Anja Murray: The difference between bumblebees, solitary bees and honeybees
Buff-tailed bumblebee. Picture: Grahame Madge
I watch an October bee flitting from flower to flower, a substantial bumblebee with a white backside which I guess might distinguish it as a Buff-tailed bumblebee. These bumblebees nest in large social groups of up to 600 bees during the summer, making their colony underground, often in repurposed burrows of mice. In Ireland the buff tailed bumblebee is one of more than 100 native bee species. There are 20 types of bumblebee, most of whom nest collectively like the buff-tailed bumblebee, and a further 80 solitary bees, who are not ‘social’ bees.
For bumblebees, the colony begins when a lone queen finds a suitable nesting site in spring. To begin, all her offspring are female worker bees, who help the queen as she continues laying successive broods of eggs over the summer. Males are only produced later in the season. At the end of summer, the old queen and all her workers reach the end of their natural lifespan. Only a few queens born late in the summer will endure the winter, hibernating in a safe nook or in loose soil somewhere. When she awakens in spring, she will begin the cycle again with a brand-new colony.
This annual life cycle is why the bees that are native to Ireland native have no need to collect up stores of honey. Honeybees, on the other hand, evolved in warmer climates where they survive through the winter and thus need reserves of honey to supplement their calorific intake through winter months. The honeybees kept in hives by beekeepers are not a native species.
In recent years there has been a welcome surge of interest in pollinators. With a whopping one-third of wild bee species threatened with extinction from the island of Ireland, growing levels of awareness mean more and more people across the country are taking action. Unfortunately, there persists a common misconception that getting a hive of honey bees is helping the situation. Beekeeping is often mistakenly perceived as being a good way to combat pollinator declines.
But because honey bees are a managed pollinator, kept for the purpose of making honey, beekeeping can be considered a form of livestock management, a hobby that is wonderful in its own right, though not a conservation action. Honeybees are not in decline, and adding new beehives to the landscape does not benefit biodiversity. Keeping honeybees won’t contribute to the conservation of the dozens of bee species currently at risk of extinction here. In fact, too many honeybees in one area can even exacerbate the challenges for wild bees, as the honeybees can compete for scarce pollen and nectar from flowers where there are insufficient foraging resources for wild pollinators.
While we’re on the subject of bees, those bees still out and about on October days can be seen feeding on the rich nectar and pollen provisions from ivy flowers, which are at their peak right now. The pollen-rich globes glisten in October sunshine with a covering of honey-scented nectar, gobbled up by bumblebees, honeybees, butterflies, and hoverflies still on the wing at this time of year. Ivy flowers are especially important for pollinators as they flower in autumn, when little else is in flower. This is one of the many reasons why it’s great to leave native ivy grow and flower wherever possible.
In 2021 a ‘new’ bee species arrived in Ireland, the ‘Ivy Bee’. This bee times its life cycle around the appearance of ivy flowers, and so is most active now during autumn. It was first spotted in the Raven Nature Reserve in Wexford but has now expanded up as far as Carlow and Wicklow. The Ivy bee is a species resident in England and Wales but not previously in Ireland. Perhaps warming temperatures have facilitated the expansion of its range. If you’re out and about in the Southeast, keep an eye out for this ivy bee.
There are so many ways we can help wild, native bees to survive in increasingly hostile landscapes. Land is now managed more intensively than was ever the case in the past. Soils are ploughed and compacted with heavy machinery, making suitable ground nesting sites for bees harder to come by. Grassy fields are now mostly seeded with monocultures of ryegrass, leaving little room for wildflowers that bees and other pollinators need to survive. Lawns and other recreational grasslands are still mown overzealously by most. Native tree cover is abysmally low and hedgerows, which can act as a kind of surrogate habitat for some species, are often flailed too frequently, restricting their ability to blossom in spring and depriving bees of pollen and nectar when they need it most.
Pesticides can be hugely harmful to bees too. By physically killing off flowering plants, spraying with pesticides reduces the availability of pollen and nectar for bees. Pesticides are toxic for insects too. They can reduce the reproductive success of many insects and making bees disoriented and thus unable to gather enough pollen or nectar for the hive. Glyphosate was due to be banned in the EU when its licence expired at the end of 2022, though the decision was deferred and now will be debated again in coming weeks. If decision-makers prioritise the profits of pesticide corporations, the Glyphosate licence will not be renewed after December 2023.
In addition to putting away the pesticides, everyone can take action to help save wild bees. As individuals, communities, local authorities, farmers, and businesses, we can all contribute to efforts to stem their decline, but remember that keeping beehives for honeybees is not going to help wild bees. Things like keeping farmland fields full of flowering plants; letting lawns grow tall; and encouraging native trees to grow and flower wherever they can are all far better approaches to helping bees and other pollinators.
For more information on how to help pollinators, there is excellent guidance from the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan
