[Pollinator] The Economist: Bzzzt, it's back

[Jennifer Tsang]

http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14460103

 

 

The short-haired bumblebee 

Bzzzt, it's back

Sep 17th 2009 
>From The Economist print edition



A black-and-yellow-striped émigré returns home after a century



BBCT


BBCT


Coming home

MORE than 100 years ago, labourers clearing ditches in Kent were paid a
bounty for each bumblebee they found. New Zealanders wanted the long-tongued
types to pollinate the red clover they used for sheep pasture, so that they
would not have to import and re-sow the clover each year. In December 1884,
282 bumblebee queens left London for Wellington on the “Tongariro”, one of
the first steamships with a refrigeration unit, in which they could safely
hibernate. Forty-eight survived the journey, and their offspring are
flourishing on South Island today.

One of the deported species, the short-haired bumblebee, has died out in
Britain. But descendants of its émigré cousins may soon be making the long
trek home. Reintroduction has been mooted before, but bees are prone to
lethal jet-lag and long-tongued bumblebees are hard to breed in captivity.
Now the Bumblebee Conservation Trust thinks it has worked out how to do it. 

The key, according to recent work by Jaromir Cizek, a Czech bumblebee
enthusiast, is to feed the queens a high-quality mix of nectar and pollen
freshly collected by bumblebees, not the low-grade stuff tolerated by their
close relatives, the domesticated honeybee. That, his experiments suggest,
will persuade the fussy eaters to lay eggs. A new generation can then be
kept in sterile conditions, to minimise the chance that nasty foreign
diseases are brought back to Britain on the return journey. If the plan
works, the second generation of queens will be fertilised, chilled to induce
hibernation and stored inside old-fashioned hair rollers sealed at both ends
with corks. Thus protected, they will be flown to Britain and released in
Dungeness, Kent, near where the species was last spotted in 2000. Farmers
have been planting masses of red clover to welcome them.

The return of the short-haired bumblebee would be a small piece of good news
amid much bee-related gloom. Honeybees are under threat from new and strange
diseases; meanwhile intensive farming means that there are fewer of the
wildflowers bumblebees sip nectar from, and fewer hedgerows in which they
can build their nests. Two species have died out, and of the 24 remaining
ones seven are threatened and only six are thriving. That is a problem for
agriculture: some commercial crops, such as apples, tomatoes and
strawberries, need bumblebees to pollinate them. 

As novel species out-compete native ones (American grey squirrels in Europe;
European and Asian knapweed in America), globalisation often threatens
biodiversity. But “abroad”, it seems, is a good place to back up cherished
locals too.

 

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