Solitary Bees and Bumble Bees

In recent years, I’ve become fascinated with solitary bees and bumble bees. Most people think of bees as just honey bees and bumble bees, but solitary bees – and there are about 240 different species in the UK – are every bit as interesting.

People don’t appreciate how important bees are to human beings. It’s been estimated that if bees died out, homo sapiens would die out, too, within four years. We rely on bees pollinating for the vast majority of our fruit and vegetables and for almost all medicines which are extracted from plants. The seeds and fruit (including flowering trees) are essential for bird life and for a huge range of animals. This isn’t simply honey bees because, important though they are for agriculture, even more pollinating is done by the solitary bees and bumble bees, several species of which are far better pollinators.

Yet we are losing our bees at an alarming rate. Amongst honey bees, Colony Collapse Disorder has wiped out numerous colonies throughout the world including the UK. There are many theories why – viruses including viruses which combine to become more potent, mites, weather, fungi, parasites, pollution, reduction in pollen in flowers, mobile phones, insecticides (some stay in the soil for several years and are drawn up by the plant), too much genetic narrowing, poor bee keeping practise and several more. But we are also losing our wild bees, too – and that certainly can’t be the fault of the bee-keepers.

In my small garden in mid-Derbyshire, I try to provide environments for the solitary bees to thrive and prosper – and lay. In 2008 I identified 12 of Britain’s 22 bumble bees (including endangered ones) in my garden. I also identified almost 30 solitary bee species. It sounds a lot, but not compared with the number of species that here are.

Some of the solitary bees are little short of amazing in the way they carry out their lives and in 2008, for the first time, I witnessed bees mating and bees emerging from hibernation and beginning their figure of eight familiarisation flights. Remarkable.

The aim of putting this on my website is to alert other people in the hope that they too will ‘do their bit’ to help bees survive. And before people think that bees in the garden = getting stung, let me assure you that the majority of solitary bees, whilst they can sting, have a vested interested in not doing so because, if a solitary bee dies, all the subsequent generations die with it, whereas that is not the case with honey bees and the common wasp or even bumble bees. (I once got stung three times in the same place on the palm of my hand by red mason bees and other than an itchy palm for three days there were no ill effects. The commercially produced tubes you can buy as nesting sites for the red mason bee are advertised as safe children and with pets.)

These tubes can be places in a waterproof container with their open ends pointed south and (hopefully) solitary bees will begin to lay inn them. Some of these bee species, especially some of the Osmia, are superb pollinators (better than honey bees) and will help fruit crops and yields of some vegetables.

Bumble bees are more dangerous, it’s true, but once again they avoid stinging if at all possible. I’ve never been stung by them. But I do treat them with care and respect.

A children’s book on bees by myself, published by Oxford University Press is available from me, post free, price £4.50 (paperback) or £8.25 hardback). The book is also being reprinted by OUP next year.

Thanks for reading this.