A Sting in the Tale (25 page)

Is there an alternative to using commercial bumblebees to pollinate crops? For tomatoes in glasshouses, the answer is probably no. Farmers would certainly not want to return to using teams of labourers with vibrating wands. However, commercial bumblebees are increasingly being used to pollinate outdoor crops such as strawberries, blueberries and apples. Farmers used to rely upon wild bees to visit such crops, but are increasingly of the opinion that there are not enough wild bees to go around. In the pear orchards of Sechuan in China, intensive farming has all but eradicated wild bees, and the farmers now pay locals to clamber amongst the trees each spring armed with a paintbrush and a jar of pollen, with which they hand-pollinate every flower. This is just about viable in China, where labour is plentiful and very cheap, but it is not an option for most farmers elsewhere. In Canada, intensive blueberry farming over vast areas has also led to low populations of native bumblebees, for there are few wild flowers for them to feed on when the blueberries themselves are not in flower, and there are also few places for them to nest. Just as in China, widespread pesticide use no doubt exacerbates the problem. Many blueberry farmers now buy in commercial nests of the native common eastern bumblebee,
Bombus impatiens
, to pollinate their crop. On the soft-fruit farms of Perthshire, most farmers now buy in dozens, in some cases hundreds, of buff-tail nests each year. The majority are placed in polytunnels to pollinate raspberries, while some are used outdoors for strawberries. The raspberry polytunnels have open ends and the plastic on the sides is rolled up in summer, so both raspberries and strawberries could be pollinated by wild bumblebees if there were enough. Clearly most farmers think that there are not.

I was a little suspicious about this. On the one hand, it is hard to imagine a Scottish farmer spending £40 per nest on bumblebees if he didn't have to. On the other, strawberry and raspberry yields vary a lot from year to year, and it would be very difficult for a farmer to know for sure what benefit he was getting from commercial bumblebee nests unless he did a proper experiment. There are umpteen examples of clever marketing persuading folk to buy products that are no use whatsoever. The cosmetics industry depends upon it.

So it was that in 2010 I employed one of my former PhD students, Gillian Lye, to look into this, funded by a little money I had left over from a previous grant. She placed four commercial bumblebee nests next to a half-hectare plot of raspberries near Dundee, mimicking the recommended density of six to nine nests per hectare of crop. She opened and shut the doors on the nests at weekly intervals so that we could compare fruit set and raspberry yield in weeks with and without the aid of commercial bees. Lots of wild bumblebees came to pollinate the raspberries – white-tails, buff-tails, early bumblebees, common carders, even the beautiful bilberry bumblebees which have enormous red bottoms. (I admit, an enormous red bottom doesn't sound beautiful, but reserve judgement until you've seen one.) Quite a few honeybees turned up, presumably from nearby hives. Yet despite all these bees, the yield increased on average by 8.3 per cent when the commercial nest boxes were opened. I must confess that I was dismayed by this result, although I shouldn't have been. Scientists are supposed to do experiments without looking for a particular result; we are meant to strive to be impartial at all times, else we risk subconsciously biasing our results in some way. Nonetheless, I had hoped that the commercial bees would prove to be unnecessary; if they had, I could have used the evidence to persuade farmers not to buy them.

Of course 8.3 per cent doesn't sound very much, but when translated into cash the figures are more impressive, for raspberries are a valuable crop. Gillian estimated that the commercial bumblebees increased yield from this half-hectare plot by 63 kilograms per week, and since the colonies last about six weeks this equates to an extra 378 kilograms of raspberries, worth approximately £2,259, for an outlay of about £160. Of course commercial farms are much larger than this, and the larger the stand of crop, the less able wild bees are likely to be to provide anywhere near adequate pollination, so on the basis of this study, purchasing commercial bumblebees looks like a very sensible option for raspberry farmers.

On the other hand, this is not the only option. Gillian's data provides clear evidence that, just as in Sechuan and parts of Canada, we no longer have enough wild bees to pollinate our crops, but that probably wasn't always the case. Not long ago we had many more bees, and farmers managed very well without buying in extra. We used to have more bees because farming was different – farms had more flowers, and used fewer pesticides. Commercial bumblebees are expensive, so that large soft-fruit farms are spending several thousand pounds per year on them. What if this money was spent instead on boosting wild bumblebee numbers, by planting strips of wild flowers, or providing them with nesting habitat? Could this provide a more effective and infinitely more environmentally friendly alternative to using commercial bumblebees, at least for outdoor crops?

I don't yet know the answer to this question, but two of my PhD students are trying to find out. Ciaran Ellis and Hannah Feltham are working together to evaluate the effectiveness and economic outcome of alternative strategies. Planting strips of wild flowers near fruit crops ought to increase wild bumblebee numbers, but it might draw bees away from the crops, which is the last thing the farmer would want. It also requires money for seed, diesel for the tractor to prepare the ground, sow the seed and manage the strips, and farm labour. On the other hand, if it works and is cost effective it would be marvellous to be able to go to farmers with evidence that they can make more money by growing wild flowers on their farm.

I think it is unlikely that we can come up with a scheme that would completely do away with the need for commercial bumblebees for raspberries in polytunnels, not least because some varieties are grown that flower in March and April, when very few wild bumblebees are on the wing in Perthshire. But we might be able to reduce the number of nests that have to be bought, and perhaps do away with the need for them entirely in July and August when wild bumblebees are most abundant.

Aside from the costs and risks associated with commercial bumblebees, there is one more good reason for farmers to ensure that they do not forget about the services offered for free by wild bees. Most commercial bumblebees come from a very small number of factories, and only one species is available in Europe. If anything should happen to the supply of commercial buff-tails, such as a major outbreak of a disease in one or more of the factories, then many farmers would not be able to get hold of them and the price per nest would skyrocket. If there were also no wild bees, then crops would fail, and some farmers would go bankrupt. This is not just idle conjecture – Colony Collapse Disorder in the USA led to a massive rise in the cost of hiring honeybee hives for crop pollination because so few were available, and hence had a huge financial impact on farmers. Depending entirely on one commercial species is an inherently risky strategy; putting all one's eggs in one basket. Wild bees can be viewed as a backup strategy, an insurance policy in case supplies of commercial bees should fail.

When you next squirt Heinz tomato ketchup on to your fish and chips, reflect on the nature of the modern world. Your ketchup was most likely made in a factory in the Netherlands from tomatoes grown in Spain, pollinated by Turkish bees reared in a factory in Slovakia. I'm sure that our food supply chain doesn't need to be quite so convoluted. You might also reflect that every cucumber, aubergine, runner bean, blackcurrant and pepper that you eat was almost certainly pollinated by a bumblebee, perhaps reared in a factory, or perhaps a wild bee. A tin of baked beans largely comprises navy beans that were pollinated by bumblebees, and a sauce made from bumblebee-pollinated tomatoes. We owe these little creatures for all that they give us …

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Chez Les Bourdons

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,

One clover, and a bee,

And revery.

The revery alone will do,

If bees are few.

Emily Dickinson

There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.

Aldo Leopold (American environmentalist)

I have always hankered after owning some land that I could manage as my own private nature reserve. Gardening for wildlife has been a lifelong occupation, but I really fancied something bigger and more ambitious than my quarter-acre suburban garden. On an academic salary, buying a substantial area of land in the UK was not an option, so I found myself looking further afield. At the time, in 2002, I lived in Southampton, and with a ferry port nearby in Portsmouth the obvious option was France.

I spent many happy hours surfing the Internet, looking at all manner of fantastic French properties. I failed to resist clicking on the link for the dilapidated twenty-bedroom chateau near the Loire, available for the price of a three-bed semi in the home counties, or looking longingly at the pictures of a rustic farm with 400 hectares of mountainous forest and scrub in the Cévennes, but neither was terribly practical and, relatively cheap though they were, they were beyond my very limited budget. In the end I narrowed my search down to the Charente, a peaceful backwater of rural France between Limoges and Poitiers, about halfway down France and west of centre. I'd holidayed in the area as a boy – my family invariably spent two weeks camping in France every summer – and I remembered catching exquisitely beautiful white admiral butterflies in the lovely oak forests with which the area abounds, as well as spending many happy days rock-pooling and playing French cricket on the great beaches of the west coast. Property also happened to be absurdly cheap, and the area is within a day's drive of the Channel ferry ports.

So it was that in a cold and wet October I found myself on a one-week whistle-stop tour of estate agents in the Charente. I'd booked in advance with them, and arranged to view a number of properties that I had seen on the Net and which looked of interest. My father came with me – I think my wife Lara had had a word with him and given him strict instructions to prevent me from buying anything too ridiculous. It was a hectic schedule – we visited a different agent in a different town every day, and then spent our evenings driving on to the next town. Most of the properties I had seen on the Internet had been sold years earlier – it seemed that French estate agents updated their sites only every decade or so, such is the pace of life in rural France.

The French countryside is absolutely littered with beautiful but dilapidated and neglected old houses, usually built of stone, with heavy oak beams and hand-made clay tiles. Many are already more or less beyond repair. In England these old piles would fetch an arm and a leg and perhaps a kidney too with folk paying a premium for the privilege of spending a year or two in a mobile home in the garden while having them reconstructed – but in France they cost very little and even at such low prices they don't sell. There is not much rural employment, and in any case it seems that the French don't want these draughty old properties, understandably preferring to live in cosy modern housing. Most sales of older, rural properties are to Brits looking for an idyllic holiday home or a new life in the country, but many of them end up back on the market within a few years as the upkeep is considerable, while those looking for a new life are often driven home by the difficulties of integrating into the local community, or the lack of viable ways to earn an adequate living. So it is that the market for rural property stagnates, and one by one the lovely old houses are falling down.

All of this was good news for me. I didn't plan to make a living in France – I just wanted somewhere to grow flowers and feed bees.

Despite my insistence that I had a very limited budget and was only interested in properties with land, the agents enthusiastically showed my father and me around all sorts of unsuitable properties, many on the verge of collapse, and often with only a small garden. Blind optimism and selective deafness seem to be prerequisites for employment as a French estate agent, perhaps because they sell so few properties. The many derelict and boarded-up heaps included an abandoned shoe factory somewhere near the town of Piégut, with machinery still in place, and a fourteen-bedroom chateau on the edge of Fontenay-le-Comte. The latter was being sold by an ancient couple who lived in just two rooms, all that they could afford to heat, while the rest of the building fell down around them. I felt very sorry for them, and it would have made a wonderful renovation project for someone with a bottomless pocket, but it was not what I was after.

On the fifth morning, after a night at a charmless motel called L'Escargot, built on the banks of a busy dual carriageway, we visited an agent in the oddly named village Champagne-Mouton. It was a damp, misty morning, and the estate agent's was closed when we arrived at the appointed time, so we went for a walk through the eerily silent back lanes of the village, startling a cow which was the only sign of life. When we got back the agency was open and we were briefly greeted by a rather unfriendly Englishman, but no sooner had we walked in the door than he muttered something about an errand and disappeared. His surly Russian wife spoke no English or French, so far as I could tell, but she made us a lukewarm instant coffee and then disappeared into a back room.

When the agent returned an hour or so later he seemed distracted and more than a little put out at the bother of showing us anything at all. In an unusual approach to his trade, and at marked odds with the approach of his French counterparts in other agencies, he tried to deter us from viewing any of his properties, emphasising their many failings, but in the end he begrudgingly agreed to show us a couple. The first was an old farm with 13 hectares near the village of Épenède, one of very few properties I'd seen on the Internet which was actually still for sale. The mist had not cleared by the time we arrived and, as we had come to expect, the place was in a parlous state. As we approached the end of the no-through lane that accessed it, we were greeted by a ferocious black dog that howled and hurled itself towards us, fortunately restrained by a long length of chain attaching it to a stone barn. Pieces of rusting, broken-down farm machinery littered the yard, many of them having lain there so long that they were encrusted with ivy, and had begun to sink slowly into the mud. The owner, a Monsieur Poupard, proudly showed us around.