Another Life/Michael Viney: If I tiptoe through the geraniums these mornings, it is not just because, billowing pinkly into blossom at either side of the garden path, they leave little room for my feet (they are, I should add, geraniums of the wilder, cranesbill kind). No, my care is to avoid discommoding the dozens of bumblebees as they nudge intently into the flowers. Their collective, helicopter buzz reminds me that their family name, Bombus, means "booming".
Their restless quest for nectar makes them dizzying to follow, so that, even with a field-guide in hand, I have to hope I'm right in identifying the big ones in yellow and black bands, with a white tail, as Bombus hortorum, and the ones with backs of brown velvet as Bombus pascuorum. Both are high on the list of the bumblebees most likely to be met in an Irish country garden.
Watching them arrive on cue as the banks of geraniums blossomed was something of a relief. An e-mail from a Greystones reader had lamented the disappearance of the early bees in this spring's chill interludes and what this might portend for the autumn's apple crop. At the back of his mind, no doubt, were reports of worrying declines among these prime pollinators. Without bees in their great variety, some of them highly specialised, many crops would fail and many native plants become extinct.
In North America and some parts of Europe, bees are in marked decline. One's first thought is to blame insecticides. But even in an Ireland of mainly pastoral farming, the spread and diversity of bees has fallen quite enough to be worrying. When, in 2002, Dr Mark Brown of Trinity's Zoology Department went looking for the 16 kinds of bumblebee recorded in the Dublin area, he sampled 1,100 bees and found only eight species, with only four of them at all common. But that area historically includes some of the most intense horticulture and pesticide use in the country.
But island-wide a major cause of decline is loss of habitat. As concrete spreads and every scrap of rough land is built on, there are fewer and fewer refuges for little bumblebee colonies or even for the simpler needs of Ireland's 70 or so "solitary" bees. Even the burgeoning gardens of Ireland are often far from bee-friendly - and not only in terms of nesting habitat. One woman wants to spray a bank of flowers with herbicide because its bumblebees are "frightening the children" (only the female has a sting and has to be bullied into using it).
In the countryside, the levelling of field banks and hedgerows, and the wholesale replacement of permanent, mossy pastures by rye-grass silage meadows has dispossessed millions of annual bumblebee colonies. Species that were once found all over Ireland, says Mark Brown, are now restricted to the west, notably in Co Clare.
Despite the obvious importance of bees to Ireland, remarkably little is known about them. Much of the recording has been done by visiting British scientists, but even the record of Irish species built up in the UK Biological Records Centre is, says Brown, "frighteningly incomplete". It tells nothing about the size and distribution of the bee populations or their genetic welfare. Last year, to fill this gap, he and Dr Robert Paxton at Queen's University, Belfast, were awarded a grant of €283,000 for a cross-Border research project.
In this first field season, with post- doctoral students Una Bradley and Tomás Murray, they are carrying out bee surveys on some 30 sites of four different types of habitat - blanket bog, grassland, machair and sand dunes - spread across the island, sampling them three times between March and October to cover all the species. The sites are all in conservation areas and the aim is to find out what the bees need to survive and prosper. For rare species, particular sites may need preserving, but most can probably be managed with set-aside land, or by controlling growing or grazing regimes through schemes like REPS. We shall end up with the first full database of Irish bees (some new kinds have already been found).
Meanwhile, Ireland's strawberry and tomato growers are importing bumblebees to pollinate the plants in their tunnels and glasshouses. Last year, some 800 colonies were flown to Dublin by the Dutch parent company of Koppert UK. The bees are Bombus terrestris, whose huge yellow-and-black queens are the biggest of the white-tailed species. Unfortunately, from a zoologist's point of view, they are the European species, Bombus terrestris terrestris, whereas Ireland's bees are a sub-species. If new queens hatched in the tunnels live to escape and hybridise, there may be more than skin-deep consequences for biodiversity.