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

New Zealand is famous for its beautiful scenery (think Lord of the Rings), but it is an ecological holocaust.

Bumblebees had failed to cross from New Zealand to Tasmania for 100 or so years, but suddenly they managed to do so just after it was discovered that they had huge commercial value. Draw your own conclusions.

It is humbling to reflect that though a bumblebee has a brain smaller than a grain of rice, it has powers of perception and learning that often put us mammals to shame.

OMGosh, he describes bees and their adventures in such a cute and charming and funny way. Goulson has major skillz. MAJOR SKILLZ.

As the famous biologist E.O. Wilson said, "If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos."

It is estimated that one species goes extinct every twenty minutes.

So far, only three bumblebees are thought to have gone extinct globally: Bombus rubriventris, Bombus melanopoda and Bombus franklini, but surely more will follow. It is the threat of extinction of large mammals such as tigers or rhinoceros that tends to capture the public's attention, but arguably it is the loss of the smaller creatures that

I was once looking for the kindest way to dispose of a colony of Turkish buff-tailed bumblebees - factory-reared bees which could not be released into the wild in the UK as they are not native here - and decided that freezing them was probably the best option. I placed the nest in its entirety in a domestic freezer at -30 degrees C. The next day I came back to find the colony very much alive and buzzing loudly;

This simple fact explains an awful lot about the biology and conservation of bumblebees. They have to eat almost continually to keep warm; a bumblebee with a full stomach is only ever about forty minutes from starvation.

Wow.

...a running man uses up the calories in a Mars bar in about one hour. A man-sized bumblebee (which would, I admit, be pretty terrifying) would exhaust the same calories in less than thirty seconds. Hummingbirds are often thought of as having exceptionally high metabolic rates, but a bumblebee's is roughly 75 per cent higher.

In fact, flying bumblebees have a body temperature that is generally well above that of the air around them, and tends to be constant at about 35 degrees C, close to the usual temperature of a human body.

The result of this new obsession was that my bedroom became more cluttered than ever, adorned now with a myriad of nightmarishly deformed creatures.

The poor creature ended up so thin it looked as if it was constructed from pipe cleaners. It also smelled spectacularly awful; live ferrets smell bad enough, but a dead one defies description. It was soon consigned to the garage, by order of my mum.

LOL LOL LOL LOL

The overall effect was of a bird that had just received a large electric shock. Nonetheless I proudly took it to my primary school class art exhibition. Dear Miss Scott remembers the gull to this day, although she must now be well into her eighties.

LOL LOL LOL LOL

Normally, the glass eyes should be placed in the skull before the skin is pulled back over it, but this was not possible, so I had to try push the eyes in through the eyelids from the outside once they arrived. By this time the skin had often hardened and shrunk a little, so the new eyes rarely sat comfortably; usually they were left protruding somewhat, giving my stuffed animals a startled expression, rather as

I persuaded my grandparents on my mother's side to buy me a dissecting kit for my birthday. I've no idea now what I said I wanted it for, but I must have made up some sort of plausible excuse. I very much doubt that I told them I wanted to chop up dead and squashed animals. They were very strait-laced, devout Methodists from a small village in deepest, darkest Norfolk, and not exactly humorous. I can't imagine

The fat reserves in the queen's body must keep her going; any queens that are smaller than average or have slightly smaller stores of fat tend to die during the long hibernation.

As will be explained later, a quirk of the genetics of bumblebees means that it is very easy for the queen to control the sex of her offspring by laying either unfertilised eggs, which become sons, or fertilised eggs, which become daughters. It is probably a good thing that humans are unable to do this.

Compared to the military precision of a honeybee nest, which contains regular flat sheets of perfectly hexagonal cells, the bumblebee nest is a rather ramshackle, jerry-built affair, but it serves well enough.

We usually used urine sample tubes - they are cheap and do the job so I always carry a few with me in summer, but it is sometimes a bit embarrassing when a handful of them tumble out of your pocket in a public place, suggesting that you have a serious urological problem.

LOL

JO MALONE LONDON
English Fields Collection
Poppy & Barley
Primrose & Rye
Oat & Cornflower
Honey & Crocus
Green Wheat & Meadowsweet

The perfect fragrances to wear and enjoy while reading this book!

Or, come to think of it, I'm wearing Jo Malone London Nasturtium & Clover right now, and that is appropriate as well! <3

Over a period of fifty years, we therefore destroyed almost all the flower-rich habitats in the UK, and 98 per cent of our lowland hay meadows disappeared. The short-haired bumblebee died out because the habitats in which it lived were swept away. It wasn't all that fussy, it just needed enough flowers to feed on. No flowers equals no bees. It is not rocket science.

When I was born in 1965 the short-haired bumblebee was still quite widespread, although not as far north and west as Shropshire. By the time I went to university in 1984 it was nearly extinct. I never saw one before they vanished.

Here's why: it's Adolf Hitler's fault.

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By chance my mother had a rather odd and old-fashioned heat lamp used to treat muscular injuries, something she had possessed every since she was in college training to be a sports teacher. It resembled an enormous Anglepoise lamp, but with two very fancy-looking bulbs, one of which produced infrared heat, and the other ultraviolet light. To this day I've no idea why anyone thought it was a good idea to give

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But I sometimes think that we are poor at keeping perspective on our activities, and those of others. How many condemn egg collecting, for instance, while allowing their pet cat to roam unfettered? (Domestic cats kill millions of birds and small mammals each year.)

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Modern readers will be horrified by all this. Egg collectors are now only one small step above serial killers in the social hierarchy (in fact, I suppose in a sense they ARE serial killers, so fair enough).

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My brother and I mercilessly wore our parents down until they agreed to let us have a dog, a lovely black Labrador-cross puppy that, with a total failure of imagination, we named Spot after the white spot on her back. As she grew, this spot rapidly disappeared, which made her name the cause of occasional confusion. Nonetheless, she was an incredibly soft and tolerant dog who put up with our endless teasing

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The dragonfly larva was my particular favourite - this ugly, dumpy brown creature would lurk motionless at the bottom of the jar, waiting to be fed. Each day we would drop in a tadpole or a worm and watch, ghoulishly as the dragonfly larva's face unfolded into telescopic pincers with which it snatched and devoured its unsuspecting prey.