Native British bees are dying out — and with them will go flora, fauna and one-third of our diet. We may have less than a decade to save them and avert catastrophe. So why is nothing being done? Richard Girling 
Midwinter. In a garden not far from the sea in Plymouth, there is a splash of pale sunlight and a sound both familiar and strange. Familiar, because if we close our eyes and think of English gardens it’s the sound that fills our heads. Strange, because now it should be silent. The drone of a bee. … “The” bee, of course, is a gross oversimplification. There are many species of bumble as well as of honeybee. Or there were. In the bounteous days of teeming hedgerows and fields of clover, Britain had 25 kinds of bumble, all merrily gathering nectar and pollinating plants and trees. Three of these already have vanished, and seven more are in the government’s official Biodiversity Action Plan (Uk Bap) as priorities for salvation. It’s the same right across Europe, and the reasons everywhere are the same — changes in agricultural practice that have replaced historic mixed farmscapes with heavily industrialised monocultures in which wild animals and plants are about as welcome as jackals in a pie factory. Insects in particular have been targets of intense chemical warfare. We are, at the eleventh hour, learning from our mistakes, but patching nature back together again is exponentially more difficult than blowing it apart. … Once upon a time, for example, the great yellow bumblebee, Bombus distinguendus, which thrives in the cold and wet, was common throughout Britain. Now it has been driven so far northwards that it occurs on the mainland only within half a mile of the extreme north coast of Caithness and Sutherland. “So,” says Goulson, “it can go no further. It is probably doomed as a result of climate change.” Other species, too, are shrinking into local redoubts. The shrill carder bee, Bombus sylvarum, is now limited to the Somerset Levels, Salisbury Plain and the Thames Estuary, where much of its habitat is on brownfield sites and impossible to protect. Since 1980, the formerly common large garden bumblebee, Bombus ruderatus, has been recorded at fewer than 10 sites in the UK. And so it goes on. As the entire insect world is being forced inexorably northwards, it may be hoped that other pollinators from southern Europe may be sucked into the vacuum behind them. Hoped, but not expected. Bumblebees are not like migrating birds — they do not fly for hundreds of miles between remote habitats. They are more like mammals, needing a continuous corridor of suitable habitats to move through. Without a linked route up through France, they are more likely to die out where they are. … And that is the thin end of the long-term catastrophe that now stares us in the face. You take one brick out of the ecological wall, others crumble around it. Then more crumble, on and on until the edifice collapses. Ecologists call it an extinction vortex. You lose bees, you lose plants. You lose plants, you lose more bees. Then more plants, then other insects, then the birds and animals that depend on them and on each other, all the way up the food chain. But never mind animals — if you stretch the process far enough, you’re talking about humans. The more extravagant, ocean-boiling scenarios of climate science have drama on their side, but the entomologists in their quiet way are just as scary. In his book The Creation, the world’s most celebrated biologist, E O Wilson, has spelt out what would happen if the vortex swallowed insects. “People need insects,” he says, “but insects do not need us. If all humankind were to disappear tomorrow, it is unlikely that a single insect species would go extinct, except three forms of human body and head lice… In two or three centuries, with humans gone, the ecosystems of the world would regenerate back to the rich state of near-equilibrium that existed ten thousand or so years ago… But if insects were to vanish, the terrestrial environment would soon collapse into chaos.” Flowering plants would go first, then herbaceous plants, then insect-pollinated shrubs and trees, then birds and animals and, finally, the soil. Wilson corrects the generally held misapprehension that the principal “turners and renewers” of the soil are worms. That distinction more properly belongs to insects and their larvae. Without them, bacteria and fungi would feast on the decaying plant and animal remains, while — for as long as it was able to support them — the land would be recolonised by a small number of fern and conifer species. The human diet would be wind-pollinated grasses and whatever remained to be harvested from a fished-out sea. It would not be enough. Widespread starvation would shrink the population to a fraction of its former size. “The wars for control of the dwindling resources, the suffering, and the tumultuous decline to dark-age barbarism would be unprecedented in human history.” Wilson concedes that we might survive quite happily without body lice and malarial mosquitoes. Otherwise, he says: “Do not give thought to diminishing the insect world. It would be a serious mistake to let even one species of the millions on Earth go extinct.”
