The far from humble bumble bee

ON this sunny September day, the flowers on the sedum plants in the garden have, I think, reddened more since I visited them this morning, and the insects visiting them have increased three-fold.

It is hard to stay indoors on a day like this and the display of butterflies, bees and hoverflies in the garden makes it even more difficult. I can forego sunbathing, but to turn my back on the display and focus on black letters slowly crawling across a white screen seems almost a sin.

The syndrome of not wanting to miss something special or unique will, I image, be familiar to my readers. The gorgeous panoply of winged insects on the reddening flowers will, of course, happen again but never again, perhaps, in the same configuration, although in a thousand others, equally striking.

This September, there are dozens of red admiral butterflies, a few tortoiseshells, a few painted ladys, no peacocks yet, but an unusually large number and diversity of bumblebees, carder bees and hoverflies.

There are 13 species of bumblebees in Ireland, 22 in Britain, down from 25 half a century ago. All species are threatened by habitat loss and the spraying of insecticides.

Biodiversity Ireland has published various studies in order to raise our awareness of bumblebees. Entirely benevolent denizens of our gardens, they pollinate flowers and fruit trees, do not sting as do wasps, and their sonorous voices in sunny lanes in February herald the spring.

These first bees are likely to be Bombus terrestris queens, the big, fat, buff-tailed bees that bumbles about amongst the spring flowers, feeding and gathering pollen and nectar while searching for a suitable nesting place. Once this is found, they store nectar in a nectar pot, a larder for themselves in bad weather, and nutrition for the forthcoming brood.

They lay eggs and the first workers, all non-reproductive females, are born.

Narratives of rural life in the past record country children robbing the queen’s thimble-sized honey pot. Wild honey bee nests would yield very much more honey (a nest may house 30,000 individuals, while bumblebee nests rarely house more than 200) but honey bees sting.

In summer, when these female workers have renewed the food store in preparation for a second brood, the queen lays again and, this time fertile young queens and males are born. These will disperse and interbreed with males and females from other nests.

Bees have been buzzing about this planet much longer than we have. Around 100 million years ago, plants that relied on pollination by insects began to develop and, simultaneously, bees evolved from wasp-type ancestors. This raises the vexing question: which came first, the flower or the bee?

Pollination by bees in Ireland is worth some €53m to the economy per year, the worldwide economic value of pollination is estimated at €153bn. With some 30% of Irish bee species in decline, Biodiversity Ireland Data Centre has been launching studies to determine how best to save the extant populations from decline, and gives advice on how to make one’s land holding or garden more bee-friendly. Bees benefits us; we would be foolish not to cherish them.

A new population of the rare Great Yellow Bumblebee, a species threatened with extinction in Ireland, was found in the Burren in Jul 2010 along with previously unknown colonies of the Shrill carder bee and the Red shanked carder bee, both very rare species.

On the island of La Graciosa, north of Lanzarote, I was fascinated to find dozens of amphora-shaped clay receptacles, very much like small pipe heads as seen on kief pipes in Morocco or in the clay bubble pipes we used to play with long ago. They were dry as old bones and scattered in the semi-desert through which we walked. Nobody seemed to bother with them.

I took half a dozen home and still have them. Made by plasterer bees secreting a polyester-like resin perhaps a million years ago, besides being intrinsically beautiful, they are extraordinary in their resilience.

Down the aeons, the winds that scour the dry plains of Graciosa blew the sand in which they were created and exposed them. Plasterer bees are widespread in Ireland. Such wonderful and useful creatures are to be treasured, as are all our living bees.