by Dave Goulson
cock-of-the-rock 146-148
Colorado 65, 67
Common Agricultural Policy 69-70
common carder bumblebee 11, 12, 18, 29, 54, 58, 67, 160
common red damselfly iii
condor 90
Corden, Chris 1
corn marigold 31
corncockle 31, 199
corncrake 34-36, 46, 47
cowslip 50, 154
Crithidia bombi 95
crofting 32, 34, 36, 39, 47, 57, 68
cuckoo bumblebee 15, 62
Cullem’s bumblebee 64
Darvill, Ben 26, 51
Darwin, Charles 67, 99, 113, 133, 145, 149, 206
Dasypoda hirtipes 160
Davis, California 103, 109-110, 112, 113, 114, 119
Dawson, Bob 46
De Jonghe, Dr Roland 105
distinguished jumping spider 163, 168, 169, 170, 183
disturbance, ecological effects of 10, 31, 53, 170, 179, 198, 199
dobsonfly 135
dog’s mercury v
Dungeness 86, 87
early bumblebee 18, 54, 114
Ecuador 125-151
electrical cables xv-xviii
elephant 191
elk 108, 193-196
eyelash viper 143
fairy shrimp 21-22
Falk, Steven 207
fallow deer 189, 196
fallow land 19, 31, 55, 57, 214
Field, Jeremy 130, 134, 135-136, 137, 138
fireworks, home-made xiii-xix
First World War 5-7
five-banded weevil wasps 163
Foreman, David 190
Franklin, H. J. 104
Franklin’s bumblebee 103-104, 109, 114, 116, 121, 123, 124
fuchsia 75, 91
fulmar 42-43
fuzzy-horned bumblebee 123
garden bumblebee 11, 15, 33, 57, 67, 132, 133, 160
garden tiger vii
gaucho 85, 99, 160
Gause, Georgy 65, 67, 75
gold mining 114-115
golden-headed quetzal 141
Goodall, Jane 222
Gorce mountains 55-58, 68, 81
Goulson, Finn iii, iv, xix
Goulson, Jedd xix
Goulson, Seth xix
Grange, Lord 39
grazing 4, 16, 32, 34, 35, 40, 46, 61, 63, 85, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194, 198, 199, 203, 207, 212, 213, 214, 217
great bustard 19-21, 35, 36, 147
great yellow bumblebee 25-27, 30, 32-33, 35, 36, 44-47, 57, 73
Green, Ted 186, 188
Guardian newspaper 177
haploid males 41-42
harebell 64, 65, 67, 154
Harper, Georgina 191
Harvey, Peter 166
hawthorn vii, 10, 11, 16, 190
hawthorn shield bug iii
heath bumblebee 29, 64
hedgehog 175-176
Heliconius butterfly 127
Henshall, Sarah 165, 179, 181
Himalayan balsam 56
Hitler, Adolf 1
Homalura tarsata 166-167
honeybee 73, 81, 87, 103, 105, 106, 107, 110-111, 113, 118-120, 130, 136, 138, 155, 157, 160, 210
Humble-Bee, The 12, 49
hummingbird 66, 84, 114, 128, 131, 137, 140, 142-143, 144, 150
Imber 4, 5, 7, 16
inbreeding 26, 36, 41, 42, 44
irrigation 117, 118
kidney vetch 10, 14, 28, 33
Kleijn, David 63
knapweed 23, 31, 33, 57, 67
Knepp Estate 185-220
Kremen, Claire 111, 120
lady’s bedstraw 10, 145
Laidlaw, H. H. Jr. 113
Lake Tahoe 123
large-flowered hemp nettle 57, 63
legume 10, 24, 28, 31, 55, 63, 64, 163
lek 147-148
little nomad bee 212
Long Mynd viii
long-tailed tit viii
longhorn cattle 189, 196, 202
Lye, Gillian 51, 53, 58, 59
lynx 55, 192, 205
machair 11, 27-28, 32-36, 40, 41, 45
marsh fritillary 18
McLaughlin Reserve 114-116, 154
melilot 24, 169
Mendoza 77, 83, 84, 85, 92, 97, 149
Microstigmus 138
Monach Isles 37-45
Monbiot, George 40, 138, 185, 203
Morales, Carolina 75, 77, 92, 93
Morrisons supermarket 172, 178, 182, 222
Montalva, Jose 100
moss carder bumblebee 11, 15, 23, 29, 30, 36, 42
Müllerian mimicry 59-60
Nevada bumblebee 134
New Zealand 74, 76, 86, 87, 96
newt 153, 173-176, 181, 183, 208, 224
nightingale 215-216, 217, 219
nomad bee 213, 214
Nosema bombi 107
Noyes, Ella 4-5
oak tree 157, 187, 188, 189, 191, 200, 209, 218
Observer’s Book of Birds’ Eggs viii
Observer’s Book of Caterpillars vii
Oostvaardersplassen 190-191, 192
orchid 62, 63, 126, 132, 153, 154, 155, 178, 179, 191
orchid bee 130, 136-138
Orkney 26
Oronsay 35, 36
Outer Hebrides 11, 25-47, 49, 57, 176
owl butterfly 135
Oxford Book of Insects vi
Packham, Chris 19
parasitoid wasp iii, viii
Peck, Mika 128-129, 131, 138, 150
pheasant’s eye 31
pheromones 71, 133, 145, 148
Poland xxi, 33, 51-70, 71, 74, 81, 89, 93
Poos, Frederick William ii
pooter ii
poppy 16, 31, 104
purple emperor butterfly 217-218
puss moth vii
Pyke, Graham 65, 66
Pywell, Richard 112
Raemakers, Ivo 63
rattlesnake 122, 154
red bartsia 10, 23, 24, 179
red clover 10, 23, 24, 28, 33, 55, 57, 63, 64, 74, 76, 181
red-shanked carder bumblebee 13, 14, 23, 57, 62, 67, 161, 166
red-tailed bumblebee 12, 13, 53, 160
rewilding 190-196, 214, 218, 219
Rhizobium bacteria 28
ring ouzel viii
Ripple, William 195, 196
Rocky Mountains xxi, 109, 114, 124, 193
rootling (by pigs) 198, 209
rough-backed blood bee 213
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds 35, 46, 178, 180, 181
ruderal bumblebee 8, 15, 23, 49, 54, 57, 62, 64, 67, 73-77, 91, 96
rusty patched bumblebee 104, 105
sainfoin 10, 11, 23, 24, 55
Salisbury Plain 1-24, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 58, 59, 62, 81, 86, 147, 190
San Martin 75, 77, 85, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92
scabious 24, 53, 57
Scharlemann, Jörn 150
Schmidt, Justin O. 136
Scriven, Jessica 71, 77, 78, 83, 84, 88, 97
sea aster bee 166
seaweed 32
Second World War 1, 7, 50, 69, 187
Sharp-shouldered furrow bee 211
sheep 4, 6, 7, 16, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40, 42, 43, 45, 61, 86, 87, 204
shepherd’s-needle 31
short-eared owl 29
short-haired bumblebee 20, 49, 64, 87
shrill carder bumblebee 17, 18, 23, 26, 27, 49, 51, 54, 57, 62, 64, 161, 179, 181
silage 35
skylark 11, 156
Sladen, Frederick 12, 13, 24, 49, 68
Smith, Michael L. 136
speckled bush cricket iii
spectacled bear 129-130, 138, 139
St John’s wort 53, 163
stone curlew 18
Stonehenge 3, 6, 8, 21
streaked bombardier beetle 182, 183
subsidy 34, 36, 41, 50, 69, 70, 187, 196, 215
Sutherland 26, 46
sweep net i-ii, 134
Tamworth pigs 196, 198, 201, 208, 209, 210
ta
rantula hawk wasp 136
Tasmania 76, 87
Tatra mountains 51-54, 55, 61
Thorp, Robin 103, 111, 112, 124
Tierra del Fuego 73, 74, 93, 96, 98, 101
translocation 173-175
tree bumblebee 67, 132, 133
tufted vetch 28, 33, 161
Uists 26, 27, 30, 33, 36, 37, 39, 40, 47, 68, 175
US Fish and Wildlife Service 124
Van Dyke’s bumblebee 114
Venus’s looking glass 31
Vera, Frans 191
Vidal, John 177
violet click beetle 189
viper’s bugloss 10, 17, 23, 86, 87, 89, 179
Vollucella bombylans 62
Vollucella zonaria 163
Vosnesensky bumblebee 113, 114
wart-biter cricket 62
weevil 164
West Thurrock 158-159
West Thurrock lagoons 159-171
western bumblebee 66
white clover 10, 28, 40, 213
white-tailed bumblebee 11, 67, 71
wild boar 191, 196, 198, 199, 209
wild mignonette 10
wildlife declines vii, 8, 14, 15, 17, 31, 34, 45, 62-65, 73, 77, 93, 95, 100, 176, 182, 200, 205, 217, 219
Williams, Neal 103, 110, 111, 112, 119, 120
Williams, Paul 132
willow vii, 195, 196, 201
willowherb 53, 54, 67
Wilson, E. O. iii, iv, v
wolf 193, 195, 202
wood cow-wheat 57
Wood, Tom 207, 210-211
yellow rattle 31, 33
yellow-banded bumblebee 104, 105
yellow-tail moth vii
Yellowstone National Park 193-196, 200, 203
Zakopane 51, 52, 54
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Copyright © Dave Goulson 2017
Dave Goulson has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape in 2017
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Prologue
fn1 A small glass jar stoppered with a bung, through which two flexible plastic tubes pass. The end of one tube is pointed at the insects, and the entomologist sucks on the other. All being well, the insect is sucked up the tube and into the jar. One vital feature is that the tube on which one sucks has mesh over the end within the jar – without this, the contents of the jar are liable to shoot up into one’s lungs. Even so, it is all too easy in the excitement of spotting an interesting insect to suck on the wrong tube, and inhale all one’s previous catches. Delightfully, the pooter was invented in the 1930s by the American entomologist Frederick William Poos, Jr.
fn2 The caterpillars of the garden tiger used to be very common across England, and were well-known to children as woolly bears. Few children today will have seen one, as this species has undergone a massive decline during my lifetime.
Chapter 1: Salisbury Plain and the Shrill Carder
fn1 Chris Corden’s Salisbury Plain: Military and Civilian Life on The Plain since the 1890s provides an engaging account of the army’s varied and sometimes eccentric activities on the Plain through to the present day.
fn2 These are species that are formally recognised as endangered – BAP stands for Biodiversity Action Plan, for these are species for which the government is supposed to have developed and implemented a conservation strategy. There were seven BAP bumblebees in the UK, but the scheme was discontinued in 2010.
fn3 The following year I came back with most of my research team to investigate this in more detail. When a bee is circling one’s head at speed it is hard to catch, but I had flapped at quite a few and been struck by the fact that the bees I caught were almost invariably red-tails and broken-banded bumblebees. Buff-tails, common carders and early bumblebees were much more common on the Plain than broken-banded bumblebees, yet none of the former ever seemed to indulge in this odd behaviour. With my team, we spent a couple of days in the summer of 2003 and 2004 doing nothing but standing in the middle of the Plain and attempting to catch the bees that circled our heads. My early impression was correct – some species seem much more prone to this behaviour than others. To this day we have little idea why they should differ – perhaps these species put more effort into memorising any new landmarks that they encounter, to aid their navigation. Or perhaps red-tails and broken-banded bumblebees are just more nosy.
Chapter 2: Benbecula and the Great Yellow Bumblebee
fn1 To do this we chop the last segment off one of the legs of the bee – it seems a little harsh, but the poor bees seem more or less unaffected.
fn2 In A Buzz in the Meadow, I describe how this plant may be used to help recreate flower-rich grasslands, and also how, in the Alps, specialist nectar-robbing bumblebees learn from each other how to steal nectar from rattle.
fn3 Silage is made by cutting fresh grass and packing it densely in clamps or round bales, sealed with a plastic sheet. In these anaerobic conditions the grass keeps well while gently fermenting, producing a smelly brown mulch that cows and sheep readily consume. Unlike hay it does not require fine weather for drying, and with plentiful fertilisers to encourage the grass to grow several cuts can be taken per year, providing far more fodder per acre than a hay meadow. Good news for farmers, but not so good for bees, bustards or corncrakes.
fn4 The islands have even been used as an improvised prison. In 1732, a Scottish judge and politician named Lord Grange fell out with his wife, to whom he had been married for twenty-five years and who had borne him an impressive nine children. She accused him – probably correctly – of infidelity and treasonable plotting against the government, and to shut her up he had her kidnapped and taken to the Monachs. After two years he must have decided that even the Monachs were not remote enough, for he had her moved to St Kilda, another sixty kilometres further west, where the poor lady lived for another ten years.
fn5 The Bumblebee Conservation Trust’s former Scottish Officer, Bob Dawson, made a hobby out of attempting to locate great yellow bumblebees in new ten-kilometre-grid squares, targeting those adjacent to known populations and scouring any suitable habitat. If one browses the online distribution maps for the great yellow available on the National Biodiversity Network webpage, it appears to have almost doubled its range in Northern Scotland in 2008–10, but I fear that this is largely an artefact of Bob’s efforts. There is a more general point that it can be very hard to disentangle genuine range changes from changing recorder efforts.
Chapter 3: Gorce Mountains and the Yellow Armpit Bee
fn1 Read A Sting in the Tale to find out more about the adventures of Toby the bumblebee sniffer dog.
fn2 Of course these bees have no common English names as they have never occurred in the UK, but one can have fun inventing suitable names for them. I’d suggest the old carder bumblebee and the red-tailed robber bumblebee for these two, the latter for reasons that will become clear.
fn3 I greatly enjoyed Polish food, but by the end of the trip I had had quite enough of their sausages, which came in an astonishing variety
of shapes, colours and sizes, but all tasted much the same to me.
fn4 It is, regrettably, sometimes necessary to collect insects if one wishes to know for certain what species they belong to. Unless one can identify them with certainty it is not possible to study them, or work out how to conserve them.
fn5 This is a species I was later to come to know well during fieldwork in the Swiss Alps, as described in A Buzz in the Meadow. There we found that B. wurflenii have a habit of always robbing flowers on the same side, with individual bees copying each other’s robbing behaviour right down to the detail of which side of the flower they attack.
fn6 ‘Ley’ is a term for resting the land, either by leaving it fallow or by sowing a legume crop and then ploughing it in to boost soil health.
fn7 Invasive weeds – non-native plants that run amok in the wild – are a major threat to biodiversity, and Himalayan balsam is one of the worst in Europe, smothering native stream-bank vegetation from Britain to Poland and beyond. If there were a way to effectively control it then I would have to agree that this would be a good thing, but there would undoubtedly be negative consequences for our poor bumblebees. In the flowerless void that is most modern British farmland, stands of balsam along ditches and streams are often amongst the only sources of food left for them.
fn8 Of course, no one is suggesting that the bees thought this through, got together at a big meeting, and collectively agreed on a common colour scheme. The idea is just that natural selection favoured individual bees that most closely resembled the colour pattern of whatever happened to be the most common species in any particular area. The phenomenon of stinging or poisonous species coming to resemble one another is known as Müllerian mimicry after the German naturalist Fritz Müller who first proposed the concept.
fn9 When a palatable species evolves to look like a poisonous or dangerous one it is known as Batesian mimicry, after Henry Walter Bates, who noticed that edible species of Brazilian butterfly often closely mimic poisonous species.
Chapter 4: Patagonia and the Giant Golden Bumblebee
fn1 An aptly named bumblebee, it was only discovered in the UK in 2002 for the simple reason that it is indistinguishable from the white-tailed bumblebee unless one takes the trouble to look at its DNA or analyse its sex pheromones. As a result, we know almost nothing about this species, a situation that Jess is attempting to remedy.
fn2 If you’ve not come across it, dreich is a Scottish colloquialism for damp, drizzly, cold and miserable weather. It is a useful term to describe the Scottish weather through much of the autumn, winter and spring, and often comes in handy in the summer too.