Bee Quest

by Dave Goulson

  On our last day in Santa Lucia I went to watch the nearest group of male bumblebees to the lodge. After two weeks of strenuous exercise and limited food I felt incredibly fit at last, though in desperate need of a huge, gravy-filled meat pie. The bees were fidgety and restless as ever, eyeing each other from their perches. I couldn’t help but feel a sense of unease. Three thousand kilometres to the south, in the river valleys below Mendoza in Argentina, the European buff-tailed bumblebees are probably still on the move, heading north. Will they make it up here, to these beautiful, pristine mountains? The Ecuadorian cloud forests are full of flowers, and their altitude means that they are not so hot; I wouldn’t be surprised if buff-tails could thrive here, along with their European diseases. We must hope that the buff-tails don’t make it, or that if they do, B. hortulanus proves to be more resilient than B. dahlbomii. That is not the only threat. From where I was sitting I had a narrow view southwards from between the forest trees, to the village in the valley below and beyond. The valley is bright green compared to the forest on the mountain slopes. It has been cleared for sugar cane or pasture, and there are some of these patches of bright green scattered across the mountain slopes, where farmers trying to increase their income have begun clearing the steep sides of the mountains. Santa Lucia is now protected, at least as long as the reserve can keep afloat financially, but steady deforestation is occurring all around. Mika’s estimates from satellite data suggest that 0.7 per cent of the surrounding forests are lost every year. That may not sound like a huge amount, but it means a little less room for pumas, butterflies and coatis every year, and if it goes on for long enough then there will be nothing left. The large mammals are usually the first to go for they need huge ranges, and as humans move in to farm they come into conflict with them. Hunting is still prevalent, and even jaguars, protected under law, are still commonly shot.

  It is a huge challenge to reverse these trends, to reconcile the needs of humans and wildlife, but we have to find a way. Santa Lucia provides one possible model – protecting the forests through tourism and providing facilities for scientific study – but it is not enough. A colleague at Sussex, Jörn Scharlemann, recently calculated what it would cost to set up a network of protected areas that would conserve every endangered bird species in the world. Such a network would, of course, also protect most other endangered species on Earth. The figure – seventy-six billion dollars per year – sounds astronomical, but as he points out, that is just 20 per cent of the global annual spend on fizzy drinks, and less than half of what is paid out each year in bonuses to bankers in Wall Street’s investment banks. Put like that, it is not such a big ask. Of course this sum is only the tiniest fraction of the amount we spend on waging wars. We could easily afford to protect cock-of-the-rocks and cockroaches, hummingbirds and hawk moths, bears and bumblebees, if only we chose to. One can of Coke in five – not much of a price to pay to save the world.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Brownfield Rainforests of the Thames Estuary

  In a field that is claimed to be wasteland

  only fed by the sun and the rain;

  it’s dotted with a sprinkling of yellow

  amongst the wild grasses again.

  Lindsay Laurie, from ‘Dandelion’

  As you will have gathered, I have always been somewhat obsessed with wildlife. From the age of about seven I spent my weekends and summer holidays catching newts and great diving beetles in the local canal, scrambling about in disused quarries for rare orchids, clambering about in an abandoned mill in search of birds’ nests, or hunting for butterflies on the wasteground around some nearby gravel pits. This was Shropshire, the county where the Industrial Revolution began, and these places where my friends and I went hunting for beasts were abandoned relics of that industrial past. I never thought about it at the time, but my friends and I hardly ever went hunting butterflies in farmland, as we had long ago learned that there was rarely much interesting wildlife to be found in the bright green pastures of rye grass or the vast monocultures of wheat.

  You may wonder why these industrial scars sometimes end up supporting so much wildlife. In some cases the answer is obvious – a canal may have been constructed to transport coal or iron ore 150 years ago, for example, but it is at the end of the day just a lengthy, very thin lake, and so long as it isn’t heavily polluted it is bound to be colonised by whirligig beetles, dragonflies, water beetles, kingfishers and a host of other creatures. Many of the ponds that were once a feature of farmland have been filled in, but quite a lot of canals remain (though sadly an awful lot were drained and filled in). Where they survive, canals teem with life, and luckily most that were not destroyed are now looked after and valued as places to fish, cycle along the towpath, birdwatch, or just somewhere to escape to for a bit of peace and quiet, away from the busy roads and hubbub of modern life. But what about quarries, abandoned factories, mine spoil heaps and so on – why on earth should they become valuable reservoirs of wildlife? It is in part simply because they have been abandoned; they are no longer disturbed by man, no pesticides are used, they are not ploughed or cropped. Nature tends to creep back into the most unlikely places if given half a chance. The McLaughlin Reserve I had visited in California is a great example; once a gold mine, now it is a haven for rare bumblebees, rattlesnakes and red-legged frogs.

  One feature that many abandoned industrial sites have in common is that the soil is poor, if there is any soil at all. This may seem counter-intuitive, but much of our wild flora is adapted to low-fertility soils; the widespread use of cheap artificial fertilisers has rendered most farmland too fertile for them to thrive. Next time you find yourself walking along the edge of a field next to a hedge, look at what plant species you can see in the hedge margin. You will rarely see orchids, scabious, harebells or cowslips – instead, wherever you are in Britain, you are likely to see a profusion of nettles, docks and cow parsley sprouting like triffids, for these are among the few species that thrive in high-nitrate soils. In contrast, amongst the broken concrete, spoil heaps, gravel and bedrock of former industrial sites, there are usually few nutrients. Here, many species of plant and insect have found a suitable home where they can thrive in peace.

  The higgledy-piggledy nature of former industrial sites can also offer many different niches for plants and animals to exploit. A quarry is likely to have sun-traps, south-facing sheltered corners where warmth-loving insects and spiders may thrive, and damp, shady corners that the sun never reaches where liverworts and mosses can prosper. There will be cliff ledges for birds to nest on safely, and where pinks and stonecrops might gain a foothold amongst the cracks in the rock. In the quarry bottom water may collect in shallow pools and form marshy areas where amphibians can breed, and damp-loving orchids may spring up. None of this was intended by the workmen who blasted or chipped a hole in the ground all those years ago – at the time, it may have seemed that they were making a terrible mess of the countryside, and local folk may have complained at the dust and noise. The hole the quarrymen made would usually have been abandoned simply because it was no further use and there was no easy way to fill it in, yet in doing so they accidentally created a haven for wildlife.

  Unfortunately, former industrial areas tend to be classified as ‘brownfield’ sites. The very name is unattractive – ‘brownfield’ sounds dirty, and in the popular imagination the word conjures up images of eyesores: polluted, rusting factories and slag heaps, carbuncles in urgent need of remediation followed by redevelopment. What is more, brownfield sites are usually close to or in cities, where land prices are sky-high and developers endlessly on the lookout for land to satisfy our insatiable demand for new housing,fn1 new out-of-town shopping centres, and so on. On the face of it, developing brownfield sites makes perfect sense, if you accept that we need new developments at all. The obvious alternative is to develop greenfield sites, and of course nobody wants that. Greenfield is usually regarded as sacrosanct – Britain’s green and pleasant land – and politicians
regularly pledge to protect it (though of course plenty of greenfield sites are developed every year). But let’s reflect on this paradox for a moment.

  Greenfield site usually means farmland – fields of cereals, oilseed rape or improved, bright green pasture. These fields generally harbour almost no wildlife – they are close to perfect monocultures, without weeds or insects or birds. Go and stand in a field of wheat in high summer and the chances are that you will see nothing but wheat, hear no sound but the wind. There will be no buzz of insects, and probably no twitter of a skylark high above. If there are lots of thick hedges, wide field margins and unfarmed corners then these might support a reasonable number of common plants, birds, insects, and so on, but on the whole most farmland is a desert for wildlife. Ironically, building houses on farmland will result in a significant net increase in the numbers of most types of wildlife – bumblebee populations, for example, seem to be much stronger in gardens than on farmland. When we placed young bumblebee nests in gardens and on farmland and monitored how they grew, the results were clear as day: they tend to do much better in gardens. Honeybee keepers tend to get much higher yields in urban areas, so much so that there has been a huge surge of enthusiasm for beekeeping even in central London, and there are now many hundreds of honeybee hives perched on top of office blocks and hotels. City dwellers tend to think that wildlife lives in the countryside, but oddly enough there is often more in town these days. That is a pretty sad indictment of modern farming, but it also shows the potential of gardens as urban nature reserves, an opportunity that we should make more of if the area of suburbia is to continue to increase as it surely will.

  Of course there are other reasons not to build on farmland, not least the rather obvious one that we need food. Governments often talk about the desirability of being more self-sufficient in food production, so that we do not depend too heavily on imports from abroad, but then they approve the building of entire new towns in rural locations, more often than not on productive farmland. My point is that we should not automatically assume that brown-field development is preferable to greenfield. Each site needs considering on its merits, there being many conflicting pressures on the land as human populations continue to grow.

  I suspect that some readers might think that I’ve lost the plot on this one, for even suggesting that we might sometimes prefer to build houses on a farmer’s green field rather than on a grubby former industrial site. Let me give you an example. But first, let me ask you a question: which site in Britain do you think has the most known species overall, the highest ‘biodiversity’? You’ll never guess, so I’ll tell you – it is Windsor Great Park, a huge area of 3,500 acres containing very ancient oak woodland, lakes and grasslands. Being close to London, it has also been intensely surveyed by biologists of all inclinations for centuries. The list of species known from Windsor Great Park is likely to be somewhere near complete, or at least as near completion as for any site on Earth. Over 2,000 species of beetle alone have been found there, a quite staggering number – who knew that there were this many species in the whole of Britain, let alone living in one place? Now, which site in Britain do you think has the highest density of species, the most per square foot? In truth no one can say with certainty as many places have not been thoroughly searched, but a top contender is a place which could not be more different from Windsor Great Park, though it too is close to London. I had heard much about this place, not least because it has become one of the latest battlegrounds for British conservationists, with its champions coining the term ‘Britain’s rainforest’ to draw attention to the extraordinary biodiversity that the site contains. It had also come to my attention as it was said to harbour populations of some of Britain’s rarest bumblebees. In July 2015, I thought that it was finally time to pay it a visit.

  My trip got off to an inauspicious start. The directions I had been given told me to head for St Clement’s Church in West Thurrock, East London, on the north bank of the Thames Estuary. The area for miles around is one extended industrial estate: roads, roundabouts, concrete hardstanding, huge lorry parks, steel-clad factory buildings and warehouses with graffiti on the walls, litter everywhere. Similar areas can be found sprawling across great tracts of the modern world, especially on the edges of our major cities, and for me they exemplify what an awful shitty mess we are making of the world. Here and there were scraps of vegetation, buddleia, thistles and chicory sprouting on the few bare patches of soil, but it could not have looked much less promising.

  My cheap satnav was not up to the task of dealing with the warren of roads and roundabouts and it took me half an hour of going round in circles in this dispiriting landscape before I eventually found the church. It turned out to be a rather lovely old flint-faced building in typical East Anglian style, once situated in rural Essex but long ago swallowed up by the growing urban sprawl. It now crouches incongruously in the shadow of some kind of industrial chemical plant, massive blocky steel buildings painted bright red, adorned with a tangled mass of steel pipes and silver chimneys spouting fumes.

  Feeling somewhat dispirited and oppressed by the industrial landscape, I parked and walked south from the church along an overgrown litter-strewn path through thickets of bramble and buddleia that were doing their best to hide the sea of discarded rubbish. It was a very warm, humid day and it was stifling along the narrow track, so it was a relief when after about half a kilometre I came out on to the top of the concrete sea wall overlooking the muddy tidal estuary of the Thames. A path ran east and west along the shore. Judging by the abundant dog faeces, graffiti, discarded beer cans and broken bottles, this was clearly a popular route for dog walkers and an evening hangout for teenagers with nowhere better to go. On the mudflats, a lone curlew took flight, its haunting call seeming out of place in this urban mess.

  I turned right, heading west along the sea wall. If my directions were correct, my destination should appear on my right after another kilometre or so. I was looking for West Thurrock Lagoons, a thirty-acre triangle of land which on Google Earth had appeared bright green amongst the concrete sprawl. Part of the site of the old West Thurrock coal-fired power station until the early Nineties, it had been used as a dumping ground for the huge quantities of pulverised fuel ash produced by the station. The power station itself has since been demolished, but the field of ash had been left to its own devices for twenty years or so, and it was this patch of unpromising land that was said to have become a hotspot for wildlife.

  I walked westwards towards the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge over the Thames at Dartford, its looming arch jammed with traffic. I was far enough away that the rumble of engines was barely audible, and it was surprisingly peaceful. Powder-blue flowers of chicory lined my path, from which red-tailed bumblebees were busy gathering nectar. Amongst them were quite a few female Dasypoda hirtipes, one of our more spectacular solitary bee species. They are sometimes known as pantaloon bees since the females appear to be wearing enormous golden trousers of which a gaucho would be proud. In fact, the hind legs are actually clothed in a bush of long, golden hairs which they use to collect pollen. Bees have evolved an eclectic variety of ways of carrying pollen. The most familiar are the ‘baskets’ used by bumblebees and honeybees; these comprise a shiny, flattened hind leg segment along the margin of which is a line of long, curved bristles. Pollen is packed against the side of the leg in a neat ball, glued together with a bit of sticky nectar. The pantaloon bees use the same hind legs, but simply trap dry pollen amongst the multitude of hairs rather than creating a sticky ball. Yellow-faced bees carry the pollen inside their stomachs and regurgitate it in the nest, while leafcutter bees pack it amongst the hairs on their belly.

  As I watched the pantaloon bees fill their pants with pollen, I began to cheer up a bit. After all, the sun was poking through, and there were plenty of flowers and bees. Clumps of ragwort were smothered in insects, tiny black pollen beetles, vivid green swollen-thighed flower beetles, small skipper and gatekeeper butterflies, and hairy orang
e tachinid flies. Teasel spikes taller than me were providing food for garden bumblebees and common carders. A little further along, a very sturdy newish fence appeared on my right, about eight feet tall and topped with nasty-looking spikes. Every ten yards there were stern signs – ‘Strictly no entry’, ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’, and ‘Caution: guard dogs on patrol’, which bore pictures of fierce-looking dogs. Behind the fence all I could see was young birch woodland, some trees perhaps thirty feet tall, which effectively screened everything beyond even from the slightly elevated top of the sea wall. This had to be West Thurrock Lagoons, but it didn’t look as if it was going to be a very productive trip. I hadn’t sought permission to access the site, having hoped that I might just be able to wander in, but this was looking unlikely.

  I walked along the fence line, scouting for a way in, and came upon a large patch of tufted vetch, a handsome, scrambling plant with clusters of tubular purple flowers that is popular with long-tongued bumblebees. And there, busy amongst the flowers, were no less than three brown-banded carder workers, handsome, straw-coloured insects with bands of richer, rusty orange on their abdomens. The brown-banded carder is the commonest of Britain’s rare bumblebees, if that makes any sense – rare enough to get me excited, in any case. As with many of our rarer bumblebees it has become mainly a coastal creature, clinging on in dunes, salt marshes, sea cliffs and other places that aren’t amenable to farming. Salisbury Plain is one of very few places where it can be found inland. I wasn’t entirely surprised to see it here, for the Thames Estuary is one of the last strongholds of the brown-banded carder and also two much rarer species, the shrill carder and the red-shanked carder. Unfortunately this means that these endangered creatures are directly threatened by the urban sprawl of London as it spreads eastwards along the Thames.