A Sting in the Tale by Dave Goulson

  

A Sting in the Tale

by Dave Goulson

First published 2013

This book is about Dave Goulson but mostly about his fascination with bees which started when he was young. It has taken him round the world, studying them and this book tells us what he has learned and how much more there is still to find out about them and how important that information is to prevent them from disappearing.

Bees and wasps have a common ancestor, the divergence happened when the bees started to specialise in feeding from nectar rather than anything they could scavenge which included nectar.

He explained that bees tend to be from the northern hemisphere, they haven’t spread south of the equator because the weather is too hot for them. Hence the problems of pollinating clover, grown to feed farm animals, in New Zealand. There were no bees to pollinate them, therefore the seed had to be brought over each year to grow a fresh crop. It was decided to export some bumble bee Queens from England in the hope that they would provide the necessary fertilisation. The type of bumble bee exported to New Zealand is now going scarce in the UK, so it was thought that it might be possible to reintroduce some Queens from New Zealand. After much work it was found that the bees in New Zealand descended from only two of the queens that were exported in the previous century. That and the problems of exporting them, meant that it was better to get some from Sweden. At the time of writing this book, that was an ongoing project.

Bees seem such simple things, but the book tells you so much more about them, even identifying the different bumble bees is difficult. The more you learn the more respect you have for the little creatures for example, they are better at fertilising tomatoes than people with little buzzy sticks, the fruit they produce is bigger and tastier. Basically life is better with bees around, so we must do what we can to preserve them, stop with the insecticides and plant more wild flowers so that there is always a nectar source available for them.