A Sting in the Tale Read online

  Modern readers will be horrified by all of this. Egg collectors are now only one small step above serial killers in the social hierarchy (in fact, I suppose in a sense they are serial killers, so fair enough). It is true that most of the eggs I collected were alive when I took them, unlike the swan’s egg. I do not defend egg collecting; I certainly would not allow my three boys to do it. But I did learn an awful lot about natural history by spending my days hunting for eggs. We only ever took one from a nest, and did our best to disturb it as little as possible. This does not, of course, make it right. Collecting the eggs of extremely rare birds is clearly a heinous crime, and I am glad that I never managed to find anything particularly rare. But I sometimes think that we are poor at keeping perspective on our activities, and those of others. How many condemn egg collecting, for instance, while allowing their pet cat to roam unfettered? (Domestic cats kill millions of birds and small mammals each year.)

  From eggs I moved on to collecting insects, starting with butterflies. My mother, bless her, was not keen on this – but I persuaded her that I would only take a male and female of each species, and could not do too much harm. To start my collection I bought a dead, dry but very beautiful tropical swallowtail from a butterfly farm in Dorset called Worldwide Butterflies. It arrived in a paper envelope inside a small cardboard box which I opened with great excitement. What I hadn’t anticipated was that the specimen would not have been ‘set’, which is to say that its wings were folded shut, and it did not have a pin through it. I tried to open the wings, not understanding that this is impossible with a dry butterfly; they are incredibly brittle and delicate. The wings snapped off along with most of the legs as I clumsily tried to arrange it in an attractive position. I was left with a very sad collection of body parts. Disheartened, I managed shortly afterwards to get hold of a second-hand book, Studying Insects by E. B. Ford, which explained where I had gone wrong. To pin and set a butterfly with the wings flat and beautifully symmetrical, as they are always displayed in museums, it must be freshly killed, or if it is dry it must first be ‘relaxed’ by putting it in a tin with moist tissue paper for a couple of days (no longer or it goes mouldy). When soft and damp the butterfly can be carefully pinned and arranged in whatever position is desired. Once it dries, it will remain fixed in position for ever, so long as it does not get damp again.

  Studying Insects also explained how to make a killing jar by filling the bottom of a large jam jar with crushed laurel leaves; when crushed, the leaves release cyanide, which smells strongly and sweetly of marzipan (even knowing it was poisonous, I couldn’t resist having a good sniff every now and again). A few minutes inside the jar is enough to send a butterfly into a permanent sleep.

  I also tried constructing a butterfly net from a wire coat hanger and a pair of my mum’s stockings, but this was hopeless, and without a net it was almost impossible to catch anything. Eventually, I discovered the address of a company named Watkins & Doncaster, based in Hawkhurst in Kent. They billed themselves as ‘suppliers of entomological equipment’. I wrote to them, and a few days later received their catalogue through the post.

  This was a seminal moment in my life, a turning point from which I have never looked back.

  I had just arrived home from a game of mini-rugby, so I guess I was eight years old. I was covered in mud, so I took the catalogue up to read in the bath. The Watkins & Doncaster catalogue was the most wonderful thing I had ever seen. Fat, it contained page after page of illustrations of the most amazing paraphernalia: insect nets, pond-dipping nets, pillboxes, cages, tubes, magnifying glasses, malaise traps, microscopes, setting boards, moth traps, pooters, beautiful mahogany insect cabinets. At the end was a section on taxidermy, which contained such entrancing objects as a brain scoop, bone cutters, and a vast selection of glass eyes. I was transfixed, amazed. This was a whole new world. Moreover, there were obviously lots of other people out there like me! I wanted to buy more or less everything in the catalogue, but my pocket money placed severe limits on what I could afford. Nonetheless, my first purchase was a full-sized, professional kite net which cost me £16, a fortune to an eight-year-old boy, and I was immensely proud of it. It was nearly as tall as me, with a stout brass handle, a rigid metal frame and a soft and very deep black net. With this, I felt I could catch almost anything.

  My butterfly collection slowly grew, as did my collection of books about butterflies and other insects. My first catch was a terribly tatty painted lady, her wings torn from the long migration from Morocco. I soon added a meadow brown, large and small whites, a gatekeeper, speckled wood, small tortoiseshell, red admirals, common blue and peacock. The beauty of these creatures takes my breath away to this day; I still have the specimens, in the top drawer of an insect cabinet which I was only able to afford three decades later. I also learned to search for the eggs and caterpillars, which meant finding out what the caterpillars ate, and also how to identify the plants. With a little care it is easy to rear caterpillars into adult butterflies; that way one gets beautiful fresh specimens to add to one’s collection, and the surplus can be released. I picked up an enormous amount of knowledge.

  From butterflies I expanded my interests to include moths. Most moths fly at night, and to catch them there are two popular approaches. One is to go ‘sugaring’. This involves boiling up a fantastic brew of black treacle, beer, brown sugar, vanilla essence, pear drops, rum or brandy, and pretty much anything else one fancies so long as it adds to the heady aroma. Every moth collector has his own highly secret recipe, or so it seems. Whatever the mixture, the end result should be a thick gloopy liquid that smells so strong that it makes one’s eyes water at fifty paces. This is then painted at dusk on to fence posts or tree trunks. The idea is that moths find the smell irresistible and are drawn to land and drink the sugary syrup; they become hopelessly intoxicated by the alcohol, and then sit there in a stupor ready to be snatched up by the eager moth collector. I stank out the house brewing up various versions of this, and got through much of my mum’s sugar, treacle and food flavourings and a lot of my dad’s alcohol. The end results were disappointing. Earwigs appeared to be the only creatures that were consistently attracted; I sometimes had hundreds of them swarming over my sugar patches, getting stuck in the goo as they climbed over each other in their feeding frenzy. Hardly a single moth appeared. I also found it slightly nerve-racking wandering around the local fields at night on my own (not least because my father regularly let me and my brother stay up on Saturday nights to watch Hammer House of Horror movies, and my overactive imagination conjured up a vampire in every shadow). On one occasion I was checking the sugar patch on a large ash tree when a tawny owl decided to screech just above me. Although I knew it was an owl, I had great difficulty resisting the temptation to sprint straight back home, and my heart didn’t stop hammering in my chest for a good ten minutes.

  There is an alternative and more convenient way to attract moths: a light trap. Studying Insects explained the principle: moths are attracted to candles and any other light sources. Hence this sort of moth trap involves a bright light hung above a container a bit like a lobster pot. The moths are drawn to the light, blunder into it and fall down through a funnel into a large dark container usually stuffed with egg cartons, which they seem to like to sit on. This sounded much easier and less scary than traipsing round the fields in the dark with a bucket of treacle, so I decided to give it a go.

  I rigged up a 100-watt light bulb over a home-made cardboard funnel, itself sitting on a plastic bucket, turned it on before going to bed and eagerly awaited the morning. I dashed down at first light to survey my catch. Disappointment: nothing but a couple of wasps and a tiny brown ‘micro’ moth as I now know they are called. I tried for a couple of weeks, but with little success. After some research, I gathered that ultraviolet light was best for attracting moths. By chance my mother had a rather odd and old-fashioned heat lamp used to treat muscular injuries, something she had possessed ever since she was in college training to b
e a sports teacher. It resembled an enormous Anglepoise lamp, but with two very fancy-looking bulbs, one of which produced infrared heat, and the other ultraviolet light. To this day I’ve no idea why anyone thought it was a good idea to give injured body parts a jolly good tan as well as a blast of heat; presumably skin cancer was not well understood at the time. Anyway, I’d never seen my mother using it (probably a good thing) and I figured she wouldn’t mind if it was cannibalised in the name of scientific research. The only problem was that it wasn’t possible to turn on the ultraviolet lamp without the heater element. Undeterred, I rigged up both bulbs next to one another above my home-made bucket trap, and left it on for the night. The next morning, I came down to a qualified success. The UV lamp had attracted a lot of moths, but unfortunately they had been frazzled to a crisp by the heat lamp: my trap was full of charred moth bodies. Not quite what I was after. In frustration, I attempted to rewire the lamps to separate the two bulbs. I don’t think I had started physics at school by that age (I was about nine years old), so this was inevitably something of a long shot. When I flicked the modified light on, this time with only the UV bulb connected to the power, there was a loud bang. The UV bulb shattered. I reassembled Mother’s lamp and put it back in the cupboard, hoping that she would never notice. Of course she did. It was many years before I saved up enough money to buy a proper ‘Robinson’s mercury vapour moth trap’ (an absolutely marvellous device, by the way, which lights up the entire neighbourhood with an eerie glow and attracts moths from miles away). In the meantime, my moth collection grew rather slowly.

  I was not fully aware of it at the time, but my childhood coincided with a catastrophic period in the history of the British countryside, at least from the point of view of a butterfly or bumblebee. Shropshire may sound idyllic, but this is misleading. It was and is a relatively rural, green and pleasant part of Britain, but it is not the haven for wildlife that it might once have been. I moved there in 1972, and left for university in 1984. At weekends I would often walk with my friends to the Shropshire Union Canal about two miles away across the countryside, searching the hedges for birds’ nests along the way. When I started, this walk involved crossing fifteen fields, each bounded by a hedge. By the time I left for university, the walk involved crossing one field – a huge one. The hedges in which I used to search for birds’ eggs had been ripped out, one by one. A large part of the canal itself had been filled in, covered in topsoil, and was now just a part of the arable expanse. Where once a bumblebee would have been able to find brambles in the hedges, cowslips in the hedge banks and marsh woundwort on the sides of the canal, there was now only a sea of cereals, a monoculture stretching across the landscape. These changes occurred almost everywhere in lowland Britain, sweeping across Western Europe.

  These changes drove the decline and, in some cases, the extinction of many creatures, and our countryside is a much poorer place because of it. But the battle is not lost. We have slowly, tentatively, started to find ways to undo the damage. Scientific studies are revealing how best to combine efficient farming with looking after the countryside. A range of payments is available to farmers to support them in encouraging wildlife. The British have a peculiar and unique love of the countryside and the animals and plants which inhabit it, and there is a huge groundswell of support for conservation. To tap into this, in 2006 I launched the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, a charity devoted to saving our bumblebees, and to my delight the Trust has flourished. It now has over 8,000 paid-up members, and is creating flower-rich habitat for bumblebees across Britain from Kent to Pembrokeshire to Caithness. Most of our wildlife clings on, and with our help it can recover. Sometimes even species which have been lost entirely might one day return. But that is the subject of Chapter 1 …

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Short-haired Bumblebee

  In the 1870s, New Zealand farmers found that the red clover which they had imported from Britain, as a fodder crop for horses and cattle, did not set much seed. As a result, they found themselves having to continually import more seed from Europe at considerable expense, rather than collecting and sowing their own. In the end a solicitor named R. W. Fereday worked out the cause of the problem. Fereday had emigrated to New Zealand in 1869 and, aside from his legal work, was a keen entomologist with a particular interest in small moths. It was Fereday who realised, while staying on his brother’s farm, that the problem lay in the absence of the bumblebees which normally pollinated the clover back in Britain. The problem was taken up by Frank Buckland, Her Majesty’s Inspector of Fisheries at the time, whose remit seems to have extended well beyond fish. He wrote back to England with a request for bumblebees to be sent on the steamships which regularly plied between Britain and New Zealand. The first, rather ill-thought out, attempt to do so involved a Dr Featherston digging up two carder bumblebee nests in late summer and sending them to the Honourable John Hall of Plymouth, New Zealand, in 1875. They arrived in January and, inevitably, were all dead. Bumblebee nests naturally die out in September, and in any case there were no flowers on the ship for them to feed on, so this scheme was doomed from the start.

  Eight years later the idea was revived with rather more competence. A Mr S. G. Farr, secretary of the Canterbury Acclimatisation Society (of whom more later), contacted Thomas Nottidge, a banker from Maidstone in Kent, asking for more bumblebees to be sent. (They also asked him for a few hedgehogs while he was at it – as you do.) So it was that, in the autumn of 1884, Nottidge offered a bounty to farm labourers for every hibernating bumblebee queen that they could find. Hand digging, clearing and widening of ditches was a common autumn and winter practice on arable farms when there wasn’t much else to keep farm labourers busy, and these labourers often turned up the plump hibernating queens as they dug, suggesting that queen bees particularly like to hibernate in ditch banks. As a result, a total of 282 queens were obtained and placed on the SS Tongariro, one of the first steamships to be built with a refrigeration unit. This was essential as the hibernating queens would otherwise have become too warm when crossing the equator, and would have woken up and quickly died. The Tongariro left London in December 1884 and arrived in Christchurch on 8 January 1885 (high summer in New Zealand). When they were warmed up, forty-eight queens proved to still be alive. They were fed with honey and flew away. A further consignment of 260 queens was sent that same January on a sister ship, the SS Aorangi, and arrived on 5 February. Of these, forty-nine were still alive and were released.

  We have no idea what species of bumblebee these ninety-seven queens belonged to, or how many survived long enough to build a nest and produce offspring. What we do know is that some thrived in their new home for, by the summer of 1886, bumblebees were seen up to 100 miles south of Christchurch. Indeed, by 1892 bumblebees had become so common in some areas that honeybee keepers feared they might become a pest.

  British bumblebees flourish in New Zealand to this day. On their long boat trip they also left behind many of the diseases and parasites that attack them in their native land, which probably helped considerably. The species that survived are an odd selection. We might have expected them to be the most common Kent species, but either our most common species were not included or they failed to survive. The four now found in New Zealand are the buff-tailed bumblebee, the garden bumblebee, the ruderal bumblebee and the short-haired bumblebee. Of these, the buff-tailed is by far the most common – they are everywhere, from the gardens and parks of Christchurch to the spectacular fjords of Milford Sound, where I have seen them feeding on the flowers of the gigantic New Zealand flax. The short-haired bumblebee is the least common, but if you know where to look, they can still be found in central South Island.

  Sadly, two of these species have not fared so well in the UK. The ruderal bumblebee was once known as the ‘large garden bumblebee’ because it was a familiar sight in gardens throughout much of England. Nowadays the ruderal bumblebee is an exceedingly rare creature, found only in a few places in the East Midlands and East Anglia. T
he short-haired bumblebee has fared even worse. One hundred years ago they were common in the south and east of England, but during the second half of the twentieth century their numbers plummeted. By the 1980s they were known only in a handful of places, and one by one, those populations disappeared. The last individual was caught near Dungeness in 1988; it fell into a pitfall trap used to monitor beetles and drowned. No one has seen any since.

  Of course you will have worked out why these bees disappeared. It happened while I was growing up. When I was born in 1965 the short-haired bumblebee was still quite widespread, although not as far north and west as Shropshire. By the time I went to university in 1984 it was nearly extinct. I never saw one before they vanished.

  Here’s why: it’s Adolf Hitler’s fault. To be absolutely fair, it wasn’t entirely his fault, but he has to carry some of the blame. One hundred years ago, farming was not mechanised. Without mechanisation, fields tended to be small. Farmers depended on horses for power, and horses love to eat clover, so most farmers grew clover. Bees also love clover. Both the horses and other farm livestock needed hay for the winter, so most farmers had hay meadows. These were permanent features of the farm, cut once or twice a year, and sometimes grazed a little in the milder winter months. Artificial fertilisers weren’t available, so apart from a bit of animal dung the meadows were not fertilised. In the low-nutrient soils of hay meadows, wild flowers flourished, particularly those with symbiotic root bacteria that could trap nitrogen from the air and so didn’t need nutrient-rich soil. The main family that can do this is that of the legumes: vetches, trefoils and clovers (and also our garden peas and beans). Bees love them all.

  Arable crops need fertile soils. The traditional way to maintain soil fertility was to grow crops in rotation. For many centuries, European farmers used a three-year rotation of rye or wheat followed by oats or barley, then letting the field lie fallow in the third year. In the eighteenth century, a British agriculturalist named Charles Townshend promoted a four-year rotation, using wheat, turnips, barley and clover in succession. The nitrogen fixed by the clover boosted soil fertility in the following years, increasing yields, and the scheme was widely adopted. So, imagine Britain a hundred years ago; a patchwork of small fields, cereals and root crops intermixed with clover leys and permanent hay meadows. No artificial fertilisers, no pesticides. Lots and lots of happy bees.