Bewitching bumblebees and other pollinators
by Nadia Connor

Photo by Bryn

Springtime means spring flowers, and spring flowers mean bumblebees. Primroses and pulmonaria; apple blossom and narcissus; wood anemone and winter aconite – all packed with nutritious pollen and nectar, perfect for raising a greedy brood of bumblebee larvae. From March, the queen emerges from her diapause (or winter slumber), fixated on her one resolution of the new year: to find a home for her future family.

Preferring pre-existing cavities, you might find her taking possession of an old rodent burrow, or the birdbox you put in last autumn for the sparrows; or even filling the interior of your worse-for-wear garden furniture with haphazard wax cells (she is less meticulous than her geometry-loving honeybee cousin) that will be stuffed with pollen beds on which she will lay her eggs. She won’t damage your property – preferring the coat-tails of someone else’s hard work, she doesn’t chew wood or drill holes. She just snuggles into whatever crevice has been left to her.

And who could object? With their adorably fluffy, iconically striped bodies, bumblebees are famously the most charismatic and cuddly of our invertebrate allies. Even their Latin name – Bombus – sounds cartoonish; and the true story behind its meaning is only slightly less adorable: bombus, in Latin, means “booming”, referring to the familiar buzzing sound that announces the presence of a bumblebee wherever she goes, also handily knocking pollen off flower anthers and into her abundant fur for easy collection and transport back home to nourish newly-hatched larvae. The Bumbling Bees are also the Booming Bees.

The protein-rich pollen that feeds baby bumblebees-in-the-making is also the means by which the flowers make their own babies. When a bumblebee arrives in her next flower, the pollen that powders her fur may be buzzed (or perhaps boomed) off, hopefully into the female part of the next flower she visits, beginning the next generation. Both partners make a donation – the flower’s pollen and the bumblebee’s transport – and receive a gift. And without this simple pact of generosity, life would not exist on earth as we know it. Not flowers. Not most vegetables, fruits, nuts or seeds. Not our familiar forests, farms or meadowbanks. Not the ecosystems we depend on. Not our lives.

So the bumblebee’s charms are more than fur-deep. But could our infatuation with our fluffier pollinator friends mean we miss out on the charms of less cuddly pollen-shifters? Britain is home to a diverse range of over 1500 insect pollinators according to the Department for Environment, including beetles, flies, grasshoppers, moths, butterflies and wasps – and the RHS says the figure is likely much higher. The Natural History Museum has found that around a thousand species of beetle alone in the UK are transporting pollen from plant to plant. Just as essential to the world’s ecosystems; just as eccentric and fascinating. Did you know that plants producing chocolate, tequila and bananas are all pollinated by bats? Or that the longest tongue-to-body ratio in the world belongs to Xanthopan morganii, an orchid-pollinating hawkmoth, whose 30cm tongue is concealed within a body only 6.5cm long? Or that beetles have been pollinating waterlilies for around 130 million years?

So if insects have been pollinating plants for 130 million years, you might be forgiven for thinking they always will. But our pollinators are under threat. And if our pollinators are under threat, then so are we. Just as the bumblebees and daffodils are connected in a web of life-giving interdependence, our lives depend on these pollinators and their continuing successful relationships with plants. So how to protect them? There are lots of simple things you can do. From sowing the seeds of native plants in your garden, to stopping using pesticides and including early-flowering plants in your borders, we can all do a little bit to make the lives of our pollinator collaborators that bit easier. We can also support small-scale, community growing spaces, places like Farm Orchard at Stanmer, where Apple Blossom provides pollen and nectar for at least 25 different pollinators. If you’d like to find out more about these idiosyncratic and essential members of our ecosystem and how to protect them, join us on 28th April for Apple Blossom Day at Home Farm Orchard, Stanmer.