You may have noticed that the Great British public adores giving directions. When given a chance, we come into our own, tossing aside our iconic reserve to guide the long-lost traveller to a far-flung destination. I’ve overheard textbook iterations of such dialogue during my travels for this book. Almost always, we deliver directions wrapped in a bundle of well-meaning – yet useless – detail. It’s very endearing: ‘OK, so you know that street? You know – that one? Up there? The one you go up before you get to the lamppost with the sign on it? Next to the fence by the bin? Well, turn right there, then carry on past where that field used to be, and it’ll be on your left.’
This poor woman. I stood behind her while queuing in the Co-op, collecting provisions for my ride the following day. Her face remained utterly blank as the shop assistant mangled instructions to the nearest chemist. The preceding couple of weeks had plunged me into a weird mood. I was restless and distracted. Returning from the Peak District meant one final trip remained in this little saga. One more ride. I know this isn’t meant to be a box-ticking exercise, but I desperately hoped that the final animal on my mind would let me in. Merlins were still darting around my subconscious and no doubt will continue to do so. But, unlike the chemist lady in the Co-op, I was a local and familiar with the terrain ahead, feeling lucky that the rare pollinator I wanted to see shared my county.
Since my family moved to England in 1998, I have been invading Dartmoor’s personal space fairly regularly. The outskirts of its 950 square kilometres of national park lie just over 10 miles from home and have been a steadfast persuader, luring me and nearly 8 million others each year. I love that this iconic national park is within reach – that its moors are there when I need them. But to start with, my brother and I couldn’t understand the concept of walking for pleasure. Although very young, our little American heads had already identified that a car just made more sense. It didn’t matter if the store was a mile away or whether Jack and Mia’s barbecue feast was just around the block – have car, will travel. As a family, we often recall the hazy memory of our primary school agony, walking the famous slope to Haytor Rocks on Dartmoor’s eastern edge. My brother Tom threw himself on the ground, beating his fists and kicking his frog wellies against the rough, waxy grass, refusing to believe that he had to use his actual legs to climb a hill. I followed suit. ‘Is this walk a circle or do we have to go back the way we came, ugh?’, ‘Whyyyy are we still walkinggg?’ and ‘Is there a gift shop?’ being my only contributions during early walks. What a waste of bloody time I thought walking was when I knew I could be back home gelling my hair and washing Barbie’s. After all, being five years old is very serious.
Thankfully, over time, these uplands have changed us. Something about the expanse, the wildness of it all, has quite literally broadened our horizons. I honestly believe that Dartmoor is responsible for untangling our young minds and planting us on our feet. Adolescence then wove a different pattern. Aside from refusing to acknowledge that my body was changing, hills became a challenge I craved to face. Summits, a satisfaction. Height, a hunger. Few of my friends shared these interests at the time, but I never wished they would, often pretending it was all my little secret, to either be enjoyed alone or with my family. Later, when I was 17, I met a boy on these moors, and I like to think that some part of Dartmoor has glued us together all these years. Later still, I discovered how the muscle of friendship could pull you back onto the map. I’ve posed big questions to howling gales and red skies, finding parts of myself that I didn’t recognise ... parts that I like. Places like Dartmoor have an uncanny ability to strip a person down to their rawest form, I think. A growing approach to counselling called ‘wilderness therapy’ is built on the idea that time in the wild can cleanse gloomy thoughts. I’ve also long considered Dartmoor (or any vast open space, to be honest) the ideal setting for an insightful first date. Southern Britain’s largest area of open moorland leaves nowhere to hide. Truth prevails.
Time had a different attitude this year, it seemed. How was it already early May? By this point during the previous year, we were comparing suntans over Zoom. Yet suddenly, spring 2021 had decided to pause. Following the drought of April, average temperatures dropped to their lowest for this time of year since 1992. Winter clothes reluctantly reappeared. Sunscreen was side-lined. We were desperate for rain, and thankfully, much was forecast (a little too much, in hindsight). But I needed the rain to hold off for just one more day because the bee I was hoping to find might otherwise stay hidden underground. Sensible, yes, perhaps even wise. And yet highly annoying given the hills I would have to climb to get there. Only a short while before, I realised that somewhere in a hairy little valley lives a colony of one of Britain’s rarest bumblebees. They weren’t the only population on Dartmoor either, but certainly one of the last.
And so, before we part ways, I have one more species to share with you: the bilberry bumblebee. Bombus monticola. Britain’s very own ‘mountain’ bee. Yeah, I know! Last time I checked, Devon didn’t have any mountains, let alone a bee that is repeatedly celebrated as possibly the most beautiful in Britain. Oh, ignorant me. Like our marsh fritillary butterfly, this bee navigates the uplands with a solid aesthetic. We’ll unpick the detail soon, but for now, know that queen bilberry bees are always larger than their male and worker counterparts, measuring around 15 millimetres long. Males and workers, on the other hand, measure up to 10 millimetres. Breaking free from the yellow-black-yellow-black topcoat flaunted by most bees, bilberries have opted for a warmer hue. Even from a photo, I already loved it. Always a fan of an intense orange, I envied its bold accents of colour. The rear end of its abdomen is a deep, rusty red. A bright yellow collar wraps the front of its thorax. And as well as being one of the most vibrant, bilberries are one of the UK’s fluffiest bumblebees, their dense fur coat trending on both the ski slopes and the fashion week runway. They can be easy to confuse with the early bumblebee or the red-tailed1 , which have similar colouring. But the bilberry bumblebee has this glorious red hemline that covers more than half of its abdomen. So there. Male bilberries also have yellow facial hair, which is a sweet finishing touch.
Also known as the ‘blaeberry’ bumblebee (by the Scottish), this unique insect is partial to living at altitude in the British uplands. ‘Monticola’ shares its meaning with the word ‘mountaineer’, which instantly conjures an image of a furry bee donning a rucksack and hiking poles, perhaps taking a selfie atop a windswept cairn. Anyway, these insects live a harsh existence that (surprise!) humans are making even more challenging. (For a final time, please hold that thought.)
Northern European latitudes have a historically wide distribution of bilberry bumblebees; from mainland Britain to Ireland and Scandinavia’s ridgelines, the Alps, the Dolomites, the Pyrenees and the Balkans. Some plasticity can exist. If they already live at a higher latitude, these bees can enjoy a nearby lower altitude. They have been seen buzzing around at sea level in Scotland, for example. So it’s unsurprising then that very few have been recorded in the flatter, balmier south-east of England.
Guys, this is a bee after my own heart. I’ll also admit that I never really wondered why bumblebees are so furry – never thought to ask. Sure, like so many of us, I like them and understand that they’re important, but until recently, my mind hasn’t bothered to stretch beyond the shallow end of their ‘cuteness’. But what I’ve learned is that all bumblebees are insects that have evolved to pollinate, sleep, breed and repeat in cold environments. Cooler climes are the preference for our tiny, chilly specialists, and as we’ll find out, a warm, furry jacket protects them against the worst of it. Who would have thought?
Of all other insects, bumblebees might just be our favourite, don’t you think? Put it this way, ‘oh look, a bumblebee!’, is exclaimed far more dreamily than if it were a wasp. If I was (cruelly) asked to rank my top 10 insects, bumblebees would predictably make the cut. They may even sit in my top five. Many different types of bees exist across the planet, and it’s more than OK if you get them all a bit mixed up. For instance, I only truly understood the significance of solitary bees when asked to write an article about them a few years ago. UK bees can be split into three groups: honeybees, bumblebees and solitary bees. We have one species of domesticated honeybee in the UK, and this is the only bee that makes the honey we eat. Honeybees live in hives of up to 80,000 female workers and males (drones), governed by one fertile queen.
Solitary bees sport the lowest profile, yet they are the most species-diverse, and we have more than 250 in the UK alone. Some are so small that they are mistaken for flies. Severing the apron strings from queen and colony, they favour a solitary life. True specialists, solitary bees have diversified into roles, such as ‘leafcutter’, ‘carpenter’ and ‘mason’, all integral yet declining workforces.
As the ‘truly wild’ bees in the British Isles, solitary bees and bumblebees face many of the same threats, but most bumblebees have a better social life. Living in nests of up to 400 individuals, bumblebees adopt a similar division of labour as honeybees. Typical of ‘eusocial’ animals across nature, this describes a cooperative group in which just one or a few females (the queen or queens) and several males are reproductive. The remaining sterile workers – often numbering in their thousands – provide for the group. Such extreme altruism has long puzzled scientists. From naked mole rats (please Google them immediately) to termites and ants, the militant, organised fortress of eusociality has turned out to be a bit of an evolutionary success story. But only for a very exclusive group of species, which is why we like them.
Some 275 species of bumblebee exist worldwide, 25 of which reside in the UK. We used to have 28, but three became extinct between the 1940s–90s. Such a shame, as they had excellent names: Cullum’s bumblebee, the short-haired bumblebee (now being reintroduced in Kent) and the apple bumblebee. Given that bumblebees are properly wild, it fits that most UK species have been riding a tide of decline since the 1940s, under pressure to adapt alongside the changes in farming, urbanisation and associated dissolution of suitable habitat – you know it. Eight species are officially ‘endangered’, with national surveys observing substantial declines in bilberry bumblebees since the 1990s. You would be right to comment that all insects suffer this same basic hardship as the land has been scoured. British skies, hedgerows, verges, and gardens face one of the worst famines of insects in history. As I’m writing in early June, I think I’ve seen fewer than five bumblebees in my garden this spring. From the marsh fritillary to dung beetles, it’s always the specialised species, with their particular quirks and meticulous associations, that are at most risk. Highly unfair.
I had initially planned to search for the bilberry bumblebee in Northumberland, where it is a bit of an insect celebrity and far better-known than in Devon. Plus, I had always fancied a stroll along an empty, north-eastern beach before retiring to camp in the grounds of a desolate castle, drunk on sightings of puffins – and bumblebees, obvs. But something about the novelty of having a few on my doorstep seemed more interesting. I was ready for it. So, here we go, our last dance.
A thin film of frost clung to the cars. Dense mists robbed the morning air, which smelled different from the previous week. Newer, sweeter. Taking my sweet time to check the tyre pressures on my bike, I was procrastinating to give the sun a chance to burn through, waiting for its hand to creep down the garden wall. Devon’s riddle of lanes leading to the moors are sketchy on a cold morning. Tree tunnels are often so dense in canopy by this point that parts of the road barely see sunlight during the day. May 2021 certainly felt confused.
Perching on the gutter above with a piece of tissue in her bill, a female house sparrow cocked her head with such precision her twitches looked almost robotic. Another flew past, so close that I could feel the purr of its wingbeat brush my cheeks. Despite its momentary aloofness, the gala of spring was almost upon us. Food orders triple-checked. Guestlist complete. Anticipation swirled in the mist.
After the first hill, I was already planning stop-off points to have a second (likely third) breakfast. I was riding fast, energised by the morning and being on home turf. Those rich, green tree tunnels offered a rapid-fire of sun-shade-sun-shade, hitting my body in strokes of warm-cool-warm-cool air. There was a lot to absorb.
What’s bizarre is that bumblebees are warm-blooded, just like us. Thermoregulation like this is a string to their tiny bows. Strange as most insects are ‘ectotherms’, so their body temperature equalises with the ambient temperature. When butterflies bask in the sun, their bodies are likely in need of a bit of a thermo-boost, and they instinctively rely on external cues. But bumblebees have a superpower – they can create heat and thus be strong, independent citizens of the world’s uplands. Presumably, as with most bees, they are also rather busy, so I doubt they have time to sit and sunbathe. And they aren’t the exception: dragonflies, hawk moths and a few other big insects can also generate their own heat – they are ‘endothermic’. Tiny, furiously busy cogs of flight muscles fire up to produce kinetic energy, the warmth from which is trapped within their oversized downy jacket (in the bilberry bumblebee’s case, especially). Generously, evolution has given them one less thing to worry about. Thermoregulation is vital to enable this bee to live the high life at low temperatures. But you may have already joined the dots: who in their right mind would want to be swaddled in fur in a warming world?
Tedburn St Mary, Cheriton Bishop, Dunsford. As England’s third-largest county by area, Devon sure puts cyclists through their paces. ‘You earn the views here,’ someone told me once. On this ascent to the high moors, the hedges were just about low enough for me to see the swell of fields, meadows and woodland, rising and falling around the Teign Gorge. Where are you now, then? I kept thinking, wondering what the salmon were doing on their home river. How had winter treated them? Huge, bare swathes of moorland rested above distant hills and freewheeling on my bike blurred it all. I will never tire of these views.
Wooded, almost luminous fields gently swallowed villages, smallholdings and lone houses. A red pillar box and matching phone box saluted a stone cottage in the village of Doccombe like some Great British fever dream. The phone box had been converted into a library of sorts, stacked with old books. A small, handwritten sign encouraged borrowers. Bluebells wobbled with dew. A chiffchaff offered a rhythm for me to pedal against, and somewhere high in the canopy of leaves, a raven croaked gutturally, as though opening an enormous door no one had cracked for centuries. How much ‘England’ can you cram in? I mused. Trying to remember exactly what bilberry looked like, I quickly scanned hedges as if some might be there. As if, mate. In any case, going for a poke around the bilberry bush in search of a rare bee sounded like an excellent way to spend a Sunday afternoon.
All this loveliness blinded me to the fact I was cycling in the middle of the lane with a 40-tonne milk tanker barrelling down my rear end. With a noise that sounded like I had inhaled a rock, I rammed my bike into the hedge and waved frantically at the driver in fierce, patriotic apology, bracing the entire side of my leg against a ripe nettle clump.
My teenage catharsis on Dartmoor brought with it the realisation that there are some places you can explore all day without seeing another soul. In the crowding South West, this feeling is becoming rare. Such expanse and Dartmoor’s tendency to spread thick fog upon walkers within seconds undoubtedly urged early minds to sprint. The legend of the ‘Hairy Hands’ of Dartmoor has gripped many. On a dark and misty night in 1921, a worker from Dartmoor Prison lost control of his motorbike on the bridge between Two Bridges and Postbridge (Dartmoor enjoys a good bridge). Since then, numerous and weirdly similar accounts have arisen, telling of large, hairy, calloused hands seizing steering wheels along this same stretch of road.
Arthur Conan Doyle, of course, saw Dartmoor as the natural setting for The Hound of the Baskervilles, writing much of the text from Princetown’s Duchy Hotel, now High Moorland Visitor Centre. Tales of pixie-clad wells, ghosts, witches and unexplained disappearances lend themselves well to its mystique. Acidic soils create remarkable preservation conditions, putting Dartmoor forward as a leading candidate for western Europe’s most important (and complete) area of Bronze Age archaeology. More than 130 medieval settlements offer vital clues to how these communities lived. Stallmoor’s stone row monument remains the longest in the world at 3.4 kilometres. And if all that doesn’t thrill, then know that its ancient woodlands also house the world’s largest land slug, stretching to more than 20 centimetres. (No need for me to be lovesick for Orkney after all.)
More than 160 granite tors scatter the national park, and it’s easy to forget how these lumps of rock arrived in the first place. For Dartmoor, granite is as rudimental to its genesis as oxygen is to ours, making it the largest area of exposed granite in southern Britain. When learning about plate tectonics in geography, I heard it better when Dartmoor was the case study instead of Mount Etna. However, my tor diagram bore a closer resemblance to a pile of dung (a very organic one, though, thanks) than an ancient granite outcrop.
Some 280 million years ago, a major mineralisation party was happening beneath the Earth’s surface. Like any good party, it was hot, sweaty and sparkly. Molten rock reaching up to 1,000ºC cooled and solidified. Quartz, feldspar and biotite minerals crystallised, meshing into a hypnosis of granite. Years of cooling scarred the rock with deep, jagged fractures. More time still and a gradual lessening of pressure from overlying rock allowed the granite to expand upwards, fissuring into iconic horizontal joints. Over 30 million years, Britain’s climate transformed from being subtropical and equatorial into an Ice Age. Humans emerged as the dominant land mammal. Dense trees and vegetation relented, then granite formed. Water froze and thawed within its joints. Weather forced its way in, shattering and sculpting the rock into the beloved outcrops we see today.
Rest assured, Dartmoor’s millennia of plate jiving has enabled it to uphold a talent for never being the same. With a chorus of tors, ancient woodlands, rivers, peat bogs and acidic grasslands, Dartmoor constantly reinvents itself within a fluid identity. Almost operating under its own microclimate, much of Dartmoor is cooler than the surrounding areas. It could be sunny in Exeter and snowing on Dartmoor – or vice versa. Like Channel 4 in the early hours, you never quite know what you’re going to get.
A significant intrigue with bees, of course, is their infatuation with the flower. When it comes to any affair, basic information doesn’t suffice: we want all the detail, the delicious subtext and a thorough who’s who. And without bees’ extraordinary partnership with flowers, I wouldn’t be writing about bilberries, and you wouldn’t be reading about them. A world without pollinators is no world at all. Not one that would be fun to survive on, at least. While all pollination is vital, there are two main types: animal (especially insect) pollination and wind pollination. Both methods are crucial for wildflower and crop reproduction and for seeds to grow again and again. Genetic diversity, which we know is indispensable if a species wants to stick around, is upheld by visitations from species like the bilberry bumblebee. Insect pollination is especially well-known for improving fruits’ yield, flavour, and reliability, which helps the whole cycle continue and allows warm, buttery beans (other plants are available) to appear on our plates.
It took me a while to get my head around the fact that plants have male and female sex cells (gametes), which they use to reproduce. To the casual observer, a flower’s pollen may just be some dusty yellow stuff that stains your nice white trainers, but within it lies a panacea. Male gametes inhabit these yellow grains. When you get pollen on your nice white trainers, you’re essentially facilitating floral sex. But bees do it better. When buzzing around a flower to gorge on nectar, pollen grains from the stamen physically stick to the bee’s entire body, face and legs. For bees as furry as the bilberry bumblebee, they can leave a flower looking like they’ve donned a pair of sunny pantaloons, a boob tube and a bucket hat – festival ready.
When visiting the next flower searching for more nectar, the pollen grains from the first are transferred to the stigma, stimulating the growth of a pollen tube that journeys down to the floral ovary, where the female gametes are. As with all fertilisation, this act results in an embryo. It grows into a seed and eventually is contained within a fruit. Seeds must be dispersed via wind, animals, humans or of their own accord so that the entire cycle can repeat. If pollen were stardust, then pollinators would be artists, painting their celestial existence right here for us on Earth. So. Very. Stylish.
This bond between bee and flower is so tight that both organisms have developed and refined complementary techniques to help each other accomplish their missions. Rich scents, colours, designs and nectar are the ingredients of floral seduction. A bee will notice when a flower has made a special effort to dress up and will reward it (in an indirect way) with sex – not a hard one to compute. One of the earliest flowering plants, magnolias likely triggered the birth of insect pollination millions of years ago. Since then, evolution has fine-tuned the strings that pull it together, resulting in the most astonishing harmony. The underlying melody is composed of carefully crafted messages. Strategically placed memos inform a pollinator of vital facts on a need-to-know basis. Guys, a healthy wildflower meadow has more flashing neon signs than Times Square. It’s not hard to see why conservationists lament the colossal fragmentation of British wildflower meadows over the past century. All these stories, and their correspondents, lost in translation.
Working together, bees and flowers share an understanding. Forget-me-nots, for instance, have a fleshy yellow ring around the centre of the flower. Acting as a beacon, this draws a bee to the nectar. And get this – once the flower has been pollinated, the plant can feel secure in its succession, triggering this yellow ring to fade to brown. Think of it as a Post-it™ note stuck to the flower reading, ‘Hiya. Don’t bother. I’ve been done’ to any prospective bees.
Similarly, bees text each other via chemical ‘footprints’. Many experiments on bumblebees have observed that once a flower has been pollinated and emptied of nectar, the bee’s footprints act as a molecular deterrent, repelling both itself and others. Foraging in this way is more efficient, avoiding flowers with depleted rewards. I would love for this to become standard practice back in our kitchens. Detailed little notes updating us on the fridge’s contents would save a lot of time, wouldn’t they?
Perhaps my favourite adaptation of all is the secret bee-flower hotline. I am obsessed. In 2013, Professor Daniel Robert led an extraordinary piece of research while I was at uni in Bristol, which discovered for the first time that flowers could communicate to bees via electrical signals. Emitting weak, negatively charged electrical fields towards a bee’s weak positive charge establishes a line of electrical communication lasting several minutes. What they talk about in those few minutes is surely the ultimate cipher. How many other Enigma codes are waiting to be broken?
Back to the upland jamboree. Moretonhampstead offered respite (i.e. much-needed caffeine and healing baked goods) before the ascent to the high moor, which began shortly after the Miniature Pony Centre (a day out that would go precisely as you’d expect). Knowing that open moorland awaits makes climbing a long, steep hill more bearable. It is the ultimate reward in many ways because it’s a landscape utterly different from the one you’ve just passed through – this is typical of the British Isles, to be fair, which hold worlds within worlds. The vast, bare moors that had rested above earlier hills were now nearly a foreground. Bike and I were gifted heady views across west Devon at every farm gate or gap in the hedge.
Swerving to avoid something long and dark in the middle of the road, I realised it was an oil beetle. A tiny head and thorax rested on a tremendous abdomen, segmented like window seats on a train carriage – it looked black from some angles, violet iridescent from others. Crossing footpaths to a new foraging patch isn’t unusual for them, but this lane must have felt as expansive as a midnight M25. I sped on.
With the landscape continuing to unfold like sections of an old map, other cyclists and walkers arrived on the scene. Cuckoos, too – our visitant charlatans. Their unmistakable call and response is all we want from summer, isn’t it? Amazingly, the cuckoos that spend summer on Dartmoor have flown 5,000 miles from the Congolese tropical rainforest, to which they will then return. The road was opening up. Ewes ushered their lambs idly across. Two ruffian ponies figured the best grass was the stuff overhanging the road, and their random wanderings caused cars to pause, drivers watching curiously, smartphones aloft. Sooner than expected, I was on the moor. The sudden absence of the Devon hedgerow meant I digested immense barren vistas on the move. Up ahead sat The Warren House Inn, well known for maintaining smouldering embers burning in its fireplace since 1845. It also happens to be where, rather endearingly, my brother inadvertently let slip the name of my first nephew a couple of months before he was born.
I had a very specific destination this time – so specific that I had been given a grid reference for it. Serious bilberry bumblebee hunting was afoot. Mike Edwards knows about bees to the same depth that one of my cousins knows about Ed Sheeran. Regularly cited as one of the UK’s top bee experts, he coordinated the Biodiversity Action Plan for bees across the UK and co-authored two of the most prominent field guides. It was Mike who had recommended I visit the Dartmoor bees rather than the Northumberland lot. A top tip, as it turned out – thanks, Mike.
‘We found many queens coming to the flowers,’ he had told me over the phone before I set off. I tried hard to visualise it. South-west of Birch Tor and just off of the B3212 lie the remains of some old stone workings. Between the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this whole area of North Bovey was a tin-mining powerhouse, occupying the largest mines on Dartmoor. Invisible from the road, shafts and earthworks remain within the furrowed brow of the hill in this peculiar confluence of the natural and the artificial where our bilberry bumblebee was (hopefully) awake following hibernation and feeding on something pretty.
‘What are you trying to do exactly?’ Mike was animated and inquisitive. He not only understood bees very well, but people too, recognising our particular (apologetic ?) way of looking at things if we dare to care. During the early 2000s, Mike led various surveys for the Bumblebee Working Group (BWG), a handful of which he passed on – ‘just if you fancy a bit of light reading …’ I suppose I did. Being a grouse moorland in a previous life, Birch Tor’s current medley of flowering bilberry, heather, white clover, birds-foot trefoil, grasses and bracken evidences its recovery. But between 2003–05, surveys of bumblebees around Birch Tor found that the bilberry accounted for just 3.4 per cent of other bumblebees surveyed. Such low numbers prompted further observation of Dartmoor’s share. Pockets of nectar-rich sallow2 nudged Mike and others to keep looking for queens around Birch Tor after they were seen feeding on sallow in Abernethy, Scotland. Their persistence was soon rewarded. ‘We soon saw B. monticola queens working the catkins, and with considerable gymnastic efforts, we were able to capture a number of queens and remove their pollen loads for later analysis,’ the report reads. Such analysis is critical if we are to understand what flowers the bees are feeding on – especially in the dawn of spring.
Considered short compared to most bumblebees, the bilberry bumblebee life cycle lasts around four months. Triggered by rising temperatures, queen bees emerge from hibernation in late April, following a winter underground. Understandably, the post-winter mood is delicate. They must replenish their energy ASAP, and before they can even start thinking about sourcing a new nest for this year’s brood. Polylectic foragers, bilberry bumblebees can collect pollen from a wide variety of flowers, the protein from which is vital for larval development. Handy. But fieldwork like Mike’s has shown them to consistently favour bilberry, and have a small number of specific favourite plants throughout the year. There is method in the upland medley. Only those plants with the richest nectar stores have evolved to flower to coincide with the emergence of the queen. And, like any good marriage, the bilberry bumblebee vows to support their growth, till death do they part.
When was the last time you thought of a bee’s tongue? You and me both. As far as tongues go, bilberry bumblebees have short ones, limiting them to shallow-tubed flowers that don’t require a cave-diving exercise. Mike explained that ‘what they need is open moorland with successions of flowering from the end of March onwards’. He added that, in good habitat, you could predict the sequence. First, they aggregate on sallow, which flowers early. An early spring bloomer, the tiny yellow bombs on the male sallow flowers promise huge nectar #gains for emerging pollinators. And fun fact: sallow nectar was once ranked second in the top 10 plants for nectar production in a survey for the UK insects Pollinators Initiative. Ooh err.
Next ‘the bee will move (somewhat predictably!) to bilberry, birds-foot-trefoil, white clover, raspberry, bell heather, sometimes bramble’. Mike explained how the bilberry bumblebee’s habitat is a ‘landscape-scale thing’ and how essential this continuity of food stations is for their upland survival. I’m sure we can empathise? The majority of us are fortunate enough to receive meals at regular intervals throughout the day, the week, month and year. Any disruption to this, however, is hard to stomach, as it were. But if this daisy chain of events severs for this bee, they can’t just mend it by shopping elsewhere.
‘They are part of the old upland system. We can cry over it as much as we like, but it’s gone,’ Mike stated. ‘You’re left with isolated pockets of good habitat and not much in between.’ Remember, this is our mountain bee. A bee synonymous with: ‘elevation’, ‘peak’, ‘ridge’ and ‘range’. A bee craving open space to forage. ‘Yet it won’t thrive in pure moorland alone,’ he reminded me, ‘it needs rich grass – other habitat – as well as bilberry heath.’ I can appreciate that. Unfortunately, sheep are very partial to a romp about the bilberry heath, too. How very predictable.
Farmers have been invaluable guardians of Dartmoor National Park for more than 6,000 years and continue to graze native livestock across 90 per cent of its land. The whiteface and greyface sheep have featured heavily from Dartmoor’s Iron Age to the present day. Around 150,000 of them graze these uplands annually, bred for their meat and wool, but changes are coming. As I write, a substantial rewilding campaign is competing with tradition. In autumn 2020, Natural England ordered the removal of 1,000 sheep from the moors around Okehampton to allow upland flora, including bilberry, to regrow. A huge debate ensued. Although removing sheep doesn’t remove the problem of reduced upland diversity, it’s worth considering when we’re looking at the bilberry bumblebee.
Because bumblebees only tend to store small amounts of food at the colony, they need to have flowers available to fund regular foraging trips – every few days or so. Some of us prefer braving Tesco once a fortnight to smash out a mammoth shop; others get what they need every couple of days. Along with my dad, bumblebees are more frequent shoppers, and concerns are that continued overgrazing could rapidly escalate an ‘ecological separation’ of this bee from its Devonian frontier. Food shops become more erratic. Frays appear in that damn daisy chain.
Some bumblebees can access flowers in ‘illegal’ ways, biting a hole and robbing nectar from the back of the flower. Although relatively common, scientists think that this ‘nectar robbing’ increases during shortages of suitable flowers upon which to feed. Research from the University of Sussex has observed how these sneaky tactics can transmit through a population and become learned behaviour – potentially very useful! But all of this adaptation takes time, which we don’t have. Although I admire the bees’ ovaries (and brains!), they shouldn’t have to stoop to burglary to survive.
The 2000–2005 surveys I read by the BWG persuasively encourage the need for mass flowering and soft, rotational grazing – directly linking upland grazing pressure to the absence of the bumblebee. And yet here we are, nearly 20 years on from these first recommendations, having the same conversation. Mike stated simply how winter sheep grazing removes the tips from the bilberry and reduces alternative flowers. Rookie mistake. Yes, large areas of Dartmoor do have bilberry, ‘but no other flowers – so the bee just doesn’t occur in those areas’.
Helmet, rucksack, bike and self were strewn across a bank by a small moorland car park, as though the four of us had bailed from a helicopter into some disaster zone. An all-day breakfast-in-a-bag simmered on a camping stove alongside some Mexican rice for lunch. You should know by now that most of my meals blur into one. I was a day-tripper in a good place. Something black flew across my face, buzzing loudly before landing near my outstretched leg. I prayed for a red bum, but it was as white as a mountain hare – buff-tailed. Bombus terrestris, the bilberry’s bigger, omnipresent cousin, finds success in an impressive range of habitats across the UK and Europe. As I spooned my lunch hurriedly, I couldn’t stop hearing, ‘Bzz….ZZZ…zzz..zzzzzZZZZ’. Whether it was, in fact, more bumblebees, my mind or the motorbikes that raced along the B3212, I can’t be sure.
I began my beeline (wahey!) to the epicentre of Mike’s grid reference. As with all the species in this book, the odds of not seeing this bee only made me want to see it more – I fall pathetically for the ones that play hard to get. Somewhere nearby, an outpost of this bumblebee has persisted, despite unimaginable challenges. Pride craved confirmation. I wondered if the area around Birch Tor was their most southerly range in the UK, meaning that it was genuinely isolated, and therefore, screwed?
I threw this thought at another professional bumblebee person – possibly the most go-to bee guy in the UK, if not Europe. The last time I spoke with Professor Dave Goulson was in a meeting where we mused the possibilities of whether beavers could help create a habitat for bees. This time it was all about the bees. Animals which, as you may have gathered, are so mind-bending that they deserve a book of their own. Aside from being a leading academic, speaker and the author of several brilliant books, Dave also co-founded the Bumblebee Conservation Trust (BBCT) in 2006. Responding to the crash in UK bumblebee populations, he and Dr Ben Darvill have built a science-led organisation. Over the years, the BBCT has gradually filled in vital data gaps on Devon’s bumblebees as part of the West Country Buzz Project. Before this, my county’s bumblebees were among its most under-recorded species. Dave and his team were also central to improving understanding of those foraging footprints that bumblebees leave behind. Safe to say, Dave is a legend.
‘So, bumblebees have declined to a point where you would never find many species unless you go specifically to one of the tiny surviving populations,’ he told me. ‘That’s what got me into it all, I guess – that there were many bumblebees in the books that I just couldn’t find. I became hooked on the idea.’ Dave revealed that the bilberry bumblebee was fast becoming one of those species, though not necessarily because of direct habitat fragmentation, which is the nightmare for most bumblebees operating around meadows. ‘No, it’s more that the bilberry is associated with habitat that’s not easily farmed,’ he observed. ‘Moorlands haven’t changed as much as the surrounding countryside. They’re still being fucked up, obviously, but on the whole, they’ve been spared the devastation of the lowlands.’
It appears that our mountain bee has other hills to climb (ones they cannot see). Their fragility here on Dartmoor is the writing on the wall. Sizable (but colourful) capital letters reading: ATTENTION PLEASE. We know this upland storyline – we could hold hands and recite it around the dinner table. To some extent, mountain hares, merlins and marsh fritillaries are all singing from the same tatty song sheet, written by the same tired lyricist. As with all endangered species, bumblebee distribution surveys are vital. If we know where they are, we can try to figure out how to help. The coastguard cannot rescue someone dangling from a cliff if they don’t know from which crag they’re hanging.
During our call, Dave added: ‘You’d expect distributions to shift towards the Arctic – that’s what species did for millions of years during historical climate change. But what is worrying is that the southern edge of their range is shifting, but the northern edge is stuck.’ Dave cited an extensive study in 2015, which revealed a disturbing stagnation of bumblebees worldwide, caught in what researchers call a ‘climate vice’. Further research in 2018 predicted these climate change-related losses among bumblebees are on standby to escalate. Focusing on North American populations, the researchers observed a trend in significant range contraction, even when bees could disperse. Dispersal is simply not fast enough to match the pace of climate change already underway. Bumblebees should be able to move north to keep cool, but they’re not.
Talking to Dave, I was reminded of something Mike had said. ‘People often think that these things can’t relocate – but yes, they damn well can. The bilberry bumblebee is the most amazing wanderer! Colonising Ireland from south-west Scotland about 30 years ago. In fact, if these bees can’t move, they’re dead.’
So, if they can relocate, what’s stopping them from packing up and summoning Pickfords? ‘My guess is current populations are just too low, and the habitat isn’t there to support them.’ Dave nostalgically referenced the past when wild insects would have existed in enormous, fluid populations. ‘If they needed to move geographically to cooler areas, they could do so – thanks to the continuity of habitat. But, now? It’s getting claustrophobic.’ In this grim gamble, if the density of suitable habitat thins, the chances of reaching it thins too. ‘They’ve somehow got to hop over a sea of crappy habitat simply to reach the next best site. If that exists,’ he added darkly.
Absentmindedly, my hands trailed pinches of flaxen grass on the rough track leading into the heart of the stone works. I was thinking of my sister-in-law, Beth, who, at the time, was heavily pregnant with my third nephew. When we met, my first thought was that her hair was the most beautiful I had ever seen – poker straight and shades of sunlight, strikingly similar to the grasses gliding through my fingers. Struggling to focus, I turned right down a new trail and fiddled with my nails, unsure why I was feeling uneasy.
Clouds assembled. The temperature dropped considerably around the edges of the mine. Please, don’t, I pleaded, knowing full well that pollinators would retreat with rain. Had this spring been more reliable, bilberry (or ‘whortleberry’ in Devon-speak) would be out by now. But I had a hunch that I was bumblebee hunting too early. Yet deep in the moorland understorey and surrounded by pussy willow (shush), the air felt balmier, as if we were in a wetland. As a subterranean species, queen bilberry bumblebees often recycle old nests of field voles and mice, which occupy a similar habitat. I could imagine a vole enjoying this place. Must be close, I thought, jaw clenched, checking the map. Ribbons of stream wound undefined routes around the track. I was alone. Thousands of male sallow catkins were held in a halo of pollen, which, upon further investigation, were compacted into hundreds of little balls, like the tips of a hairbrush.
Whipping my head around like some agitated dog, I was foolishly trying to pinpoint the aggressive bee flying in and out of my head. Impossible. Tired legs tickled with phantom itches, and my patience was ebbing. Distracted and irritated, I noticed a baked bean was drying in a strand of my hair. I circled clumsily behind some rocks like a wheelie bin, eyes fixed skyward, a low coil of blackthorn shredded my ankles. Frustrated, I wiped away the blood roughly with my hand.
But then I noticed them – a thousand phones vibrating. Looking up, I realised I could hear the entire tree humming – a deep, thrumming baritone, supported by tenors and basses dotted throughout their canopy bandstand. One hand on its trunk, the other shielding my eyes, I gasped because a tiny black bullet was darting around the sallow far above me in the canopy. A miniature spaceship entirely consumed by its mission. And then another. And another. Hundreds of bees of various types had been here all this time. Feeding. Pollinating. Living. I just wasn’t listening.
This bee is completely orange. I have blurry memories of drinking Aperol spritzes with my lifelong pal, Rachel, that had me wobbling around the streets of Majorca in search of pasta. Bees were commuting fast and high amid the network of branches, making it impossible for me to differentiate between them. A thousand wing beats differing in pitch and cadence made it busier than London Paddington at rush hour. You could feel the urgency of spring.
Writers have observed how the bilberry bumblebee doesn’t ‘bumble’ about like other bumblebees. Instead, it works the understorey slowly, methodically, as a carpenter might over their workbench. I had finally locked on to a queen, radiating unmistakable warmth like a deep, rusty sunset. She was a big girl, too. She lobbed off a sallow flower that fell into the stream with an audible plop. Take me to your leader, I thought, imagining some resplendent queen of queens silently observing this scene from her nearby throne. The bilberry bee I watched seemed to work a patch fully, then move on, flying low like a chinook on a classified assignment. Buff-tailed were far more numerous, and nippier too. A bar of signal brought a text from Tom sent at 1.28 p.m. telling me that Beth had given birth to their third baby boy. I beamed under my bee tree and contemplated what it would feel like for this rare little world to swallow me up, just for a bit.
As ‘pollen storers’, bilberry bumblebees actively feed the developing larvae back in the nest from a central pollen store – a larder – rather than wrapping each larval cell with a little pollen party bag as solitary bees do. ‘Pollen is a complicated food source with a dual purpose: food and protein for larvae and the chemical constituents to fertilise the flower,’ according to Dr Beth Nicholls – a research fellow at the University of Sussex and formerly part of Dave’s research group. The bumblebee world is quite niche. This Beth runs the Nicholls Lab with researchers specialising in the cognitive mechanisms driving foraging choices in bee populations. Permission to be inspired. Young, breezy and sporting an excellent genre of headband, she chatted with me over Zoom. Thirty seconds in, and I aspired to go for a drink with her. Two minutes in, and I considered asking if she had a job going. ‘People used to think that insects had rigid behaviour patterns, but bees are learning about flowers all the time! Even these tiny animals can adjust their behaviours based on the rewards.’
I asked Beth if there is plasticity in the bilberry bumblebee’s foraging behaviour. Could it modify its floral needs to suit a shifting upland life? She told me they could do so, but ultimately their morphology limits them – big bumblebees can struggle to visit smaller flowers and are restricted to specific locations. ‘Dave taught me how strange bumblebees are. Most insect groups become more species-rich towards the tropics, but bumblebees just aren’t like that. If it’s cold, they can shut down and almost re-enter hibernation. But if it’s warm and wet, you’re still burning energy, but you can’t get out. That’s the primary concern – the colony can collapse quickly.’
There are growing fears about this bee and its hotness. An unusual thing to worry about, I’ll admit, albeit well-founded. The good news is that, unlike merlins, for instance, bumblebees (generally speaking) have research on side. Multiple studies have investigated how exactly bumblebees can withstand harsh, cooler environments. As the name suggests, Bombus polaris prefers life at the Arctic Circle. Bombus kashmirensis enjoys a romp around the Himalayas. Studies also admit apprehension when considering how these upland insects will stay cool as the world warms. ‘They’re going to be hit harder than most,’ Dave had told me. Their dog days are only just beginning.
Earlier, I mentioned how bumblebees generate their own body heat to navigate these extremes. ‘Bumblebees can only fly when their internal temperature is between thirty to thirty-five degrees Celsius,’ Dave said casually. I was astonished. ‘Yeah! You could watch a queen flying around in air temperature that’s near-freezing, but if you were to measure her internal temperature, she’d be thirty-plus degrees.’ I’ve been dreaming of miniature thermometers ever since.
As part of their pre-flight checks, all bumblebees must warm their flight muscles – ‘pre-flight thermogenesis’, if you’d prefer a fancy term. Ironically, this means they shiver. Beating their wings around 200 times per second generates heat. Around 40 per cent of the average flight muscle volume is crammed with mitochondria – the organelles that nearly all living organisms have to generate energy in respiration – our tiny batteries. Shivering essentially activates the bee’s mitochondria, firing up the muscles and initiating lift-off.
Sometimes, the bees can temporarily overheat – and that’s OK. ‘They can just pump hot haemolymph [insect’s version of blood] from the thorax back into the abdomen, cooling them down,’ Dave explained. But there’s a limit. ‘Once they start flying, they cannot stop generating heat whether they want to or not,’ he continued, ‘so if the air temperature is high, they overheat. They can’t fly; they can’t collect food. They waste time at the nest waiting for conditions to improve, which means they aren’t pollinating.’
This situation could be serious for two reasons. Back in 2003, Dave found evidence to suggest that bumblebees are more effective pollinators than honeybees, as their ability to withstand the cold gifts them more hours in the working day – and year. Dawn, dusk and cool summer spells are all on the cards. As a group, wild bees are twice as effective as honeybees in pollinating crucial crops, like coffee, almonds, strawberries and oilseed rape. On the flip side, Dave has observed how a reduction in pollination for any bee can potentially trigger an ‘extinction vortex’. Flower reproduction suddenly isn’t as rampant. Other pollinators go out of business. In worse-case scenarios (yet scarily simple economics), both bee and flower populations can crash. Poof! It’s over. Nothing to see here.
The trouble with the bilberry bumblebee is that although it’s a ‘gobsmacking species to look at’ (Mike’s words), its furry coat is its Achilles heel. Being one of the hairiest bees, the maximum temperature that it can fly at is likely lower than that of lowland species. ‘Warm temperatures can increase larval development back at the nest up to a point, but too hot? Like recent summers? Lethal.’ Mike paused. Cripes. Thinking back to all the times I have been too hot, and I remember how much I hate it: racing through London to catch my train to Scotland; again on that train to Scotland; that time I made the fatal error to wear jeans and a jumper in Wilko when the heating was on full blast and the escalator had broken – irritable and lethargic in all scenarios. Overheating is universally rubbish and, at times, deadly for us too.
As I write, in July 2021, British Columbia, Canada, is currently in a roasting oven of a heatwave. In what scientists are referring to as a ‘heat dome’, record temperatures of nearly 50ºC are not only causing sudden human deaths but that of almost 1 billion marine animals in the waters off the Canadian coast. More than just a global warning, it’s a real-time demonstration of the vast amount of heat that is increasingly being trapped within Earth’s atmosphere. A report from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) presents a sobering picture of a stark imbalance of solar radiation emerging between 2005–19. During those 14 years, solar energy gain on Earth has nearly doubled. It would be like turning an oven preheated to 180 ºC up to 280ºC just as your spuds are almost cooked. Would you prefer edible roasties or a charred mess?
Back to the bilberry bumblebee. Fabulous fur coat or not, I imagine the anguish of being unable to remove it when temperatures are rising would be similar to wearing orthodontic braces forever. When you first have them fitted, they hurt like hell. You’re so desperate to rip them off that you dream of it. But, no can do, hun – you’re trapped in a vice. At least the climate vice we’re stuck in is temporary. It is, right?
Bumblebees play a critical role in our environment. They’re an ecological linchpin. Don’t even bother questioning that. But I’ve deliberately not told you their monetary value. I don’t see the point. Yet later, we start asking other questions when we decide that a bee as, a bee, is no longer enough. So, how much are they worth? Yeah, but how much money do they bring in? If they don’t contribute X, then what’s the point? Sadly, this angle has become a crutch when trying to communicate the natural world within the confines of a capitalist one, because mixing everything in the cocktail of the economy is easier. I did it in the dung beetle chapter, hoping that linking their services to money might prick the right ears. Open a bottle, grab some hors d’oeuvres, put a number on it, dammit – then Whitehall will listen! Naturally, many articles on pollinators begin by quoting the fiscal value of their services.
Even over the screen, I saw Dave wince. ‘What do bees do for us? That utilitarian argument has not aged well.’ He shook his head. ‘I absolutely hate that approach. It’s shallow and actually just really sad.’ He told me there will always be people for whom the economic argument of bees is the most powerful. There is a widespread attitude that if insects don’t have a demonstrable value to humans, it is beyond our remit to care. ‘But I’d love to do more to challenge this and stop justifying conservation on the grounds of how it benefits us. Dodos didn’t do a fat lot for us, and our society hasn’t collapsed without them. But it’s a poorer world we live in without them.’
Beth Nicholls, too, shared a similar view. ‘Asking what ‘the point’ of an animal is – especially insects – is such a strange attitude.’ We were both fiddling with the pendants on our necklaces. Deep in thought. ‘Like, what’s the point of us then?! We cannot be so single-minded.’
So, what if the bilberry bumblebee was to become extinct? Total disaster? Or just a shame? According to Mike Edwards, ‘As long as something shoves its face into the bilberry plant and pollinates, we’re not going to be in an environmental crisis if this bee were to die out. The buff-tailed would probably fill the gap quite well.’ In the same vein, Dave told me it ‘wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference’. Bilberry bumblebees, specifically, look lovely. But there’s no evidence that they pollinate any of our crops. So, to be crude – what is the point?
Mike considered this for a moment, then threw it back to me. ‘Do we want to see the same thing every time we go somewhere? People go and watch the same football clubs forever, but do they want to watch the same games forever?’ Hello, moral compass? Be a babe, and tell us what to think? An upland without the bilberry bumblebee lighting up the understorey would be a boring one indeed. Not worth the money, that’s for sure.
My head hurts. I’m worried that we risk making a mockery of bumblebees. We are blithely overusing their looks as though they are ornaments of the countryside rather than a cornerstone of it. Bumblebees have become our go-to species when it comes to greenwashing our glorious* (*broken) system. However, the future of the bilberry bumblebee and its Aperol arse can be bright, but only if we get off our own.
It appears that we already know what to do. ‘But we need to fucking wake up and stop dithering about,’ Dave stressed. He was referring to the National Pollinator Strategy introduced in 2014 and how little humans have achieved since, bar a national monitoring scheme. ‘Counting pollinators is important, but that’s not going to save them. Paperwork isn’t going to walk out of Parliament and save bees. No, we need to galvanise rapid change, and we need support to do that.’
We need to stop diluting and start concentrating. Take risks. Taylor Swift knew what she was doing when she told us to be Fearless. Just like all the species I’ve introduced throughout this book, relentlessly taking risks to survive. There is a strong case that the more diverse a pollinator community, the greater its resilience. The more varied bacteria that children are exposed to, the more robust their immune system becomes. Simply releasing captive-bred bees back into a landscape to make the data look better is counterproductive, as M&S accidentally proved early in 2021. Although well-meaning, their plans to release 30 million honeybees into the environment was not an answer. Aside from the high possibility of out-competing wild species like the bilberry bumblebee, honeybees can also introduce deadly invasive diseases. Let’s just say wild bees (and their researchers) are not species you want to piss off.
Of course, we won’t implode if the bilberry bumblebee disappears tomorrow. But there’s no denying that it colours the upland tablecloth, probably to an extent that we will never fully understand. Broad-scale habitat management across hotspots like Dartmoor can help the bilberry bumblebee to keep up.
As I write, conservation organisations are pursuing a renewed zest for collaboration following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. We’re realising that economic and societal restoration is incomplete without restoration of the environment. Across the Peak District National Park in 2019, the BBCT, the National Trust and the RSPB planted 1,000 bilberry plants inside sheep-proof cages to protect them from being grazed. Ecologists think 10 megatonnes of carbon reside in Dartmoor’s soils alone, equivalent to the annual output from all UK industries. Experts are urging land managers to seal cracks in these moors and prevent carbon leaks. They are also highlighting all national parks for their crucial role in accelerating widespread healing. It’s a shame this realisation has arrived at such a tipping point, but it’s better late than never.
‘We must think of things that everyone can do,’ Beth reminded me. ‘You can do a lot simply by providing food for bees and planning your planting, so there are flowers throughout the year. And please – stop pulling up dandelions!’ She laughed.
The shocking revelation is that we can build that damn daisy chain. Yes! Each one of us. We can shimmy those baselines back. Plant mini meadows on balconies, window boxes, pots and grow bags. Remove ‘weeds’ from the vernacular. Be a little messier in a tidy world. ‘And then you can sit outside with a gin and tonic, with bees flying past, knowing that you helped them get there,’ Beth said triumphantly. Sounds good, right? Let’s not forget that the beauty of the bee is that it’s one of the few things that every community, every school, every household – and you – can rescue.
‘We shouldn’t give up. We can’t,’ Dave said simply.
I thought it would be fitting for us to end the book with a bee. Thinking back, I don’t think I even spotted an actual bilberry bush during my little jaunt. I cycled home in a complete trance. So, whether Dartmoor’s bumblebees made it through May’s cold, wet weeks, I’m unsure. But I like to think they did. After all, evolving as our mountain bee must equip them with some serious grit.
I’m writing these final thoughts cross-legged, wearing one of my dad’s old T-shirts. It fits me like a dress. England is simmering in yet another heatwave, and I’m struggling to stay cool at my desk. It’s been a few months since I finished my travels. Since then, I’ve seen a fair few beavers, some jellyfish and rediscovered that I could be a professional dancer (when alone). Whenever a song comes on by The 1975, there I am – straight back on North Ronaldsay – feeling poetic. Been out on the bike a bit, though not as much as I would’ve liked.
If I’m honest, I’m feeling a little lost. Does this final chapter end my time with these 10 species, their landscapes and the people fighting for them? Our distracted lives make it all too easy for us to look for what’s next instead of seeing what’s here. I’m worried that in moving on, I’ll forget them, but their story matters.
Where to now?
Notes
1 The early bumblebee is a small, widespread bumblebee found across the UK. The red-tailed bumblebee is also widespread and abundant. Both of them have distinctive red tails.
2 A species of native willow, also known as ‘pussy willow’. Behave.