Bee Quest Read online

  Sadly, I fear that they are the exception. I do not know for sure, but my impression is that engagement with nature is declining, that the generation growing up today are even more detached from the world that supports them than the one before, and if so then it is a terrible thing. Even today, in the midst of a mass extinction event caused solely by man’s activities, with climate change threatening to render large portions of the globe near uninhabitable in the not-to-distant future, and with topsoil being lost at the rate of about one hundred billion tonnes per year, environmental issues remain pretty low on the political agenda. The environment was scarcely mentioned in the 2015 UK general election campaigns, even by the Green Party. Most of the debate focused on the economy, but money will be little use to us when we have no soil or bees.

  If we want to save the natural world, and ultimately to save ourselves, then we need more people to care about its fate. First and foremost, we need to ensure that our children grow up with opportunities to explore nature for themselves, to get covered in mud chasing frogs or crawl through hedges looking for caterpillars. We need to give them the opportunity to express their natural curiosity, to watch a butterfly emerge from her pupae, to see tadpoles developing tiny limbs, to experience the excitement of discovering a slow-worm under a log. If we give them this, then they will love nature, cherish it and fight for it in the future.

  I was fortunate enough to do all of these things as a child, and it inspired me to spend the rest of my life pursuing my own curiosity with regard to natural history. I have been lucky enough to travel the world and have watched birdwing butterflies soaring through the rainforests of Borneo and listened to howler monkeys proclaiming their territories in the forests of Belize, amongst so many other unforgettable experiences. Much closer to home, I have spent countless happy hours hunting for insects, birds, reptiles, mammals and flowers in the less spectacular but just as wonderful woods and meadows of France and Britain. I have been lucky – I was brought up in the countryside, and then stumbled into a career that allows me to spend my time chasing after the world’s most interesting bees, in the hope of understanding more about them, of unravelling some of the unknown details of their lives, and trying to work out how we can conserve them so that others might enjoy them in the future. This book is the story of those bee travels. We’ll start close to home, in some of the hidden corners of Britain where wildlife still thrives, before moving abroad to the wild mountains of Poland and then to the Andes and Rocky Mountains of the New World, where a sad tale is inexorably unfolding for their bumblebees. Finally, we will return to Britain for some inspiring and hope-filled examples of nature’s resilience. Welcome to Bee Quest …

  CHAPTER ONE

  Salisbury Plain and the Shrill Carder

  Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

  Carl Sagan

  I have in the past been heard to blame Adolf Hitler for causing the demise of British bumblebees, for it was the Second World War that really started the drive to increase food production in the UK – at the time, it made sense for Britain to attempt to become as self-sufficient as possible for food, as there were precious few routes for importation. Thus began decades of agricultural intensification, during which a good deal of our countryside was destroyed to make way for vast monocultures of crops. However, if I continue with this line of logic then I must concede that the Kaiser and Hitler perhaps deserve some grudging acknowledgement, for their actions also unwittingly led to the creation of one of the largest nature reserves in Europe.

  In 1897 the Ministry of Defence began purchasing land on Salisbury Plain on which to conduct military training exercises.fn1 At the time, Britain had a vast empire and had been involved in a long succession of conflicts around the globe – it was a lot of work claiming new territories in far-flung corners of the Earth, and it took a lot of well-trained troops to keep so many poorly armed native peoples firmly under our thumb. During the sixty-three years of Queen Victoria’s long reign, we were involved in no less than thirty-six full-blown wars, plus eighteen military campaigns and ninety-eight military expeditions. Our standing army was vast, and we needed somewhere to train all those men. Recognising this, the government passed an act enabling the army to buy its own land, by compulsory purchase if necessary. It made sense for the army to focus on an area not too far from transport links, London and the Channel ports, somewhere where there were few people, and where land prices were low. Salisbury Plain fitted the bill perfectly, for the collapse of the wool industry in the mid-1800s had made Wiltshire one of the poorest counties in Britain. The army began an extended shopping spree – in 1897 alone it bought about 6,000 hectares of the Plain, plus various other chunks elsewhere in Britain.

  Prior to the arrival of the army, the Plain had had an ancient history of human occupation. It comprises a huge slab of chalk, laid down as the shells of countless trillions of tiny dead sea creatures accumulating at the bottom of an ancient sea some hundred million years ago, but now raised up in a rolling plateau that gently inclines from south to north, and reaches not much more than 200 metres above sea level at the highest points. It would have become forested as the ice retreated from Britain after the last ice age, but along with the North and South Downs it was one of the first areas to be cleared of trees by early Neolithic settlers perhaps 5,500 years ago – the thin chalk soils would have made it less difficult to grub out the roots than in the lower surrounding areas. There are signs of human activity from even earlier – the rotted stumps of a line of regularly spaced upright poles sunk into the ground some 8,000 years ago, for an unknowable purpose. We can glean very little about how these people lived, but their presence is evidenced by the many strange barrows, tumuli, hill forts and other odd-shaped mounds of mysterious origin that are littered across the Plain.

  Of course, the most famous Neolithic structure is Stonehenge, a wonderful and iconic collection of enormous cut stones, a circle of vertical pillars, the Sarsen stones, capped by massive cross-pieces, somehow erected 5,000 years ago. I visited Stonehenge when I was just a child, at a time when visitors were allowed to walk and clamber amongst the stones, and the memory remains vivid to this day. There is an inescapable magic to this cluster of ancient stones, which some fancifully claim were carried there and erected by the legendary wizard Merlin. Certainly it is hard to explain how they were transported there by conventional means, for the four-tonne ‘blue stones’ which make up a smaller, inner circle at Stonehenge were quarried in west Wales, some 290 kilometres distant, with major rivers and mountains in between. If no magic was involved then one imagines that there must have been an awful lot of blood, sweat and tears expended instead, so presumably these people thought that building Stonehenge was pretty darned important. The Sarsen stones originated from near Avebury, a mere forty kilometres to the north, but weighing twenty tonnes each must also have taken some shifting. It has been calculated that it would take a team of about 600 men to drag each stone on rollers, and even with so many it would have been very, very slow. One imagines that assembling such a team must have been quite a task, at a time when the total population of the UK might have numbered just a few tens of thousands. Why these ancient people went to such extraordinary lengths remains entirely unknown. Cremated human bones and other remains have been found buried in pits at the site, and radio isotopes have revealed that some of these remains are of people who originated far away, in France, Germany, even a boy from the Mediterranean basin. Perhaps these were human sacrifices, foreign slaves slaughtered to appease a long-forgotten god? Alternative theories suggest that the stones were a site of astronomical study, or a place of healing, even a celebration of peace and unity amongst the Neolithic peoples. We’ll almost certainly never know. Whatever their original purpose, it feels as if these past activities have somehow left their mark, for there is no doubt that the stones have a brooding atmosphere all of their own.

  Much later, the Romans arrived and grew crops on the Plain to feed their legions. Later s
till, in the year 878, King Alfred is thought to have won a decisive battle against the Viking invaders near Westbury, the victory commemorated by a white horse carved into the chalk of the hillside above Westbury on the western edge of the Plain. Through all of this until the beginning of the twentieth century, it is likely that the lives of the people who lived and worked on the Plain changed relatively little. A pair of Victorian sisters, Ella and Dora Noyes, travelled the Plain in the late 1800s and published an evocative illustrated account of their experiences in 1913: Salisbury Plain: Its Stones, Cathedral, City, Villages and Folk. Life on the Plain was centred on sheep – shepherds each maintained flocks a thousand strong, with wool being the main source of income, the animals providing not only meat but also fertiliser for the arable fields. The villages on the Plain tend to be tucked into the valleys for shelter and surrounded by enclosed fields, with the surrounding plain comprising mostly open pasture. These pastures had probably been managed in the same way, by occasional livestock grazing, for the best part of 5,000 years. Ella Noyes described the village of Imber:

  The village lies in a deep fold of the Plain, on the track of another little winter stream; on all sides the slopes of the high downs surround it. It is just one straggling street of old cottages and farmsteads, winding along the hollow under the sheltering elms; the narrow stream brims fresh and clear through it in spring, leaving its bed dry, to fill up with coarse grass and weeds, in summer.

  The white-washed cottages, with their leaning timbers and deep thatched roofs, are set down in short rows and groups, the angles and nooks between them filled in with garden plots full of flowers; rose bushes, here and there a lilac, lilies, and tangles of everlasting peas.

  There is known to have been a settlement at Imber since at least 967, and the village is recorded in the Domesday Book one hundred years later. When the Noyes sisters visited there were small shops, a pub, a blacksmith, a windmill to mill the grain for bread, a small school, a Baptist chapel and a substantial church. Their description of the village and the people that lived there make it sound romantic and idyllic, but life must have been blisteringly hard. Most folk would leave school and go to work at the age of nine; those that were not shepherds were farm labourers, maids, blacksmiths, millers or bakers – hard manual jobs that must have changed little over the centuries. The Noyes sisters cannot have known it, but they were describing a way of life that was just about to disappear.

  In 1898 over 50,000 troops took part in exercises and marching parades on the Plain in preparation for the Second Boer War in South Africa, a sign of things to come. There not being too many sources of public entertainment at the time, these military manoeuvres became a popular attraction, with hundreds of local people turning out at the weekend to picnic on higher points of the Plain and watch the mock battles. More permanent changes began with the onset of the First World War, for large numbers of overseas troops, particularly Canadians and Australians, were stationed on the Plain, training alongside home-grown volunteers. Most had to live under canvas, or at best were allocated a bunk in primitive wooden barracks that were hastily thrown up. The sleepy villages were suddenly choked with soldiers, horses and wagons, and businesses of all sorts sprang up, from barbers to brothels.

  During the war, early experiments with military aircraft took place on the Plain, with quite a few crashes and several lives lost. At one stage the fledgling Royal Air Force considered moving Stonehenge to make way for a runway, but luckily other suitable sites were located. At around the same time, an engineering company based in the village of Bratton was asked to develop a new, top-secret, all-terrain metal war vehicle carried on caterpillar tracks. Since the huge and noisy prototypes could hardly be hidden, the company created a cover story that they were building a machine to carry tanks up onto the plain to water the sheep. It is plausibly claimed that this is how the name ‘tank’ came about. One imagines that the local folk must have had much to talk about of an evening in the village pubs.

  The winter of 1914–5 was particularly wet, with extensive flooding in the valleys of the Plain, and many of the soldiers perished of diseases such as meningitis before ever making it over the Channel. One imagines that conditions in the crowded, muddy military camps would have provided good training for the horrors that lay ahead on the Western Front. For many men, their last memories of England are likely to have been of their soggy months of training on the Plain before being shipped over to France to be slaughtered like cattle. Of those that were lucky enough to survive and return to England after the war, many were initially returned to their billets on the Plain, where the Spanish Flu pandemic took yet more lives. There are military cemeteries near most of the army camps on the Plain, some of the graves occupied by those who eventually succumbed to wounds received in battle, but many more occupied by those who perished from disease.

  After the First World War military spending was cut, for the prospect of another war in the near future was unthinkable. For a brief period the army had difficulty making ends meet – it even resorted to getting soldiers to hunt the innumerable rabbits on the Plain for selling to local butchers to raise money. The military presence on the Plain dwindled for a little while, and life would have returned to something approximating normality for many of the locals, but of course it was not to last.

  As unrest in Europe began to grow once more, the army recommenced its programme of land purchase, acquiring the village of Imber in 1927 (all except for the church). Until the Second World War life continued in the village and elsewhere on the Plain much as it always had, despite the change in landlord, but the war brought a new influx of soldiers. In 1943 the Imber villagers were evicted so that their homes could be occupied by American troops, and so that troops could practise for the D-day landings in secret. The villagers were initially told that their furniture could be put in storage, and that they would be allowed to return to their homes after the war was over, but they never were. With just a few weeks’ notice, the farmers were forced to sell their herds at knock-down prices – over 5,000 sheep and seventy dairy cows – and their farming machinery.

  Such heavy-handed treatment of the local people is of course awful, but the sequestration of all this land did, at least, protect it from agricultural change. Elsewhere in Britain, the drive for self-sufficiency during the war coincided with the increased mechanisation of farming, along with the advent of cheap artificial fertilisers and the introduction of synthetic chemical pesticides, and together these innovations fuelled dramatic changes in farming practices. The end result is the vast monocultures of chemical-soaked crops that constitute food production in the modern world, and catastrophic crashes in wildlife populations. Almost all of the flower-rich chalk grasslands of the North and South Downs in the south and east of England were ploughed up to create arable fields or ‘improved’ pastures, but on Salisbury Plain much of the original downland remains to this day. Whatever one’s opinion on the morality of the army’s actions in evicting people from their homes and the compulsory purchase of land, an unintended consequence was the creation of a vast unofficial nature reserve. Today, the army’s holdings on the Plain comprise about 400 square kilometres of land – or 40,000 hectares. This isn’t the entirety of the Plain by any means, but it is more than half – a seriously large patch of land by any standards.

  After my childhood visit to Stonehenge, I was not to return to the Plain until the winter of 2002. At the time I was a youngish lecturer at Southampton University, which is about forty kilometres to the south, so it was not a huge journey. I’d been studying the behaviour and habits of common bumblebees for six or seven years in and around Southampton, and I was struck by the fact that I had never seen many of the UK’s species. Even the ruderal bumblebee and brown-banded carder, which according to distribution maps published in the early 1980s were species that ought to be found in the south of England, did not seem to occur in south Hampshire any more. I had heard that Salisbury Plain supported populations of many rare insects and flowers
, and it seemed to be the most likely place within striking distance where I might encounter some of these rare and exotic-sounding bumblebees. So it was that one dull morning in February I drove up to the army barracks at Tisbury for a compulsory safety briefing on accessing the Plain.

  The briefing was delivered by a short, barrel-chested sergeant with a majestic moustache, almost a comic-book caricature of an army type. He sternly described the various risks one might encounter, making it sound as if the odds of surviving a visit to the Plain were slim indeed. He explained that there is substantial unexploded ordnance all across the Plain, the accumulated debris from over a hundred years of military exercises, so that sticking to the main paths is advisable, and digging in the ground or picking up metal items is a very bad idea and strictly forbidden. Access to the central artillery bombardment area is off-limits at all times, as you might expect, but live firing also takes place in other areas, warning of which is given via a series of flags. He made it abundantly clear that, when driving on the tracks across the Plain, it is wise to give priority to Challenger tanks which, weighing over sixty tonnes and travelling at up to sixty miles an hour, can go right over a domestic car and barely notice. This seemed like sound advice.

  A few months later, on a cool day in early June, I returned to hunt for bees. I was driving my slightly silly two-seater sports car, a black Toyota MR2, definitely not a vehicle suited for a head-to-head encounter with a tank. I passed through the town of Bulford, dominated by its huge army barracks, and headed along a narrow lane which wound northwards and quickly degenerated into an unsurfaced and heavily rutted track to which my car was extremely poorly suited. I passed a warning sign telling me that I was entering the military training area, but thankfully there was no red flag flying to indicate that I was likely to be blown up or strafed by rifle fire in the imminent future. The track climbed gently, and after another quarter of a mile or so emerged onto a rolling plateau of grassland stretching far to the north.