Bees are beautiful, and essential for human life. So why don’t we protect them better?
OPINION
On those blowsy days in May, where clouds sail like galleons and the verge-side mud of winter has dried into blooms of farmyard dust and flowers, there is a new energy abroad. The air is zoomy with bees, propelled and fully charged with the green electric ‘zing’ of late spring.
It’s an intoxicating, heady time and a delightful indulgence to watch these incredible, industrial creatures at work. Each spring, I try to improve my bee ID, and end up lost in wonderment: spotting the delightfully named hairy-footed flower bee, zipping at high speed and pitch, in and out of the comfrey bells. A long-tongued hummingbird of a being, with feathered feet like a tiny shire horse. Or getting so close to a big, buff-tailed queen bumble, her thighs loaded with golden saddlebags of pollen, that there is the breath of a breeze on my cheek from the flap of her wings.
Bumblebees, solitary bees, cuckoo, mason, mining bees; bees that nest in snail shells, or ride tiny lengths of grass back to their nests like broomsticks, bees that sleep in flowers, bees that cut, roll and seal perfect tubes from leaves in which to lay their eggs. Bees are astonishing.
Bees are what I remember, working at a ‘big house’ as a housekeeper-waitress in my twenties. I spent blissful hours between shifts, lolling in a walled garden full of bees and apple blossom. A spring-summer ‘earworm’ returns to me from that time: a Kate Bush ‘B’ side from 1994. A song about getting lost and meeting a beekeeper at sunset, waiting for his hive to come home: “They got alchemy! They turn the roses into gold; they turn the lilac into honey.”
Each of our 270 species of bee has its own ecological niche. Each bee, its flower, if you like, methodically visited, and often covering incredible foraging distances to collect pollen and nectar, pollinating trees, flowers and crops along the way.
It bears repeating that globally, a third of our food depends on bees and other pollinators, yet a third of the UK bee population has disappeared in the last decade. Bees are a critical part of the enriching, interconnected diversity of life we are part of, and responsible for. Deep in our hearts we know this. As poet Jo Shapcott puts it: “So nuanced it is, the geography of nectar, the astronomy of p
