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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
Lyrical bees
Loss of habitat and food threatens a one-time
harbinger of Spring. By Shirley Clerkin
Continued on page 68
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IN THE STICKS
— April – May 2013
I
SAT on a bumblebee once. I’ve no idea which
one of the twenty species had the misfor-
tune to land on my office chair; but she met
her demise that afternoon. I felt her pain.
As a result, I am honour-bound to home in on
bumblebees for this article rather than the usual
newspaper colonists, the honeybees.
Taxonomists have given bees the most fantas-
tical Latin name Bombus and as gaeilge, Bombog.
Adding to the bee lexicon is Dumbledore, an old
English word for a bumblebee. More familiar
though as the headmaster of Hogwarts from
JK Rowling’s Harry Potter, because she imag-
ined him walking around “humming to himself
a lot”.
Bumblebees and their Ways was published in
by Sylvia Plath’s father Otto, an entomol-
ogist, who after his death when she was eight
became the lens through which Sylvia felt the
world. Known as the “king of the bees” as a boy
in Germany, his scientific dissertation was made
readable as a book by his wife Aurelia, although
she got little recognition despite being the queen.
In , only a few months before she died,
Sylvia wrote five bee poems through which she
demonstrated a real empathy with bees. “The
bees are flying. They taste the spring”.
In , Carol Ann Duffy published a collec-
tion of poems entitled simply “The Bees”. The
poem Ariel attacks the pesticides and monocul-
ture of intensive agriculture that threaten bees,
transforming Thomas Arne’s light-hearted song
to “Where the bee sucks, neonicotinoid insec-
ticides in a cowslip’s bell lie”. She underscores
the ecosystem service of pollination that bees
including bumblebees provide, reminding us of
their crucial role for food production. In Virgil’s
Bees, she writes:
“where bees pray on their knees, sing, praise
in pear trees, plum trees; bees
are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard
them”.
And guard them we must. The National
Biodiversity Data Centre’s report on the state
of bees concludes “Some bumblebees that were
once common are now beginning to decline in
Ireland. Two of the most worrying are the red
tailed bumblebee, Bombus lapidarius, which is
jet black with a red tail, and the large carder bee,
Bombus muscorum, which is a blond bumblebee”.
Duffy warns of life without nature’s pollinators,
when they may need to be replaced by labori-
ous hand pollination. Bees don’t just make honey,
they are vital to life on earth, every year polli-
nating % of plants and crops and helping to
generate an estimated $bn value and over
one-third of the food supply in many countries.
Without immediate action to save bees, many of
our favourite fruits, vegetables, and nuts could
vanish from our shelves.
Last month the European Food Safety
Authority gave the most compelling evidence yet
that toxic chemicals called neonicotinoid pesti-
cides could be responsible for bee deaths. Italy
has banned some uses of these bee-killing pes-
ticides and has already seen it’s bee populations
come back, but Bayer and Sygenta are lobbying
to prevent a Euro-wide ban, for fear it would
harm their global business. A petition signed
by over . million people was recently delivered
to the European Commission, which proposed
a ban days later, only to have it turned down by
member states in the Council. EU parliamentar-
ians are stepping up their pressure and several
other European governments have announced
plans to push ahead with new legislation to ban
the deadly pesticides on their own.
The classical work The Flight of the Bumblebee
magically evokes their seemingly frenzied forag-
ing behaviour; all that buzzing, bumbling and
whizzing around. But bumblebees approach
their visits to flowers very methodically from
the bottom of a plant spire, working their way up
and leaving scent as messages on flowers visited,
saving them time and energy. They also see five
times faster than humans and have colour prefer-
ences, purple being their favourite when they are
young, for example. Research shows that a bee
that innately prefers the colour of flowers with
the highest amounts of nectar will probably have
a better chance of surviving its first few days in
the world and then pass on that trait to its own
offspring. Bumblebees give purpose to purple.
Bees are Ireland’s most important pollinators
and provide vital ecological services to soci-
ety. The contribution bees make to agriculture
and the horticultural sector in Ireland is worth
€m each year. World without Bees by Allison
Benjamin and Brian McCallum focuses on the
role of honey bees and how in many countries
we have industrialised them as slaves for mass
pollination of large monocultures. Missing many
micro-nutrients available from a varied diet in
the wild, they become increasingly susceptible
to colony collapse disorder, in other words the
bees die. Other threats like loss of suitable hab-
itat and climate change also are affecting the
natural populations. Unfortunately, according
to the Data Centre, of the different spe-
cies of bee in Ireland are now threatened with
extinction.
In The Other Hand by Chris Cleave, a young
Nigerian asylum seeker in England assumed
the name “Little Bee” as a way to survive, wor-
ried that her real name might reveal her identity
and religion. She says “Most days I wish I was
a British pound coin instead of an African girl.
Everyone would be pleased to see me coming...”.
I also wish the same for bees.
The National Biodiversity Data Centre has
compiled a pocket-size book to help us identify
different types of bumblebee. A complete ama-
teur on the bee front, apart from the bee stings, I
tried it out last Summer. It is a clever little swatch
book, based on differentiating the bumblebees
by the colour of their tail, white, ginger, blond
or red. The next step to identification is to count
their stripes. I felt very privileged having these
close encounters with the bumblebees and their
stripey pile. They are, after all, our “winged-
saviours”.
It would be utterly depressing if Rimsky-
Korsakov’s music and the bee poems became
their eulogy; and the National Biodiversity Data
Centre’s reference collection of bumblebees, sus-
pended on little pins like tiny ponies spiked on
carousels, their museum.
culture
Thirty of the 101 different
species of bee in Ireland
are now threatened with
extinction
