Contacts
Publications & Events
Our science is published in a variety of formats. Click here for more information. We also attend events and conferences in the UK, within Europe, and at venues around the world.New Projects to address decline of honeybees and other insect pollinators – 22 June 2010
Nine projects worth a total of up to £10M from the Insect Pollinators Initiative (IPI) were announced today on 22 June 2010. These projects will explore the causes and consequences of threats to insect pollinators and ask questions about the decline of honeybees and other pollinating insects over recent years. The aim is to inform the development of mitigation strategies that will ensure that the pollination of agricultural and horticultural crops is protected and biodiversity in natural ecosystems is maintained.
Dr Claire Carvell from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology is leading the IPI project “Investigating the impact of habitat structure on queen and worker bumblebees in the field.” along with Dr Matthew Heard. They are collaborating with scientists from the University of East Anglia and the Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London.
The importance of our wild bees for pollinating crops and wildflowers cannot be emphasised enough. Bumblebees are extra special for a number of reasons. Their large hairy bodies make them very effective at transferring pollen between flowers. They are also active at lower temperatures than other bees, so you’ll see them out working earlier and later in the day. But bumblebees have declined worldwide, largely due to the loss of flowers and other habitats they need to survive in the countryside.
Recent declines in wild plant species in the UK are well documented. The UK has lost 97% of its wildflower meadows since the 1930’s (POSTnote on Insect Pollination, Jan 2010), and previous CEH research has found that more than 70% of bumblebee forage plants (ie. plant species that have been shown to provide important nectar and pollen sources for bumblebees) declined across the UK in the last half of the 20th Century. As a group, these plant species showed significantly greater declines than the ‘average’ plant species. (Carvell et al 2006). Research from the University of Leeds found that insect pollinated plant species declined relative to other plant species (e.g. wind pollinated species) in Britain and the Netherlands during the 20th Century. (Biesmeijer et al 2006).
The project led by Dr Carvell will use a new high-tech approach to unravel fundamental aspects of the ecology of bumblebees and so help us understand why these essential pollinators are declining. Bumblebees are wild bees that live in colonies of at most a few hundred workers and a single queen. We know they need safe nesting sites and lots of flowers. But we don’t know how the distribution of nesting and foraging habitats across a landscape, or habitat structure, affects in detail how nest-searching queens or foraging workers use these habitats. The researchers will analyse DNA from live wild bees to estimate how far queens fly to start new nests and how far workers fly to forage. All of this information will be fed into a computer and mapped out using details of the landscape collected during fieldwork alongside aerial scans of the area. The study will focus on five different species including the rare Bombus ruderatus, a UK Biodiversity Action Plan species. Because the English study landscape contains wildflower strips sown alongside fields especially to attract pollinators, the research will help farmers and conservationists decide how such schemes can be made as effective as possible.
Full list of projects funded under the IPI (Principal Investigator)
Sustainable pollination services for UK crops (Dr Koos Biesmeijer, University of Leeds)
Modelling systems for managing bee disease: the epidemiology of European Foulbrood (Dr Giles Budge, Food & Environment Research Agency)
Investigating the impact of habitat structure on queen and worker bumblebees in the field (Dr Claire Carvell, Centre for Ecology & Hydrology)
An investigation into the synergistic impact of sublethal exposure to industrial chemicals on the learning capacity and performance of bees (Dr Chris Connolly, University of Dundee)
Linking agriculture and land use change to pollinator populations (Professor Bill Kunin, University of Leeds)
Urban pollinators: their ecology and conservation (Professor Jane Memmott, University of Bristol)
Impact and mitigation of emergent diseases on major UK insect pollinators (Dr Robert Paxton, Queen's University of Belfast)
Unravelling the impact of the mite Varroa destructor on the interaction between the honeybee and its viruses (Dr Eugene Ryabov, University of Warwick)
Can bees meet their nutritional needs in the current UK landscape? (Dr Geraldine Wright, Newcastle University)
Additional information
More information on the Insect Pollinators Initiative.
