Status Updates From A Sting in the Tale: My Adv...

I bought a professionally made bumblebee outfit for such events, which is great at drawing attention to the bumblebee stand, but incredibly hot to wear for long. Younger children either love it or are terrified; on one occasion a small girl burst into tears when she saw me in the suit, so I pulled off the oversized head to show her that it was just a person inside. Unfortunately this made it worse, either because

....she lived up to two American stereotypes in that she had a very loud voice and an astonishing capacity for food, particularly chocolate-coated ginger biscuits. She also had the largest dog I have ever seen, a St Bernard that was slowly eating her house.

I must immediately apologise for this shockingly stereotypical portrayal of a farmer. Of course they are not all male or from Somerset, except in my head. Dumbledore, you may have gathered, is the old English name for bumblebee, possibly originating in Somerset or Sussex.

Honeybees cannot be transported between most countries unless they have been certified free of an agreed list of their major diseases, but no such regulations have been applied to bumblebees. In the UK, there are no independent checks whatsoever on bumblebees that are shipped in, despite Defra being well aware of the situation - they paid me to provide them with a report on this issue in 2009.

Up until that time, tomato growers had been hand-pollinating tomatoes - employing teams of labourers with vibrating wands to touch every flower three times a week. The labour costs were enormous, amounting to about €10,000 per hectare per year. At that price, the effort of rearing a few bumblebee nests is comparatively trivial. What is more, De Jonghe found that both the quality and quantity of fruit produced was

"I hate myself, I hate clover and I hate bees."

- Charles Darwin

Each young queen releases a pheromone which is enormously attractive to the males - known as drones - who eagerly swarm after her. They mate in mid-air, the male grasping the female's abdomen with his claspers and then explosively squirting sperm into her. This explosion produces an audible pop and ruptures the male's genitalia, usually causing fatal damage so that he falls to the ground and quickly expires,

He found that older males took longer to mate than young ones, but that they had better endurance, mating for longer.

My name was mentioned in a few newspaper articles about this new bee. I subsequently received a storm of emails and letters describing creatures which the authors presumed were tree bumblebees. The summer of 2001 happened to be a good year for hummingbird hawkmoths in the UK, and I received many accounts of a hovering insect with a very long tongue which was surely a tree bumblebee. One lady described how she had

"I could only follow them [the male bees] along this ditch by making several of my children crawl in, and lie on their tummies, but in this way I was able to track the bees for about twenty-five yards."

I guess the children should have counted themselves lucky that he didn't sent them up to sweep out the chimneys too.

LOL LOL LOL :D

When I was a child, it was normal to have milk delivered to the doorstep. It arrived in glass bottles with foil lids. Every doorstep would have a tile or a piece of wood to hand, which the milkman would balance on top of the bottles. If he did not, within minutes a blue tit would appear, peck open the foil, and drink the cream from the top of the milk. I must admit to feeling slightly sad that this rather cute

Some evolutionary biologists even argue that we are simply vehicles manufactured by our genes as mechanisms to help them multiply - a somewhat disconcerting thought.

After all, what could be more harmonious than a sisterhood of celibate bees devoting themselves to helping their aged mother and their younger sisters? Yet this apparently altruistic and idyllic nunnery is not what it seems for within the shadowy confines of the nest violent fights do occur, and cannibalism, infanticide and murder are rife.

If ever there is some kind of global catastrophe, Steph will undoubtedly be among the survivors. Her idea of a perfect weekend is to go rabbiting with her three pet ferrets, or out in the woods shooting pigeons, or making home-made wine out of unpromising root vegetables. On one occasion she came in to work with a packed lunch of squirrel casserole; at the time her skinning skills were not great and she had to

In fact the nests are especially smelly, at least when reared in captivity; I have heard the smell described as like Christmas cake, but if so it is not a type of Christmas cake that I would like to eat. You can create a similar odour by pouring black treacle and sherry over a pair of dirty running socks, sealing them into a Tupperware box and then leaving it in a warm place for a month. Not that I have tried this

Her volunteers were then asked to take a deckchair and sit in their garden for twenty minutes. (The deckchair wasn't compulsory but it made the whole exercise much more relaxing - as did a cold gin and tonic.)

I love bumblebees. Beekeepers love their honeybees. Both are enormously valuable and important creatures. But mankind has wrought enormous harm on our ecosystems by shifting species around the globe.

In short, in many ways beekeepers are the natural allies of a bumblebee conservationist such as me. But there is no denying the potential conflict and I am sometimes saddened by the strong reaction of some beekeepers to the merest hint that their bees might occasionally do harm. It is the simple truth.

So our strategy became one of finding the most colorful garden in each town or village as we drove around Tasmania. We would then either peer in over the fence or, if that wasn't possible, knock on the door and ask if we could look for bumblebees in their garden. I guess that crime rates are low. I've tried the same approach in Britain and generally received short shrift from homeowners who clearly thought this