Bees

My "Nature Notes" article for local magazines . . .

I was doing a few evening jobs in my garden the other day, close to my rather untidy fruit cage - untidy mostly because raspberries, which often seem to grow better underground than on top of it, seem to push their shoots up everywhere (note: except in the rows where you want them to be). Last year’s new raspberry canes are of course now busy flowering, ready to produce this year’s fruit, and there was a steady hum of bees, as several different sorts prospected the flowers.

Although raspberry flowers have thin white petals that are hardly visible, and clearly don’t use showy colours to attract the bees, they’re obviously popular, and I’m glad they are: no bees would mean no fruit. And that’s true for a huge number of our flowers and fruits, both things we like to see in the hedgerows and commercial crops. Bees are vital, and without them everything else would break down.

Bees form a large and very variable group of insects, and there are about 270 species of bee found in the UK. Although our first thoughts might be of honey bees, there are in fact just ten species of honey bee worldwide, only one of which is naturally found in the UK, so most bees are not honey bees. And not all bees are social insects in the way that honey bees are - most are either solitary or live in loose colonies.

But all kinds of bees are important pollinators of our flowers, and everything we can do to maintain and improve bee populations is important. In gardens, this can include opting for flowers that are good for bees - some showy blooms don’t produce the nectar and pollen that bees need - using garden chemicals sparingly if at all, and installing a few bug houses or bee hotels, which are readily available not only from wildlife groups but also garden centres and even supermarkets. And then maybe signing up to the Friends of the Earth campaign and their Great British Bee Count.

Currently, several of our roses are beginning have great bites taken out of their leaves - a sign that our local leaf-cutter bees are back in business. They seem to specially like roses. They are dark, hairy little bees, and the female bee cuts the leaves to make cells for her larvae. We also have one particular climbing rose whose clusters of small highly scented flowers attract good numbers of tree bumble bees. This is a species new to the UK, and it’s a bit of a relief to see a species on the increase at a time of anxiety about the declining bee population as a whole.

Tree Bumble Bee on our climbing rose

We need them all, as different bees are around at different times of the year, and may prefer different plant species. I’m always glad when the bamboo tubes in our “bee hotel” get blocked and turned into cells for the grubs that will be the next bee generation. But not all bees are good guys. I saw a very yellow one - almost wasp-like - sneak in the other day: that will have been a cuckoo bee, and its grub won’t just eat the food ball left for the host larva, but probably the larva itself as well.