are a rusty brown, but the common carder has black hairs on the sides of the abdomen, which the other two do not. The brown-banded carder should have a sprinkle of black hairs amongst the brown near the bases of its wings, and a distinct darker-brown band across the abdomen. The moss carder has no black hairs on its back or sides, and has a neat and tidy coat, giving it a velvety appearance or, according to some sources, ‘teddy-bear good looks’. My apologies for bothering you with such tedious distinctions – I’m afraid that the life of an entomologist involves quite a lot of staring at tiny, seemingly inconsequential features, and sometimes also trying to make sense of subjective statements such as the degree of similarity to a cuddly toy. Don’t all bumblebees look like cuddly toys? Anyway, I had studied all the books, particularly Frederick Sladen’s The Humble-Bee, published in 1912 and still arguably the best book yet written on bumblebees, in which he lovingly describes their lives and habits and the minutiae of the differences between the British species. I had familiarised myself with these distinctions, and it didn’t sound so difficult on paper, but in the field, with a buzzing bumblebee in a small glass pot, I found it extremely hard to see whether or where there were black hairs, even with a hand lens (I was eventually to realise that the process is made somewhat easier by stuffing tissue paper into the pot until the bee is gently squashed against the glass wall and can no longer buzz about). I spent the next couple of hours staring at a succession of brown bees, reluctantly concluding that all were just boring old common carders. It is an unfortunate and inconsiderate feature of bumblebees that the rare species mostly look like one of the common species, almost as if they want to play hard to find.

  I was becoming a little despondent at the lack of rare bees and had circled back to the car with a view to trying my luck elsewhere when I spotted a bee that didn’t look quite right – it was black with a red tail, superficially similar to a common red-tailed bumblebee, but the red was a little less red, the black a little less black, and its bottom a little more pointy than is usually the case. It was also a little too small for a red-tailed queen, but a bit too big for a worker. It was visiting some tatty red dead-nettles that I had almost parked on top of, and something about the way it flew looked different too. I snaffled it in the net, and potted it up for a closer look. Of course it buzzed about unhelpfully for a while but eventually it tired and sat still, and I was able to get a proper look at it. As soon as I got a good look at its legs, I knew what it was – a queen red-shanked carder bee, a cousin of the various brown carder bees I had been looking for. The stiff fringe of hairs that make the pollen baskets on the hind legs are orange in the red-shanked carder, but black in the red-tailed bumblebee – very distinctive at close range. I apologise once again for giving you all the morphological details, which may be detracting from my effectively conveying what an exciting moment this was – my first rare bumblebee, a BAPfn2 species. Red-shanked carders had once been widespread in the south-east – old distribution maps showed them all over Hampshire amongst other southern counties, and Sladen described them as common in Kent – but I had never seen one.

  By the time I had finished admiring and photographing her and had let her go, it had clouded over once again, and a gentle drizzle began to blow in from the west. I hung around for a while, getting steadily damper, and in the end decided to call it a day. But my appetite had been whetted. If I was ever going to see more of our rare bumblebee species, and find out more about them, then surely this was the place.

  I wanted to know why some bumblebees had become so rare in Britain, while others remain widespread. It seemed to me that if I could understand more about the needs of these rare species and what had driven their declines, I would stand a better chance of coming up with solutions, so that we could prevent them continuing to decline, or maybe even bring them back in places where they have disappeared. I devised a plan for a summer of fieldwork that would, I hoped, enable me to discover at least the basics of the ecological needs of these bees. My idea was to conduct timed, one-hour searches for bees at as many sites on the Plain as I could find time for through the summer months. I would count and identify every bee I saw, what flower it was on, and whether it was collecting pollen, nectar or both. I would also count the abundance of all the different flower types at each site. The idea was to build up a picture of the relative distr
ibution and abundance of both the common and the rare species, and to gather data on which flowers the different bees preferred to visit. I hoped that the Plain might offer a window on the past, a view of what Britain was like a hundred years ago when much of the countryside was covered in flowers and when these rare species were still quite common. For example, I might discover that red-shanked carder bees are particularly keen on pollen from kidney vetch or the nectar of betony, flowers that are no longer common in most of the UK. If so, I would have a simple explanation for their decline and a solution – plant more kidney vetch and betony. Such flowers could be included in flower-strips planted on farms as part of agri-environment schemes, and red-shanked carder bees might once more spread into the wider countryside and become common. Of course, life is rarely as simple or easy as this, but that was the basic idea. What is more, it made a fantastic excuse for spending a lot of the summer romping about the Plain with a butterfly net while being able to genuinely claim that I was working.

  Over the next two months I was to encounter most of Britain’s rarest bumblebees, as well as managing to conduct a thorough lunchtime survey of the pies available in the many quaint timbered pubs to be found in the pretty valleys that intersect the Plain. I did eventually find both brown-banded and moss carders, after many more hours of staring furiously at equally furious bees squashed between glass and tissue paper. The brown-banded turned out to be quite frequent in a few places, and with practice the brown band is fairly easy to spot and minimal squashing is required. Sadly, I only ever saw a handful of those teddy-bear moss carders, but at least they were there. I also found ruderal bumblebees, though once again it took a lot of agonising over subtle differences in their colour pattern and the shape of their head to be sure I wasn’t looking at their much more common sister species, the garden bumblebee. I encountered a range of cuckoo bumblebees, five of the six known British species, beasts that employ the underhand tactic of invading the nests of other bumblebees, killing the queen and enslaving her poor workers as their own. I found a bumblebee species I had not expected to see – the broken-banded bumblebee, possibly the most unhelpfully named of bees, for it does not usually have the broken band after which it is named, whilst the very similar and common buff-tailed bumblebee often does have a broken band, especially when balding with age. With practice, the two can be separated by other subtle characteristics – for example the broken-banded has a reddish fringe to its white tail, while the buff-tail, which in the worker is actually white tailed, usually has a hint of a brownish fringe. (Sorry, I’m at it again – you’ll appreciate by now why few people ever get fully to grips with identifying bumblebees.) The broken-banded bumblebee is mainly found in the hills of north and western Britain, which was why I had not been expecting it, but it turns out that there is an odd outlier population on Salisbury Plain – odd because the habitat could not be more different. This species was never given BAP status, but there is a good argument to be made that it should have been since it has declined enormously in the last fifty years, with the only reasonably strong population south of mid-Scotland now on the Plain.

  In my exploration of the Plain I visited Imber, today a sombre, lifeless place. The church has been maintained and an annual service is held there, but otherwise the buildings have been slowly allowed to crumble. The old cob and timber-framed houses have rotted and collapsed, being absorbed back into the Plain. The brick-built houses have had their thatched roofs replaced with rusty corrugated tin to keep them standing so that they can be used in mock street battles, and the black sockets of their broken windows stare mournfully at what was once the village high street. It is hard to imagine the bustling little community that once lived there.

  In early August the military operations shut down for two weeks, and I used the opportunity to sneak into the impact zone near the centre of the Plain. Artillery batteries several miles away in Larkhill pound the hell out of this site on a regular basis, producing a lunar landscape of craters in a central area just a few hundred metres across – reassuringly suggesting that they are usually good shots. The craters were sprouting arable weeds such as charlock and poppies – plants normally associated with the disturbance of ploughing, here thriving under the extreme disturbance of regular explosions. Surrounding this pockmarked area was dense scrub – for obvious reasons, domestic livestock such as sheep are not brought out here. Amongst the hawthorns numerous badger setts were evident – presumably the badgers occasionally get blown to smithereens, and perhaps some are a little hard of hearing from the terrible din they must regularly endure, but clearly this was not enough to deter them from living here. Without grazing animals this part of the Plain is slowly reverting to the woodland it would once have been 6,000 years ago. It was fascinating but slightly unnerving to visit a place that is almost never visited by humans – perhaps the only such place in Britain. One might argue that the scrub should be cleared, since it is displacing the many flowers and insects that thrive on the open downs. On the other hand, it is nice to see nature taking its own course for a change.

  My most exciting bee find did not take place until late August, when I had all but given up hope of seeing this particular species. The shrill carder, named after its distinctively high-pitched buzz in flight, is arguably Britain’s most endangered bumblebee. It was once found all over the south and east of Britain, but it declined rapidly as our flower-rich grasslands were destroyed, and it is now found at just a handful of sites, of which Salisbury Plain was reputed to be one. Unlike the other carders, the shrill carder has the decency to have a distinctive colour pattern – it is largely greyish brown, with a black stripe across the thorax and a reddish bottom. This may not sound wildly exciting, but at least it is different, and I was pretty sure I would know one if I saw it. As the summer wore on, and successive visits to the Plain failed to yield a single one, I began to wonder if they had gone extinct there. Then, one late afternoon as I was scouting amongst a scrappy patch of viper’s bugloss near the eastern edge of the Plain, I found myself being circled by a small, high-pitched bee. I’d been struck by this odd behaviour on several occasions during my visits to the Plain – occasionally, and particularly when I was standing out in the open, bees would zoom around my head three or four times in a tight circle before careering off at speed. It felt a little bit as if I was being inspected, investigated as an interesting new feature of the landscape.fn3 Anyway, on this occasion I flapped out wildly with my net, and more by luck than judgement I caught the inquisitive bee and popped it into a pot – lo and behold, it was a rather tired-looking shrill carder worker. Before summer’s end I saw two more, one more worker and a male – the latter very handsome, for the males have brighter colours than the workers.

  In many ways, the best thing about exploring the Plain was not the bees but the other wildlife that I stumbled across. Outside of the tropics, I have rarely if ever seen so many butterflies. On my very first visit I saw plentiful marsh fritillaries, a very rare and declining species with checkerboard orange and black wings. Later in the summer things really got going with clouds of chalkhill blues, marbled whites, vivid sky-blue Adonis blues shimmering in the sunshine, beautifully camouflaged graylings, dark green fritillaries soaring on the breeze, little chocolate-coloured arguses zooming energetically amongst the flowers, and many more. The Plain is also famously rich in bird life, including two of Britain’s oddest and rarest birds, although I only saw one of the two that summer. This was the stone curlew, an awkward-looking chicken-sized creature with a disproportionately large head and bright yellow, slightly bulging eyes. I was lucky enough to spot a pair of them stalking around in a fallow field, but when I tried to creep close they saw me and gave a mournful, plaintive cry before galloping off on their long, gangly yellow legs. I didn’t see the second species because it was not there in 2002, but it has since returned, the subject of an ongoing reintroduction programme – the great bustard. Bustards are odd creatures, in appearance a little reminiscent of grouse or turkeys, but in
truth more closely related to cranes. The great bustard is the world’s heaviest flying bird, with the males weighing up to twenty kilograms and standing over one metre tall. It is also perhaps the most ridiculous. To attract a mate, the males engage in a remarkable and bizarre display, in which they simultaneously inflate an air sac in their neck so that it becomes hugely distended, point their whiskery chin feathers to the sky, flip their wings upside-down and fold their large white tail forwards towards their head. The wildlife TV presenter Chris Packham once memorably described them as resembling a vicar in a tutu. They may hold this uncomfortable pose for many minutes, occasionally shivering their plumage for added drama. As if this doesn’t make them look foolish enough, their call sounds rather as if they are simultaneously sneezing and breaking wind – the combined effect of all of which is apparently appealing if you happen to be a female great bustard. Let’s hope so, for the males’ sakes.

  The great bustard is a creature of wide, open spaces. Once found in Wiltshire and East Anglia, and abroad in the Steppes of Russia and the great plains of Eastern Europe and Spain, its large size made it an irresistible target for hunters, and so it has been exterminated in many areas. In a crowded country such as Britain it stood little chance, particularly in the great nineteenth-century age of hunting, and the last one was shot in 1832. The hunters must surely have known that the great bustards were disappearing, but presumably they just couldn’t help themselves. One hundred and seventy-two years later, in 2004, a team of volunteers calling themselves the Great Bustard Group began a reintroduction programme, using young birds from Russia. The supply of birds was very limited, since they were only allowed to rescue eggs from nests that were in arable fields and were about to be destroyed by harvesting of the surrounding crop. The birds, when hatched, then had to be reared in captivity. Each year about twenty young birds were released, and by 2009 some of the released birds had survived to adulthood and produced the first wild chicks to hatch in Britain for nearly 180 years, although sadly they didn’t make it through the following winter. Adult survival has not been great either – the young birds suffer from predation, and also they have a habit of flying into fences. I visited the release area a few years ago and one of the staff explained that such heavy birds must take off and land at a shallow angle, and that while doing so they are prone to collisions with wire fences, which presumably they do not see until it is too late. The good news was that there seemed to be plenty of suitable food for them, for all of the corpses that had been retrieved along fence lines were in excellent health – aside from being dead.