Bee Quest

by Dave Goulson

  The Knepp project is only really possible because of taxpayers’ money, in the form of an annual subsidy in the region of a quarter of a million pounds. Other income comes from the sale of high quality meat, ‘safaris’ that are run to see the wildlife, a ‘glamping’ site,fn12 hosting weddings in fancy tepees, renting out former farm buildings as offices and workshops, and anything else Charlie and his team can dream up. Overall, they are running a small profit, enough to keep them afloat. You might question why your taxes should pay for this? Personally I think it is a bargain, particularly when compared to many of the other things on which our money is spent,fn13 though by now you’ll have guessed that I have bought the concept hook, line and sinker.

  What is perhaps most fascinating for me about Knepp is that its most striking successes were never planned or anticipated. There was no deliberate intention of encouraging nightingales, yet they arrived. Nightingales have undergone a drastic population collapse in the UK – between 1967 and 2007 the UK nightingale population fell by 91 per cent, the biggest fall in numbers of any UK breeding bird since records began. If one had set out to create habitat for it, what Charlie has done at Knepp would almost certainly not have been seen as the way forward – the decline of nightingales has been blamed largely on overgrazing by the UK’s growing deer population, which is thought to have damaged the thickets in which it nests – so creating a large enclosure full of deer and other grazers would not have seemed like a great idea.

  Another great success story at Knepp has been the rise of the purple emperor. Glance through a guide to British butterflies, and two species stand out as being especially spectacular: the swallowtail, a majestic yellow and black kite-shaped butterfly with elegant tail streamers, sadly found only on the Norfolk Broads; and the purple emperor, a big, powerful insect, the males with iridescent purple wings. Both were species that I could only have dreamed of seeing as a child in rural Shropshire. The purple emperor is an elusive beast that is generally found in large tracts of mature, deciduous woodland in the south of England. Even in such places it is rarely seen, for the butterflies spend most of their day in the treetops; they feed on honeydew, the sugary droppings of greenfly, so have no need to come down to flowers. The males set up territories in the canopy of an especially tall tree, known amongst emperor aficionados as the ‘master tree’, and there they engage in aerial skirmishes not unlike those of Bombus hortulanus, their wings glinting in the July sunshine. The females lay their eggs on sallow trees growing along the edge of woodland rides or clearings. If one wished to conserve purple emperors, one would probably conclude that the best strategy would be to protect ancient woodlands at all cost. If anyone had suggested that arable farmland could become prime emperor habitat within just ten years, they would have been regarded as nuts. Yet this is exactly what has happened at Knepp. The sallows have proliferated in some of the meadows, and the standard oaks along the overgrowing hedge-lines provide master trees. Purple emperors were simply not found at Knepp before the rewilding began; by 2013, no less than eighty-four males were seen in a single day (surveys tend to focus on the territorial males which can be counted through binoculars, a tricky business but much easier than trying to spot and count the less colourful and less active females).

  Sadly, a recurring feature of man’s activities is that we endlessly implement change – sometimes deliberately, often accidentally. For millions of years, change tended to be very gradual on this planet. Aside from the occasional asteroid strike, tens of millions of years would go by without anything particularly much happening. Ice ages came and went over periods of thousands or tens of thousands of years. Each year a handful of species naturally went extinct, but new species gradually evolved so that there has been a net increase in global biodiversity over the millennia – until very recently. Nowadays, large-scale, man-induced changes can occur in years, sometimes in just hours. We clear forests for farming, introduce invasive species, introduce set-aside schemes in farming, decimate fish stocks, plant dense forests of non-native conifers and then cut them down, drain marshes, create dams and reservoirs, abandon marginal lands, scrap the set-aside schemes we’d introduced just a few years earlier, cause acid rain then partly fix the problem, make holes in the ozone layer then partly remedy that too, alter the climate, exterminate large predators, introduce endless new pesticides and other pollutants and then ban some of them only after we have seen the predictable damage they do – a ceaseless barrage of change in the face of which wildlife has to either adapt or die. Most creatures can adapt to gradual change, particularly if they start with a large, genetically diverse population, but few can cope with the continual, rapid changes that we throw at them. I sometimes wish we could just learn to stand still for a while, to let nature catch up, but that seems to be the one thing that mankind is most unlikely to do any time soon.

  Knepp is a wonderful example of what can happen if we just stop. Stop doing anything at all – stop trying to conserve, stop trying to interfere, stop trying to manage – just let nature catch up, absorb the changes that went before, and then do its own thing. Who knows what will happen next at Knepp, what new species will arrive? What will it look like in a year, a decade, a hundred years? The truth is that we really don’t know, we cannot anticipate – and although I am a scientist, and it is my job to seek to understand and predict these changes, I rather like that.

  Is it too much to think that we might have a rewilding project in every county in Britain? Places within reach of all of us, where we could experience a sense of adventure, of nature unchained. Where we could hope to glimpse the purple flash of an emperor, hear a nightingale sing, perhaps hear the slap of a beaver’s tail as it warned its family of our presence.

  I’m not suggesting that we abandon traditional nature reserves – they have an important role to play – but it is clear that the traditional model of conservation, setting up reserves to protect a particular rare habitat or species, has not managed to stem the overwhelming tide of wildlife decline. Perhaps there is another way, one that might help us to reconnect with the natural world.

  Conservation can be a depressing subject. It often feels as if we are fighting a rear-guard action, a losing battle against the relentless tide of human population growth and the futile, senseless drive for economic growth at all costs. If you ever feel that all hope is lost, then go to Knepp, or Canvey Wick, and take heart. Nature is fantastically resilient, and it will recover, though of course the more damage we do the longer that will take. Is there anything closer to true magic in this world than the transformation of a lagoon of grey, industrial ash into a flower- and insect-filled meadow?

  There will one day come a time when we stop messing up the Earth – either because we have wiped ourselves out or because we have learned to live amongst nature, rather than trying to exert dominion over it. When that happens, wildlife will come back, creeping from the cracks in the concrete, sprouting from the seeds that remain in the soil, adapting, thriving, evolving into new and wonderful forms. It would just be nice if we or our children were here to see it.

  Epilogue: Back-garden Bees

  The world’s biodiversity is under threat, particularly in such exotic places as Ecuador, a country blessed with extraordinary natural riches but also with an impoverished and rapidly growing human population. It is easy for us to criticise from afar, bemoaning the deforestation, the pollution and the foolish deliberate introductions of invasive species, while living in our comfortable, warm houses, watching our flat-screen TV from Korea while snacking on almonds from California, sipping an Australian Shiraz, and pondering whether to splash out on a holiday to the Maldives or stick with Tenerife again. In truth, we in the developed world are in no position to preach, for we have already devastated our own countries, stripping them of forests long ago, scrubbing clean the land of most of its wildlife to create cities, motorways, shopping centres, golf courses and of course vast monocultures of crops. Even when we discover hotspots for wildlife that have somehow sprung
up right under our noses, in our biggest cities, we do a poor job of protecting them. We create the demand for much of what happens in the developing world, with our endlessly increasing consumption of fossil fuel, food, minerals and other resources. It is often huge companies based in Europe and the USA that buy up cheap land in developing countries and impose industrial farming regimes, or conduct devastating mining activities that rip great holes in the land and pollute rivers and soils. In any case, we can hardly blame people in developing countries for trying to attain our luxurious lifestyle.

  We could afford to save the world, if we so chose, and surely we must. Skipping one can of Coke in five, or an equivalent, would hardly place us in great hardship. We could rein in the blatant profiteering of multinational companies who take advantage of the weaker environmental legislation in developing countries. We could pay poorer countries to protect their wildlife, and we would barely notice the cost. But we also need to put our own house in order, for we too continue to prioritise new rail links over preserving ancient woodland, we pollute our farmland with a blizzard of chemicals, and we spend millions prospecting for gas in shale rocks while pretending to care about tackling climate change.

  All of these issues are hard to fix. We often feel helpless. The main political parties rarely mention the environment except as a token gesture in the run-up to an election. Remember David Cameron’s quick trip to the Arctic to hug a husky during the 2010 election campaign, in which he promised the ‘greenest government ever’, before appointing the climate-change sceptic Owen Paterson as Environment Secretary? But of course we are not entirely helpless. Aside from voting every few years, we make important decisions every day. As Jane Goodall said, We have to realise that each day we make some kind of impact. And we have a choice as to what type of impact we will make.

  Conservation begins at home. We should all recycle everything we can – it is possible to almost entirely avoid producing waste that has to go to landfill, especially if one avoids buying food with unnecessary or unrecyclable packaging. I recently spotted on social media a caption someone had written beneath a picture of rows of bananas on sale in Morrisons, where each individual banana had been packed on a polystyrene tray and covered in cling film. The comment read, If only bananas had evolved with their own hygienic removable wrapper. Why do we put up with such nonsense? We should all try to buy locally produced food, ideally from organic farms. There are plenty around, and they need our support. We could all do without buying strawberries from Chile in January, and perhaps if none of us had bought them the Chilean government might not have felt the need to import our bumblebees. If customers demand it, supermarkets will soon respond, and our collective buying power could have a huge influence on the way we produce food at a global scale. We should all have a compost heap or a wormery, or both, though this might be tricky if you live in a flat. If you have space, have a go at growing your own, healthy, nutritious food, and plant flowers to encourage bees, butterflies and birds. It might not seem like it, but every small decision makes a difference – after all, there are now more than seven billion of us, and we each hold the future of our planet in our hands.

  Imagine if every garden in Britain was wildlife friendly, with cottage-garden herbs and wildflowers, healthy home-grown veg and perhaps a home-made bee hotel for solitary bees to nest in in the corner. Why don’t we ban pesticides in our gardens and urban areas? Quite a few cities around the world have done this, and they are not overrun with pests. Imagine also, council-owned land managed to encourage wildlife: road verges and roundabouts not mown every five minutes, but instead sown with wildflowers; grassy areas in parks allowed to grow long in places. Let’s persuade our local authorities to stop putting out annual bedding plants every spring, which are no use to wildlife, but instead to plant the borders in our parks with bee- and butterfly-friendly perennials. What about having patches of flower-filled hay-meadows on university campuses and in school grounds. Perhaps our industrial estates and science parks could be planted with native flowering shrubs that provide food for bees and berries for birds, rather than planting evergreen exotics. Why don’t we plant apple, pear and plum trees along our suburban avenues so that the residents could pick fruit along the street, and children could pluck an apple on the way to school? We might sprinkle in some green roofs and green walls on new buildings. Perhaps we could protect wildlife-rich brownfield sites and open them up to the public, rather than allowing them to be tarmacked over. We could green our cities, encourage wildlife in to live amongst us, and create the largest nature reserves in Britain, all for no net cost whatsoever. Our children could grow up connected to and respecting nature, able to catch grasshoppers in their hands amongst the long grass, watch the bees bustling amongst the runner bean flowers, or hunt for newts and great diving beetles in the local canal. If this is what we want for them, then now is the time to act. My fervent hope is that future generations will have the chance to experience the natural world first hand, so that they too can fall in love with it. One of my greatest fears is that my grandchildren, should I ever have them, will grow up in a grey, impoverished world of concrete and steel, unable to experience nature for themselves because it has all but gone, and not knowing or caring because they have no idea what they have missed. It doesn’t have to be this way. It is within our grasp to green our cities. Increasing urbanisation is inevitable, so let’s use our imagination to make our urban areas into sprawling nature reserves, where people and wildlife live alongside one another in harmony. Perhaps it is too fanciful to think that our cities might become ‘Britain’s rainforests’, but our children might thank us if we try.

  Index

  The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.

  acorn woodpecker 122-123

  Adonis blue butterfly 18, 63, 191, 192

  almond 110, 116-121, 123

  Alstroemeria 91

  Andrena fulva 212

  Andrena haemorrhoa 212

  Apicystis bombi 95

  apple bumblebee 64

  arable weed 16, 31, 32, 34, 57, 199, 214

  Arbetman, Marina 92, 93, 95, 98, 108

  Argentina 71-101, 108, 112, 123, 149

  Arrayan tree 92

  Ashland 109, 121

  Atlantic grey seal 43-44

  badger 16

  basking shark 44

  Batesian mimicry 60

  beaver 195, 196, 200, 204, 205, 206, 219

  Benbecula 25-29, 37, 72

  bess beetle 135

  betony 10, 14

  bilberry 61, 64

  bird’s-foot trefoil 10, 24, 28, 181, 213

  black-tailed bumblebee 113

  bluebell 209-210

  Bombus atratus 72, 81

  Bombus bellicosus 73, 79

  Bombus dahlbomii 73-77, 84, 85, 91-100, 107, 123, 150

  Bombus hortulanus 132, 144, 145, 150, 217

  Bombus quadricolor 62

  Bombus opifex 84, 85, 97

  Bombus pyrenaeus 54

  Bombus veteranus 51, 54

  Bombus wurflenii 51, 53, 54

  Brittain, Claire 120

  broken-banded bumblebee 15, 18, 24, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 67

  brownfield sites 153-184, 224

  bromeliad 132

  brown-banded carder bumblebee 8, 11, 15, 24, 64, 65, 161, 168, 181

  buff-tailed bumblebee iii, 15, 18, 30, 49, 57, 59, 67, 72, 75, 76-77, 87, 89-100, 105, 107, 149, 150, 207

  Buglife 165, 167, 168, 170, 171, 176, 177, 178, 181

  bullet ant 136

  bull-headed furrow bee 213

  bumblebee breeding 105-106

  Bumblebee Conservation Trust 30, 46

  Burrell, Sir Charles 185, 186, 187-190, 196-197, 199-202, 204, 206, 208, 209, 213-217

  buzz pollination 27

  Caithness 26, 46

  California 103-124

  Camer
on, Sydney 108

  Canvey Island 171-172

  Canvey Island ground beetle 177

  Canvey Wick 171-183, 219

  caracara 79

  carpenter bee 72, 81, 82, 87, 114, 120

  Carvell, Claire 63

  Central Valley, California 109, 110, 111, 114, 116, 118, 120

  chalkhill blue 18, 63

  charlock 16

  chemistry experiments ix-xv

  Chile 73, 74, 75, 76, 85, 89, 91, 96, 100, 106, 223

  chipmunks 126

  chlorine gas x

  cicada 82, 131, 140

  cinnabar moth vi

  clover ley 55, 57, 63