The Bumblebee Flies Anyway Read online

  Helen.

  It was early May when she told me she’d seen bees going in and out of that hole, that she thought there was a nest. But after sitting in front of it for half an hour, I confidently told her she was mistaken. One had probably been hibernating there, I reasoned, there’s nothing going on now. So she got on with her job of razing the garden. She had the garage knocked down, levelled off the lawn, took cuttings of plants she wanted to save and dug up and threw the rest into a skip (which I later rescued and took for my own garden). She dug up the ice plant because she wanted to keep a bit of it, trim it down, resurrect it, but in doing so she dug up the bumblebee nest. She turned the safety of that old mouse hole into a death trap. And she didn’t know what to do, she didn’t know how to fix it, so she called me.

  I cycle over while she fetches two jam jars and a bit of cardboard from the recycling bin. In digging she’s filled in the entrance hole and now five white-tailed bumblebees, legs loaded with purple and orange pollen, angrily buzz around it. The ice plant, half-dug out of the ground, hides the rest of them.

  I learned to catch bumblebees in jam jars from F.W.L. Sladen who, in 1912 at the age of just twenty-six, wrote my favourite book: The Humble-bee. A bumblebee fanatic, he would trawl the Kent countryside in his horse and trap looking for nests, which he would dig up and take home with him. In 1911 he dug up more than a hundred. Some he kept in the garden and others he would raise in the parlour. I like him, he makes me want to keep bumblebees in my bedroom. In The Humble-bee he describes the lives and habits of bumblebees, explains how to catch and rear them, documents his observations of bumblebee nests. More than a hundred years later he’s still the leading expert on various facets of bumblebee behaviour. He’s my bumblebee hero.

  ‘As regards the taking of the nest,’ he writes, ‘I have never been able to improve on a method I devised when a boy. The apparatus needed is quite simple – a strong trowel, two glass jars with narrow necks, and two squares of card large enough to cover the mouths of the jars; also a little box to hold the comb, though in my boyhood I used to carry it in my pocket handkerchief.’

  Using his trowel he would dig up the nest and catch errant workers in the jam jars. ‘This jar I stand in a convenient place on level ground about a yard away and place a stone or lump of earth on the cover to prevent the wind blowing it off. Continuing to dig out the hole, it is not long before I’m greeted by another worker from the nest; she is promptly captured in the other jar; this jar is then placed, mouth downwards, on top of the first jar, the two cards drawn out and the two jars given a vigorous shake; this causes the bee in the upper jar to drop into the lower jar and the stone replaced on it. Thus all the bees that come out are caught, one by one, in one of the jars, and collected in the other jar.’

  Today’s bumblebee experts have since told me that a spade is a much quicker and more efficient method of bumblebee removal – you simply dig the nest out of the ground and lower the whole thing, bees and all, into a shoe box or similar lined with grass clippings and moss. But I always start with Sladen, if only to sit for a moment and pretend I’m in the early-twentieth-century Kent countryside catching bumblebees from the hedgerows while a warm, snorting horse waits for me with my trap.

  Helen is frantic: worried she’s killed the bees but also allergic to their stings and concerned her two-year-old twins might be as well. I wear a vest and shorts, drink tea, play with the twins. I’m too relaxed, she says, to be catching bumblebees. I seize the five workers in a jar and look for the entrance hole beneath the sedum. It’s completely blocked, and has been, Helen admits, since the previous afternoon. I worry for the bees. The five outside would soon lose energy and die – no huge loss to the colony – but those inside it are in danger. I think of Chilean miners trapped in the bowels of the Atacama Desert. How long can a bumblebee hold on without food, water, light and air? There’s no choice but to dig the sedum out completely and see what’s beneath it.

  I get a fork while Helen and the twins stand back. I don’t know what to expect; silence would be the worst thing, signifying a dead nest. A queen and a few workers, suffocated in the earth. Or a crushed nest, destroyed from the weight of the earth piled onto it. No; I want them angry and alive.

  I get them. A cloud of furious bumbles erupts around us. There are hundreds of them, the largest nest I’ve seen, and in early June, after a late start to the year, this is a good sign. The fact they are mad means they’re alive and kicking. And the fact they are swarming around my head means I need to act fast.

  I lift the sedum clean off the nest, gently popping it on the ground nearby, and the bees instinctively fly to it, looking for their entrance hole. The nest – a small mound of grass, presumably assembled by the long-gone mouse – is miraculously still intact. I can just see the waxy pots poking through, in which bee grubs and food – a watery mix of nectar and pollen similar to honey – are stored. From deep within I can hear the fierce, high-pitched buzzing of the queen. As I dash around dodging bees, in my shorts and vest, Helen tells me I look happy. It’s one of my favourite afternoons of the year.

  Sladen’s method long forgotten, I retrieve a shoe box from Helen’s recycling bin, fetch a spade and gently lift the nest – bees and all – and lower it into the box. Most workers settle down but there are a few stragglers still focusing on the site of the original nest that need showing the way. I collect them and drop them in their new home and, as soon as they land, they stop buzzing. Home at last. I reunite the five originally caught in the jam jar, drink more tea and eat a chocolate éclair, and cycle home again.

  I first moved a bumblebee nest ten years ago. It was before my ex, Jules, and I had moved in together; she was living in a rented flat in Manchester, and her flatmate Jonny had thrown a mouldy duvet out into the back yard. I don’t know what he expected would happen to the duvet. Most people would just wash it if it was mouldy or dispose of it, but it was in those post-student days of not quite being a responsible adult and so Jonny, who wasn’t very house-trained at the best of times, chucked it where he couldn’t smell it.

  But a bumblebee smelled it. A red-tailed queen. She will have found the duvet in March or April, laid six eggs and brooded them like a bird, while she survived on a small portion of pollen and nectar she had gathered for herself. When the eggs hatched into grubs she will have left the duvet and gone out to gather pollen and nectar to feed them, and then, after they had grown and metamorphosed into worker bees, they will have gone out to forage for nectar and pollen while she brooded another six eggs. Gradually the nest will have grown, until the neighbours noticed buzzing and complained to the landlord. He phoned Jules and said, Move that nest or I will. And she said, What nest? Neither she nor Jonny had noticed the bees.

  It was July 2006. Bumblebee Conservation Trust had just launched and had managed to secure a front-page story in the Independent, announcing that bumblebees were in trouble. I remember clearly which shop I had seen the paper in, next to the takeaway on the Oxford Road, near the swimming baths. Bumblebees piled high on the floor in front of the sweets. I found Bumblebee Conservation Trust online and fired off a message, detailing the nest in the duvet and the landlord and the neighbours. Ben Darvill, now a friend, wrote back, telling me what to do: wait until darkness because bees don’t fly at night and therefore can’t sting you, cut the nest out of the duvet and gently pop it into a box lined with grass and moss with two taped-up entrance holes, and drive this to a nearby park or allotment, ideally eight miles away because the bees won’t try to return home. Untape the entrance holes the following morning.

  It seemed so easy. We called it Operation Bumblebee. Jules made a beekeeping outfit using old net curtains but I wore jeans and a T-shirt, believing Ben when he told me bees don’t fly at night so they can’t sting you. They can if you shine a torch at them, Ben. I was stung twice but it didn’t really hurt.

  We cut out the nest and moved it into the shoebox. I’m not sure how easily the nest went in. I imagine a lot of honey pots
were spilled, bees lost. But we managed it, we moved the nest and drove it to my allotment. The next morning I cycled there and removed the tape covering the holes, just as Ben said to do. I went to work but I was late and I couldn’t really concentrate. After work I went back to my allotment to check on the bees. And that was it for the rest of summer: my new-found love affair with bumblebees, something inside me unlocked, a new version of me found in a mouldy old duvet in a back yard in Old Trafford.

  As often as I could I would sit and watch them. I’d see workers come in and out with legs laden with pollen, males coming and going. I saw a lot of dead bumblebees, which made me worry I’d somehow contributed to their demise, and I watched a daughter queen dig herself into the ground, just next to the nest, which initially I thought was bumblebee suicide. I bought books on bumblebees and learned that red-tailed bees have a preference for yellow flowers, and seem to like nesting in damp places, like walls in moorland and, perhaps, mouldy old duvets thrown out into a yard. God knows what would have become of her, or me, if it hadn’t been for Jonny.

  I’ve since moved three bumblebee nests, only ever because they have already been partially dug up due to a garden redesign or similar. That first nest was going to be destroyed by the landlord. The second was found at the base of a compost heap that had already been moved. The third was under a bamboo hedge that was being grubbed out. I gathered the bees and their broken home into a box, which I placed just a couple of metres from the original, so the bees could carry on as before. One I took home with me, which I wasn’t allowed to keep in the bedroom and document the bees’ behaviour, as Sladen did all those years ago. I don’t move nests willy-nilly. We must, unless absolutely impossible, leave bees to get on with being bees. We make life hard enough for them as it is.

  Helen’s garden, now a field of raked earth, is no place for bumblebees. But you can’t relocate a nest during the day, despite Sladen’s advice to do so in the afternoon. There are too many workers out foraging for food. I leave the boxed nest of bees open, exactly where the sedum has been, for the bees to get used to their new home, settle down and continue foraging for nectar and pollen. At 10 p.m. (after sunset) I text Helen to remind her to put the lid on the box, which she dutifully does. I get up at 4 a.m. the following day, drive round and pick them up. There are no bees circling the nest, none missed the 10 p.m. curfew – it’s complete.

  The bees are angry as I drive them to mine. They buzz loudly and I can hear the queen above the din. But within five minutes we have arrived. I place the bees gently at the back of the garden, remove the tape from the entrance holes, and go back to bed.

  The white-letter hairstreak is a shy little butterfly. Keeps to itself. Doesn’t make a big song and dance like some of your other butterflies. Doesn’t parade itself on buddleia like your peacock or your red admiral, all strong and bold and brightly coloured. The white-letter hairstreak is brown and small. When it rests you can see its orange wing edges and the delicate letter ‘W’ written in white on its underwing. Little, insignificant tail streamers. Except you won’t because it lives at the top of elm trees and you probably haven’t noticed it.

  It doesn’t get out much. A bit like the house sparrow, it spends most of its life with a handful of others in the same place – in the canopy of one or two elm trees. Always and only elms. It starts its life as an egg on a twig at the outer edge of the tree. Endures winter like this, exposed to the vagaries of hungry birds and tidy councils who like to trim trees into a lollipop shape – butterfly eggs in the bin, a life cut short before it’s started. Those that survive hatch into a caterpillar in spring, eat flower buds before pupating and emerging as an adult in June. It flies until the beginning of August, mostly around the canopy of the tree it started life in, feeding on the honeydew secreted on its leaves by aphids, mating and laying eggs on its twigs. Sometimes it comes down to feed on bramble and thistle nectar. Sometimes. It’s most active in the morning, apparently. If you want to see it you need to find an old elm tree and take your binoculars. Look for a triangular-shaped, chocolate-coloured insect bobbing jerkily in the tree top. You might be lucky.

  This shy, retiring butterfly used to be fairly common but Dutch elm disease all but wiped out its caterpillar food plant, its winter hibernaculum, its home. It can’t just go and live on an ash or an oak, it’s evolved to live and feed on elm, it is entwined with elm, relies entirely on elm. So, along with the elm, it is all but wiped out and no one has noticed.

  I’ve seen it once. Brighton and Hove has the National Collection of elm trees. Something to do with the Downs forming a natural barrier to the beetle that spreads Dutch elm disease, and something to do with the conservationists of Brighton and Hove being prepared by the time it arrived here. There’s an army of volunteers who check their local elm trees for signs of damage. At the first hint of disease the tree is felled, sacrificed to save the others. Most of Brighton and Hove’s street trees are elms. You can tell because they flower before the leaves develop, streets of red lollipops in March and early April. And when the leaves come and the seeds disperse, delicate little samaras, winged seeds in a papery tissue, become lodged in the gutters and drains and pavement cracks of the city. And no one notices.

  I interviewed the local white-letter hairstreak expert a couple of years ago for an article I didn’t end up writing. She took me into the hills, to Hollingdean Park where there is a stand or two of mature elms. It was early August, late in the white-letter hairstreak season. We scoured the tree tops with binoculars, I couldn’t see anything, but with her trained eye she pointed at a fluttery thing against the blue sky. I squinted and caught the briefest glimpse before it disappeared into the canopy – my first white-letter hairstreak.

  White-letter hairstreaks like mature elms. Not the newly planted hybrids in the city centre. The older the better, where annual generations of butterflies have lived for many years. There are some on the Level and in the grounds of the Royal Pavilion. And there’s the Preston Twins, the two oldest elm trees in the world, situated by the north-western entrance to the park on London Road.

  There’s a good chance of seeing white-letter hairstreaks above the Preston Twins. A good chance of seeing some of the most threatened butterflies in Britain in the canopies of some of the oldest trees in the world. Across the road from the Rockery, where I run and gawp at frogspawn in spring, are these two trees and their shy brown butterflies, four hundred years of Brighton and Hove’s history neatly packaged into a few square metres.

  Summer now, shorts and a vest, no cumbersome hat and gloves but a small bag packed with binoculars. I head out into Sunday morning, less of the bustle and traffic of the weekday. I run up past the closed chippy and Hove station, past the Tesco Express, into the hills to the Droveway, the route I last ran to gawp at tadpoles. Early July, the vest was, perhaps, a little ambitious, and I run faster to warm up. Down South Road and across Preston Road, I head towards the north-western entrance to the park.

  I stop, breathless and sweaty, and lean against railings on the edge of the road. Look at them, these great old things, two old dears guarding the city. ‘English’ elms. It was 1613 when they were brought to Brighton by the Romans. They’re huge, with thick trunks from which a hundred tributary branches fan out like veins, like water. I fish out my binoculars and scan the canopy. A slight wind has picked up and the branches and leaves are quivering. No white-letter hairstreaks yet. I lower the binoculars to look into the trees, into an ancient world hidden from passers-by on the road. Far up, a baby jay sits, unmoving, on a branch. Elsewhere a charm of goldfinches twitter. If I searched closer I’d find ladybirds and other beetles beneath the bark, ants, leafminers, grubs of things I couldn’t even begin to identify. Each tree a city, housing the tiniest insects up to birds and small mammals – mice and squirrels, bats perhaps. And, somewhere, the white-letter hairstreak butterfly.

  I scan the canopy again, take the binoculars around the edge of each tree, the outermost branches where tits forage. White-letter ha
irstreaks like to hide in the canopy. The males come out to fight in great aerial battles; both sexes, occasionally, come down to feed. But mostly they stay hidden. Mostly, you have to be patient.

  The sun disappears behind a cloud and everything becomes quiet, except the road behind me, where traffic is picking up. I try to block it out. I scan the bark with my binoculars, look inside the great hole Mother Nature carved out in one of them. These trees with their four hundred years of gnarling, four hundred years of twisted growth and of being home and food to thousands, being part of the landscape for a growing town, a new city. Tell me your life, Preston Twins. Part of the old Preston Manor and not far from the Droveway, these trees would have seen the comings and goings of farmers, the felling of the Rookery to create the Rockery, the developments of crown estate into parkland, of the road, the first buses and cars. These trees and the butterflies, too: each generation, each year, a little different from the last.

  The sun comes out and I tune my binoculars back to the canopy. Nothing but the gentle waving of stems in the breeze. I keep looking, keep scanning. I shiver as my body cools down from running; I should have packed a sweater.

  There. A flicker of something. A butterfly. Flying out and then in again. Is it feeding? I can’t tell. I use my binoculars to zone in, focus on it. It rests on a leaf, a little chocolate triangle, a white-letter hairstreak. Just a hint of it, a glimpse, and then it’s gone again. But definitely there. I continue looking but see nothing else. Is that it? Again? Two white-letter hairstreaks glimpsed in a flash? I like them more for that, somehow, shy and elusive as they are. As well as being cold, my eyes hurt and my neck is strained from looking upwards. But I’ve done it. I’ve seen a white-letter hairstreak butterfly in one of the oldest elm trees in the world. I pack my binoculars back into my bag and run back home to the warming day, a little more in love with these butterflies, a little more in love with Brighton.