09-07-2025
JOHN MACLEOD: Hairy and dishevelled, bopping along as if sozzled...but hum of the bumblebee is truly the voice of our gardens
'The hum of bees is the voice of the garden,' mused the late Elizabeth Lawrence, internationally known garden writer – and she spoke not of the industrious, humourless honey-bee, merely a unit in in a hive of fantastically ordered complexity and its one loyalty to the Reich.
She meant the bumblebee, meandering gently about, never in a rush, loath to sting. Hairy and dishevelled, it bounces off windows and bops, as if a little sozzled, amidst delphiniums and buddleia and honeysuckle and the bonny purple heather.
The Victorians rather sweetly called them 'humblebees.' In Old English, they were 'dumbledores' – yes, that's where she got it – and the Romans thought them creatures of the Muses.
To our Celtic forebears, they were messages from the heavens. And, even today, some superstitions endure. A bumblebee flying into your house, they do say, heralds some important, forthcoming visitor.
They portend luck and sweetness; a bumblebee landing on your hand declares that you are about to come into money. And, chilled and ponderous as a bumblebee might seem – less the maniacal jiving of the honeybee advising the hive of abundant good things at such-and-such a location than embarrassing Dad-dancing at a wedding – it is supremely efficient.
Its four wings beat two hundred times a second; it thunders like an exquisitely tuned guitar-string – and it is the only living thing capable of pollinating a tomato plant.
Accordingly, great commercial growers important thousands of boxes of bumblebees each year, sourced largely from France and Belgium and where they are commercially farmed, for their glasshouses.
Bumblebees do not make honey: they do not need to, for a colony lasts but one long summer. Only the fattest hibernating queens, holed up in some crevice, survive winter – and her first mission, understandably, is to feed.
Duly regaled with nectar from the first spring flowers, and protein-rich pollen from catkins and fluffy pussywillow, she then seeks out some des res – most species like to repurpose a fieldmouse's burrow – moulds some waxy cups, stores therein garnered nectar and pollen-balls, and lays her first eggs.
Larvae duly pupbate and, just like that, she now commands a troop of workers – all girls; and the only thing that might go amiss is the invasion of a queen of some cuckoo bumblebee species, who usually kills (or, in rare mercy, enslaves) the original queen.
What no queen will tolerate is a worker laying her own eggs. Her Majesty, naturally hurt as well as cross, promptly eats them. It is in only late summer, and doubtless with a world-weary sigh, that boys are begotten: lazy, laddish and stingless and only the luckiest getting to mate.
'He does nothing except stay out all night,' darkly confides Gill Perkins of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, 'get drunk on nectar and look for sex.'
It might as well be a hall of residence. There are only seven relatively common species of bumblebee you are likely to see in Britain, and the biggest, the Great Yellow Bumblebee – 'like big, fat flying ping-pong balls,' enthuses Mrs Perkins – is now confined to the far north.
Caithness, Sutherland, Orkney – and the Western Isles where, too, we can boast a unique bumblebee sub-species. A small heath bumblebee, bombus jonellus var. hebridensis.
All told, though, there are twenty-four species in this country, as the late and peerless Bernard Levin enthused in a column published, rather sweetly, on 9 July 1975 – a precise half-century ago.
He had just read Dr D V Alford's definitive work on the subject, published by Davis-Poynter for the eyewatering price, at that time, of £25, and imaginatively entitled Bumblebees.
'They go by names of such variegated magnificence,' panted Levin, 'such exquisitely poetic beauty, that I must introduce you to a selection.
'There is bombus agrorum, for instance, who is obviously a rustic bumblebee, forever sucking straws and leaning over gates; there is bombus americanorum, who, no doubt, chews gum; bombus distinguendus, who comes of a very old family of bumblebees, and bombus elegans, who only goes to the best tailors.
'Bombus frigidus, a very reserved bumblebee; bombus hortorum hortorum, who stammers; bombus inexpectatus, who is apt to pop out from behind lampposts and cry 'Boo!'; bombus senilis, poor old thing…
'And bombus virginalis, or so she says.'
But all is not well for bumblebees. 2024 was the worst year for their numbers in Britain since records began. A big factor, of course, was its extraordinarily bad spring, with – according to the Meteorological Office – many areas receiving more than double, and in some places triple, the usual amount of rainfall for March, April and May.
Untold, emerging queens were chilled, starved and clobbered just at the frailest point of bumblebee life – when a season's new colonies are being established by assorted single mums.
Though conditions improved, even July and August saw their second-worst counts since Bumblebee Conservation Trust monitoring began.
'We've got smaller, weaker populations of a lot of these bumblebees,' says Dr Richard Comont, 'because of long-term habitat changes. We know that bumblebees were struggling anyway and smaller, weaker populations are less able to respond to changes: they don't have that resilience.
'Although there's loads of bumblebees in midsummer, they all come from very small numbers that emerge from hibernation in the spring.'
Protracted heatwaves – remember the scorcher that was 2022, so protracted that in many districts it triggered a 'false autumn'? – also jeopardise bumblebee colonies.
Queens and workers routinely 'thermoregulate,' fanning eggs and larvae when things hot up, but if the thermometer hits 35 degrees or more then all is lost.
For almost the greatest paradox of bumblebees is that they are creatures of temperate climes, not tropical - at their most abundant in territory like the Alps and Britain and the cool summers of the Outer Hebrides.
There are even some that live in the Arctic, like bombus polaris. ('Said to have nuclear mandibles,' purred Bernard Levin.)
But still greater threats are neonicotinoid pesticides – which dramatically reduce a queen's egg-laying success – and even a 26% fall is enough, in many instances, for local extinction.
Climate change and heavy metal pollution, as we reported yesterday, are even affecting how bumblebees hum, according to experts – and humming is vital in teasing such flowers as the tomato to open up for a visit.
The simple destruction of habitat, though, long predates such toxins. Since 1950 we have lost, incredibly, 97% of Britain's wildflower meadows – largely due to modern intensified farming – and with dire ecological consequence.
One reason that bumblebees still prosper in the Western Isles is because of the lowkey crofting agriculture – Hebrideans do not scamper around spraying things – and because of the fabled machair, the rich coastal shell-sand grazings which, at this season, are a riot of sweet, scented, blossom.
I fully understand why neighbours mow their lawns, but wince when they go above and beyond and strim the roadside verges too.
And when, several months ago, the northern verge the length of my street was churned up by BT – laying the kit for high-speed broadband – I quietly ordered in some wildflower seed and did much discreet evening sowing. Poppy, cornflower, yellow rattle, ox-eye daisy and so on.
A summer without bumblebees is, for me, unthinkable. And, as French mathematician André Sainte-Laguë once joyously reflected, 'According to aerodynamic laws, the bumblebee cannot fly. Its bodyweight is not the right proportion to its wingspan.
'Ignoring these laws, the bee flies anyway.'
