Plight of the humble bee

Richard Girling
London Times
Sunday, Jan 31, 2009

Native British bees are dying out — and with them will go flora, fauna and one-third of our diet. We may have less than a decade to save them and avert catastrophe. So why is nothing being done?

Midwinter. In a garden not far from the sea in Plymouth, there is a splash of pale sunlight and a sound both familiar and strange. Familiar, because if we close our eyes and think of English gardens it’s the sound that fills our heads. Strange, because now it should be silent.

The drone of a bee.

It is a buff-tailed bumble, Bombus terrestris, a worker pottering among late-flowering fuchsias, heathers and mahonias like the ghost of summers past. All the textbooks say it should be dead. Only queens overwinter in holes in the ground. Yet here it is, at 200 wing-beats a second, energetically hawking the beds for nectar. And it is not alone. The man in whose garden it flits, Dr Mick Hanley, a lecturer in terrestrial ecology at Plymouth University, has recorded them in December and January all the way along the south coast as far east as Ramsgate. Others have found them as far north as Shropshire, Leicestershire and even North Wales.

Weird, you might think, but not something we should worry about. But aberrant behaviour in nature, especially when it happens suddenly, is rarely a sign of systemic good health. A bee in winter is no more proof of a thriving ecosystem than a flake of snow is disproof of global warming. The world is going haywire. If the very worst scenarios are to be believed, then the Plymouth bee is an early pathfinder en route not just to its own Armageddon but to our own.

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• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Think of summer. Meadows and gardens daubed with so much colour it looks as if some giant hand has gone berserk with a paintbrush. Now expunge that picture and think of another. This time the giant hand has mislaid every pigment save brown and olive. There are no blooms, no insects, no birds. No visible wildlife of any kind. No fruit. No sound other than the mechanistic din of humankind harvesting fungi and the approaching cries of battle.

The first picture is a poetic fiction, a received vision of England as it never was, an idyllic land of apple-cheeked rustics singing in harmony with a bountiful Nature. The second is a piece of bleak futurology that assumes the process of environmental degradation will be irreversible, leaving hollow-cheeked starvelings to follow the rest of the world’s fauna across the Styx. The creature that links the two visions — by its abundance in the first and absence from the second — is the same that now buzzes unseasonably among the dripping foliage of our winter gardens. The bee.

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