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bees, botanical, Bumblebee Conservation Trust, environment, nature, Nature writing, photography, poetry, Vita Sackville West
“And then pell-mell his harvest follows swift
Blossom and Borage, lime and balm and clover
On downs the thyme, on cliffs the scantling thrift
Everywhere the bees go racing with the hours
For every bee becomes a drunken lover
Standing upon his head to sup the flowers
The Land (Vita Sackville West)
Poets have recently taken to bees again. Carol Ann Duffy published The Bees in 2011 (shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize and the Costa Book Award), which included a poem called Ariel, in tribute to Sylvia Plath’s 1960s bee poems.
Sean Borodale’s 2012 Bee Journal, his first collection of poetry, was also short-listed for a Costa Book Award and the TS Eliot Prize. As Gillian Clarke said in her Granta review this is “a year in the life and death of a swarm, from bringing the bees home in early summer, ‘noise of weight; /we carried this / through our proscenium of grasses’ to their winter silence, ‘in our hands the corpse of a city’. The poems are true, forensic, beautiful.”
Jo Shapcott has also written bee poems. ‘I Tell The Bees’ is one in a series of six poems written by her as part of the City of London Festival 2010.
We tend to take bees for granted. We think we know them. Yet it is not until we look more closely that we become aware of the complexity of their lives.
It was only a few years ago I even realized there were different sorts of bees. Having them pointed out on visits to community gardens occasionally I started noticing them, particularly on certain plants. Bee hotels, clusters of tubes of bamboo, in odd corners, were obviously different from hives as a home for bees.
Honey bees get most of the press of course. They have been domesticated since prehistory and so have always been a commercial asset. Their recent rapid decline has finally caused great concern worldwide and several UK TV programmes have highlighted this recently, and there is even a forthcoming cover for and article in Time Magazine. Pesticides (especially neonicotinoids) mites, viruses, climate change all to blame, as well as the increase in monoculture in agricultural production leading to restriction of the range of food sources for all bees as well as loss of habitat. Honey bees (together with bumblebees, which over the past 20 years or so have also become a part of the bee industry, bred for commercial pollination of many plants such as tomatoes and raspberries) are now responsible for pollinating one in three mouthfuls of everything we eat. If they go so do we.
However it was only when I was given A Sting in the Tale by Dave Goulson for my birthday that I discovered the world of the bumblebee. This very readable book by a pioneering conservationist is a revelation. He founded the Bumblebee Conservation Trust to further knowledge and conservation of bumblebees.
Since reading this book a few months ago I have been looking more closely at bees. Armed with my pocket bumblebee identification cards from the Natural History Museum I have tried identifying what I see. There are over 20,000 species of bees worldwide. There are only 6 main types of bumblebee in the UK, 24 in total, and a few other types of wild bees, including solitary bees, along with honey bees, but it is still not as easy as you might think……. here is my work in progress!
I hope my identification skills will have improved over the summer, along with my photographic skills! Even with a fairly basic (non SLR) camera it is possible to get close ups, although as with any living creature it takes a lot of persistence. It has become quite addictive! But then there is the naming of names….
RELATED ARTICLES
- The cover of TIME …. (hrexach.wordpress.com)
- http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2149141,00.html
- http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2013/aug/05/neonicotinoids-ddt-pesticides-nature
- http://miniatureforestgardens.wordpress.com/2013/07/15/wanted-the-shrill-carder-bee/
- Oddly wrought bee (morningstaronline.co.uk)
you look to have a really interesting bumblebee community there Diana and i can see at least one cuckoo bee species may be, two. And all, i think, of the six common ones already. They are so variable as well aren’t they within species, so male redtails have that lovely yellow yoke, which the workers lack. I am a bee devotee too. Great work.
Thanks Mark – I didn’t know you were a bee lover as well as bird lover! Your comments are very helpful as I find it quite difficult to identify some of the bees. The photos are actually taken in a few different places, mainly in London but a few in Wales too, because I wanted to show as many different bees as I could.
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Such lovely photos! The bees have been wonderful busy allotment companions for me this year more than ever, but then with so many visiting I’ve been bound to see the slowing in breath over too much pollen gorging and the odd one asleep forever in the artichoke fluff. I’m feeling lifted by the thought of feeding them a little honey water and seeing them do a little wee. thanks Diana!
Stunning post and what photos! The hairyness makes bees look so cuddly and cute – love the way the post is set out too. Well done!
Lovely busy pictures. We had a nest of buff-tailed bumble bees in our blue tit box last year – an adaptable and fairly new species to the UK.
Great close up pictures.
I know someone who keeps bees (brave man!) and was chatting to him only a few weeks ago about the decline in the bee population. He told me that things seemed to have picked up this year, at least from his perspective. But the overall decline is worrying
sorry this is her campaigning blog http://www.beestrawbridge.blogspot.co.uk/
I completely understand your fascination with watching bees. I do it all the time. They absolutely adore the Echinops, my neighbours had about 20 on one head! There’s a woman in Cornwall who has set up a bee sanctuary – bumblebeefarm.co.uk if you’re interested. She’s a campaigner and speaker too.
Bumb le-bees are so interesting, and I baught a book, but it is hard to see the difference. Great post, wonderful flowers, and the busy bees doing such and important job.
Marvellous stuff as always!
Thanks again, Matt!
I do love to watch bumble (humble) bees!
I was going to say something about the old name for them! http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/humblebee
Hi Diana. I picked some Tansy yesterday for a project I am doing on plant dyes. In each head was a bumblebee, very drowsy and hard to budge. My husband says they get slower with the cold (it was 16 degrees C). They are so brightly colored. Jane
I would not have thought 16 degrees was that cold for them! What did you do with them?
Hi. I shook them off into the growing tansy. They should have been able to crawl into the nearest flower. Jane
Love this post and the photos – strikes a real chord. I planted wild flowers in my garden for them and while the flowers have not really come out I think the Scottish summer has been better for them and for butterflies this year. Sadly probably short-term in long-term decline.
Thank you so much – it has been a good year for bees and butterflies. You have some rare bees in Scotland – Oronsay I think, and butterflies too, so let’s hope for the best.
Timely post,Diana.I expect you saw last week’s Horizon about the causes of the bee decline. It’s still on iplayer if you missed it. Great photos,too. How .much we will lose if the bees go (I say that as an allotment holder and human being).
I did see the Horizon programme. It is repeated 18 aug and available on iplayer until 2 Sep http://bbc.in/13fWOi0. Thanks for commenting, Gerry.
There were lots of seemingly dead bees either side of a road over the heathery Yorkshire moors the other day – we wondered if they had flown into cars or something more sinister… and with hearing that most of trees where we were staying would be lost to disease by the end of the decade, to enjoy this beautiful summer feels like fiddling while Rome burns. But your photos are beautiful and, maybe, hopeful?
I want to be hopeful – bees in gardens and urban areas do seem to be thriving. I think there are more food plants than anywhere else! The dead Yorkshire bees sound worrying – I would guess they were honey bees.
Simply fascinating. Thank you!
Thanks for reading.
As always, a lovely post, Diana; I find the detail in the photographs simply wonderful Was just reading about the Time article but your sentence says it all: “if they go, so do we.” What will make us stop? The Goulson book sounds intriguing and will check that out as well. Thanks, Diana!
Karen
Thank you, Karen. Maybe we won’t be too late (no pun intended)!
I’ve spent a lot of time this year just standing and watching bees close up in my garden. And freeing those that have got themselves stuck in the house or the porch (along with the moths and dragonflies and butterflies and spiders…). I haven’t troubled to learn to identify the different kinds yet, but I’ve certainly seen quite a few different kinds.
I tweeted last year about a bee in my porch that had zonked out. I put a few drops of honey-water next to it and it almost immediately started feeding on it. Then it did a wee, and rested for a bit in a patch of sunlight and then flew off, seemingly recovered!
Wonderful creatures. Thanks for this – nice photos.
I have got rather obsessed with watching myself. As always the more you see the less you realize you know.
awesome photographs. you might want to catch the film More Than Honey, it’s supposed to be really good and it is all about how bees are fighting for survival.
Thanks Helen. That film sounds worth a look.
Reblogged this on It Is What It Is and commented:
Very informative and complete!! A must read ….
Thanks for that! Glad you enjoyed the post.
How can we even imagine the world without them??? No …. this craziness has to stop!!!
Reblog: http://hrexach.wordpress.com/