“If you want to look at bees, go to a city rather than the countryside,” says Sarah Hudson, and on a bright spring day in central London, it’s not hard to see what she means.
Hudson, a retired accountant, is carefully picking a path through the overgrown gravestones of the historic Bunhill Fields cemetery, pointing out the bees buzzing through an abundance of wild and cultivated spring flowers.
“Oh, there we go, yes, lovely!” says Hudson, gesturing towards a fat, fuzzy bumblebee that has settled on a small, bright blue flower. “That’s a buff-tailed worker. As you can see they dwell on the flower for quite a long time”, she says as it flies off casually in search of more nectar.
Though she regularly helps maintain the grounds, once a month Hudson comes here specifically to count bumblebees, tracing the same path, at the same pace, and noting the number, species and whereabouts of every bumblebee she sees. As such, she is one of an army of people at the forefront of conservation efforts to save one of Britain’s best-loved creatures.
However plentiful they may be in this tiny urban idyll, times are tough farther afield for the British bumblebee.
“Basically, the numbers are decreasing all over the shop for a lot of the [bumblebee] species,” says Richard Comont, the science manager of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, an organisation founded to try to arrest that decline. Its aim, he says, is “to get people a bit more switched on to the fact that these things are disappearing – and that ‘bee’ doesn’t just mean honeybee”.
It certainly doesn’t. There are 270 different species of bee in Britain, 250 or so of which are solitary bees, which don’t live in nests or colonies, “and they generally do quite well”, he says. Honeybees, living in hives of 50,000 or more individuals, are now almost all managed by beekeepers, says Comont, “so looking after them is essentially not conservation, it’s animal husbandry”.
Bumblebees, however, have “a perfect storm of difficulty going on” – living in nests of 100 or so workers “they’ve got an awful lot of mouths to feed for every breeding individual but only comparatively small nests”.
Unlike honeybees, they do not roam far to forage for food. “So they’ve got a big job to do, and it’s not very easy for them to do it,” says Comont. Two bumblebee species have gone extinct in the UK in the past century – one of them only in 2000.
Which is where Hudson and her fellow volunteers come in. Between March and October each year, volunteers walk a designated route and count how many bees they see, as part of an initiative called BeeWalk; after a little more than a decade, the trust now has a huge community of almost 800 citizen bee counters, and have amassed one of the largest bumblebee datasets in the world. It’s important, says Comont, “because if you look at abundance year on year, you can see a decline, you get that early warning, you know when you need to be doing stuff”.
It is far from the only conservation body drawing on the immense potential of citizen science – the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme, founded in the 1970s, is one of the longest-running insect-monitoring schemes in the world, while more than half a million took part in the RSPB’s Big Garden BirdWatch this year. Volunteers help monitor the national shoreline; others count reptiles in Cheshire, monitor hedgehogs in Cumbria or survey marine mammals and sea grass in the Solent. (Recent research has found that taking part in such projects is good for humans’ wellbeing, too.)
Sadly, due to habitat loss and the changing climate, the news is not encouraging in many places. In the case of the bumblebee, more than half of British species are getting scarcer, including some that were once quite common. Wildflower hedges and verges are disappearing from the countryside, leaving bumblebee populations with too few and too small patches of flowery habitat.
On the other hand, “gardens, window boxes, right the way out to estates, cover an area the size of Somerset in Britain”, says Comont, so from planting bumblebee-friendly flowers in a window box to allowing clover to grow in lawns to not immediately ripping up weeds (“essentially, volunteer wildflowers”), urban gardeners can play an important part.
In Hudson’s case, having moved to the Cotswolds after her retirement and “absolutely hating it”, she and her partner moved back to central London where, from a position of almost total ignorance about bumblebees, she has now completed a master’s in ecology, specialising in the insects.
“I’m still not an expert by any means. But they’re just absolutely fascinating creatures, for something so small. The things they can learn to do, because they are social animals. They are just amazing.”
