A Sting in the Tale (3 page)

I was not fully aware of it at the time, but my childhood coincided with a catastrophic period in the history of the British countryside, at least from the point of view of a butterfly or bumblebee. Shropshire may sound idyllic, but this is misleading. It was and is a relatively rural, green and pleasant part of Britain, but it is not the haven for wildlife that it might once have been. I moved there in 1972, and left for university in 1984. At weekends I would often walk with my friends to the Shropshire Union Canal about two miles away across the countryside, searching the hedges for birds' nests along the way. When I started, this walk involved crossing fifteen fields, each bounded by a hedge. By the time I left for university, the walk involved crossing one field – a huge one. The hedges in which I used to search for birds' eggs had been ripped out, one by one. A large part of the canal itself had been filled in, covered in topsoil, and was now just a part of the arable expanse. Where once a bumblebee would have been able to find brambles in the hedges, cowslips in the hedge banks and marsh woundwort on the sides of the canal, there was now only a sea of cereals, a monoculture stretching across the landscape. These changes occurred almost everywhere in lowland Britain, sweeping across Western Europe.

These changes drove the decline and, in some cases, the extinction of many creatures, and our countryside is a much poorer place because of it. But the battle is not lost. We have slowly, tentatively, started to find ways to undo the damage. Scientific studies are revealing how best to combine efficient farming with looking after the countryside. A range of payments is available to farmers to support them in encouraging wildlife. The British have a peculiar and unique love of the countryside and the animals and plants which inhabit it, and there is a huge groundswell of support for conservation. To tap into this, in 2006 I launched the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, a charity devoted to saving our bumblebees, and to my delight the Trust has flourished. It now has over 8,000 paid-up members, and is creating flower-rich habitat for bumblebees across Britain from Kent to Pembrokeshire to Caithness. Most of our wildlife clings on, and with our help it can recover. Sometimes even species which have been lost entirely might one day return. But that is the subject of Chapter 1 …

CHAPTER ONE

The Short-haired Bumblebee

In the 1870s, New Zealand farmers found that the red clover which they had imported from Britain, as a fodder crop for horses and cattle, did not set much seed. As a result, they found themselves having to continually import more seed from Europe at considerable expense, rather than collecting and sowing their own. In the end a solicitor named R. W. Fereday worked out the cause of the problem. Fereday had emigrated to New Zealand in 1869 and, aside from his legal work, was a keen entomologist with a particular interest in small moths. It was Fereday who realised, while staying on his brother's farm, that the problem lay in the absence of the bumblebees which normally pollinated the clover back in Britain. The problem was taken up by Frank Buckland, Her Majesty's Inspector of Fisheries at the time, whose remit seems to have extended well beyond fish. He wrote back to England with a request for bumblebees to be sent on the steamships which regularly plied between Britain and New Zealand. The first, rather ill-thought out, attempt to do so involved a Dr Featherston digging up two carder bumblebee nests in late summer and sending them to the Honourable John Hall of Plymouth, New Zealand, in 1875. They arrived in January and, inevitably, were all dead. Bumblebee nests naturally die out in September, and in any case there were no flowers on the ship for them to feed on, so this scheme was doomed from the start.

Eight years later the idea was revived with rather more competence. A Mr S. G. Farr, secretary of the Canterbury Acclimatisation Society (of whom more later), contacted Thomas Nottidge, a banker from Maidstone in Kent, asking for more bumblebees to be sent. (They also asked him for a few hedgehogs while he was at it – as you do.) So it was that, in the autumn of 1884, Nottidge offered a bounty to farm labourers for every hibernating bumblebee queen that they could find. Hand digging, clearing and widening of ditches was a common autumn and winter practice on arable farms when there wasn't much else to keep farm labourers busy, and these labourers often turned up the plump hibernating queens as they dug, suggesting that queen bees particularly like to hibernate in ditch banks. As a result, a total of 282 queens were obtained and placed on the SS
Tongariro
, one of the first steamships to be built with a refrigeration unit. This was essential as the hibernating queens would otherwise have become too warm when crossing the equator, and would have woken up and quickly died. The
Tongariro
left London in December 1884 and arrived in Christchurch on 8 January 1885 (high summer in New Zealand). When they were warmed up, forty-eight queens proved to still be alive. They were fed with honey and flew away. A further consignment of 260 queens was sent that same January on a sister ship, the SS
Aorangi
, and arrived on 5 February. Of these, forty-nine were still alive and were released.

We have no idea what species of bumblebee these ninety-seven queens belonged to, or how many survived long enough to build a nest and produce offspring. What we do know is that some thrived in their new home for, by the summer of 1886, bumblebees were seen up to 100 miles south of Christchurch. Indeed, by 1892 bumblebees had become so common in some areas that honeybee keepers feared they might become a pest.

British bumblebees flourish in New Zealand to this day. On their long boat trip they also left behind many of the diseases and parasites that attack them in their native land, which probably helped considerably. The species that survived are an odd selection. We might have expected them to be the most common Kent species, but either our most common species were not included or they failed to survive. The four now found in New Zealand are the buff-tailed bumblebee, the garden bumblebee, the ruderal bumblebee and the short-haired bumblebee. Of these, the buff-tailed is by far the most common – they are everywhere, from the gardens and parks of Christchurch to the spectacular fjords of Milford Sound, where I have seen them feeding on the flowers of the gigantic New Zealand flax. The short-haired bumblebee is the least common, but if you know where to look, they can still be found in central South Island.

Sadly, two of these species have not fared so well in the UK. The ruderal bumblebee was once known as the ‘large garden bumblebee' because it was a familiar sight in gardens throughout much of England. Nowadays the ruderal bumblebee is an exceedingly rare creature, found only in a few places in the East Midlands and East Anglia. The short-haired bumblebee has fared even worse. One hundred years ago they were common in the south and east of England, but during the second half of the twentieth century their numbers plummeted. By the 1980s they were known only in a handful of places, and one by one, those populations disappeared. The last individual was caught near Dungeness in 1988; it fell into a pitfall trap used to monitor beetles and drowned. No one has seen any since.

Of course you will have worked out why these bees disappeared. It happened while I was growing up. When I was born in 1965 the short-haired bumblebee was still quite widespread, although not as far north and west as Shropshire. By the time I went to university in 1984 it was nearly extinct. I never saw one before they vanished.

Here's why: it's Adolf Hitler's fault. To be absolutely fair, it wasn't entirely his fault, but he has to carry some of the blame. One hundred years ago, farming was not mechanised. Without mechanisation, fields tended to be small. Farmers depended on horses for power, and horses love to eat clover, so most farmers grew clover. Bees also love clover. Both the horses and other farm livestock needed hay for the winter, so most farmers had hay meadows. These were permanent features of the farm, cut once or twice a year, and sometimes grazed a little in the milder winter months. Artificial fertilisers weren't available, so apart from a bit of animal dung the meadows were not fertilised. In the low-nutrient soils of hay meadows, wild flowers flourished, particularly those with symbiotic root bacteria that could trap nitrogen from the air and so didn't need nutrient-rich soil. The main family that can do this is that of the legumes: vetches, trefoils and clovers (and also our garden peas and beans). Bees love them all.

Arable crops need fertile soils. The traditional way to maintain soil fertility was to grow crops in rotation. For many centuries, European farmers used a three-year rotation of rye or wheat followed by oats or barley, then letting the field lie fallow in the third year. In the eighteenth century, a British agriculturalist named Charles Townshend promoted a four-year rotation, using wheat, turnips, barley and clover in succession. The nitrogen fixed by the clover boosted soil fertility in the following years, increasing yields, and the scheme was widely adopted. So, imagine Britain a hundred years ago; a patchwork of small fields, cereals and root crops intermixed with clover leys and permanent hay meadows. No artificial fertilisers, no pesticides. Lots and lots of happy bees.

Then roll forwards a few years. The internal combustion engine had by now provided farmers with an alternative to horses, in the form of tractors. The booming motor industry demanded oil, and the petrochemical industry that grew up on its back made it possible to synthesise cheap nitrogen-based fertilisers. These greatly boosted crop yields and removed the need for rotations, so clover leys were abandoned. Moreover, horses were no longer needed, so no clover was necessary for feeding them.

Silage making is an alternative approach to providing winter fodder for livestock. Where hay requires a dry period for harvesting, meaning that wet summers can be a disaster for farmers dependent on it to feed their animals, the grass for silage can be cut even when it is wet. With the addition of cheap fertilisers to hay meadows, the grass grows much more quickly and so can be cut for silage many times during the spring and summer, providing a larger and more reliable supply of winter fodder. An unfortunate side effect is that adding fertilisers to hay meadows quickly results in the disappearance of most of the wild flowers. The clovers and other legumes, which used to gain an edge from their ability to fix nitrogen from the air, lose their advantage when nitrates are poured on to the ground, and cannot compete with fast-growing grasses.

None of this sounds good for bees, for fewer clover leys and fewer hay meadows means fewer flowers. So where does Hitler come in? By the advent of the Second World War, farming in the UK was changing, but only slowly. The techniques for growing more food were available – tractors, fertilisers, silage – but farmers tend to be traditionalists at heart and often farm as their parents farmed. There was no great pressure to change. Then, in 1940, Britain found itself isolated. No food could be brought over from mainland Europe. Obtaining supplies from across the Atlantic was perilous, with U-boats taking a heavy toll on shipping convoys. Before the war, Britain had been importing about 55 million tons of food each year. Suddenly, being able to supply enough food for our substantial population living on our small and crowded island became terribly important. As a result, the government launched a ‘Dig for Victory' campaign, encouraging everybody to dig up their lawn and grow as much food as possible. At the same time, farmers were encouraged to use every measure available to maximise food production. Patches of land which had previously been deemed too small to bother with were now ploughed and sown with crops, hedges were ripped out, marshes were drained. Between 1939 and 1945 the area of land used for food production rose by 80 per cent.

From a bumblebee's perspective, the war era led to some other unfortunate developments. The chemical dichlorodiphenyltrichloro-ethane (usually known as DDT) was first made in 1874, but its incredibly high toxicity to insects wasn't discovered until 1939, when the Allies were desperately searching for chemicals to help combat the mosquitoes that spread malaria and typhus among the troops fighting in Asia. By 1945, DDT was readily and very cheaply available as an agricultural insecticide. It was twenty years before its long persistence and devastating effects on the environment began to be recognised. Also during the war, research in Germany into chemical warfare agents (nerve gases) led to the development of a range of organophosphate chemicals which were also highly toxic to insects. These too became available to farmers shortly after the war, providing them with a growing armoury of pretty unpleasant compounds with which to combat insect pests.

After the war ended, the policies which had been introduced to increase food production continued. Food rationing ended in 1954, but farmers carried on receiving financial incentives to increase production until the 1990s. Over a period of fifty years, we therefore destroyed almost all the flower-rich habitats in the UK, and 98 per cent of our lowland hay meadows disappeared. The short-haired bumblebee died out because the habitats in which it lived were swept away. It wasn't all that fussy, it just needed enough flowers to feed on. No flowers equals no bees. It is not rocket science.

Luckily for the short-haired bumblebee, Hitler didn't have the same impact on New Zealand. In fact there is a certain irony that this species now survives in the clover-rich pastures that man has created in New Zealand by clearing dense native forests which would have been entirely unsuitable for bumblebees, whilst back in its native land we have been busy destroying its habitat. While the short-haired bumblebee has been away, many changes have taken place in Britain. Yet by the 1980s and 1990s it was becoming all too obvious that most of our wildlife was in rapid decline, and that in the long term what we were doing to the countryside might not be sustainable. Farms need flowers to support the bees that pollinate our crops, and they need predatory beetles, wasps and flies to eat the pests that eat the crops. So it was that schemes were introduced to pay farmers for encouraging wildlife on their land. Farmers can now get funding to re-sow the wild flower meadows and replant the hedges that only thirty years ago they were paid to remove. It might just be that we have turned a corner. But if British wildlife is very slowly beginning to recover, it can certainly do with a helping hand.