A Sting in the Tale Quotes

“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. If a bumblebee runs out of energy, she cannot fly, and if she cannot fly, she cannot get to flowers to get more food, so she is doomed”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“The key to helping our rarer species to thrive is probably simply to add more flower patches to the landscape, making it a little easier for them to find food and keep their nests well provisioned.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“In flight a bumblebee flaps its wings 200 times per second (which equals 12,000 rpm), roughly equivalent to the speed of a high-revving motorbike engine.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“Conservation is not something that should be left to others. It is easy to get depressed and despondent at the impending extinction of the polar bear or the tiger, or at the horrific progress of deforestation in the tropics. Perhaps governments or scientists or organisations such as WWF can do something to help address these situations, but as an individual it is very hard to know where to start – it all seems so remote and dauntingly complex. In contrast, conserving bumblebees is something anyone can do. A single lavender bush on a patio or in a window box will attract and feed bumblebees, even in the heart of a city.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“Sadly, one of the few places where bumblebees generally won’t settle is in the bumblebee nest boxes widely sold in garden centres. Whatever”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“Since the grasses are being parasitised, they grow less, leaving more room for other flowering plants. Pywell demonstrated that sowing rattle seed into an English meadow significantly boosted the diversity of flowers present by suppressing growth of grasses.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“The mutualistic relationships between bees, the flowers that they pollinate, and the bacteria that live within the roots of those plants are at the heart of the functioning of a natural, species-rich meadow. The problem is that these relationships can be ruined by application of a sack of fertiliser, which allows the grasses to swamp the legumes and other wild flowers, swiftly resulting in a bright green, flowerless sward, with no legumes, no Rhizombium, and no bees. In the farming world this is known as "improved" grassland. In the 1940's Britain had in the region 15 million acres of flower rich grasslands. It is hard to get precise figures, but about 250,000 acres remain; a staggering loss of over 98 percent. Fertilisers were cheap, and successive governments were keen to persuade farmers to boost productivity, so ecosystems that had taken hundreds of years to develop were subject to swift and wholesale destruction.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“Apenas empezamos a vislumbrar la complejidad de las interacciones entre los seres vivos del planeta, mientras que, en general, seguimos despilfarrando recursos que son irreemplazables, despreciando las cosas que nos permiten seguir vivos y hacen que la vida merezca la pena.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“Tal vez si aprendemos a salvar a una abeja hoy, podamos salvar el mundo mañana.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“In high summer males can be very common. They sit around on flowers drinking nectar. They prefer flowers with big sturdy heads such as thistles and natweeds and gangs of males can often be seen clustered together, reminiscent of a group of men propping up the bar in a pub.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees by Dave Goulson (28-Apr-2015) Paperback

“Universitair docent is een behoorlijk raar beroep. Om te beginnen staat college geven laag op het lijstje van kwaliteiten waar sollicitatiecommissies van universiteiten naar op zoek zijn. Het belangrijkste criterium is de staat van dienst op onderzoeksgebied die de kandidaat met zich meebrengt. Dat verklaart waarom het sommige docenten ontbreekt aan zelfs de meest basale communicatieve vaardigheden of aan wat voor sociale vaardigheden ook.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“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 should give us most concern. Insects are responsible for delivering numerous ‘ecosystem services’ such as pollination and decomposition, and there is no doubt that little life on earth (including ourselves) could survive without them.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“Many bees evolved longer and longer tongues to make it easier for them to reach nectar hidden within flowers; some now have tongues longer than their bodies.fn1”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“a bumblebee with a full stomach is only ever about forty minutes from starvation.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“This is not just about bumblebees, but about creating a future environment for our children to enjoy, where there are still flowers, bees, butterflies and birds, and healthy crops to eat.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“In general, old-fashioned cottage garden perennials are the ones to go for, particularly garden herbs – lupins, hollyhocks, scabious, lavender, chives, sage, thyme and rosemary and so on. Most are easy to grow and low maintenance, so they are well suited to busy modern lifestyles – gardening for wildlife is easy.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“Most of the rare species seemed to be very fond of clover, particularly red clover, and other wild legumes such as tufted vetch and bird’s-foot trefoil, probably because these plants provide pollen that is unusually rich in protein.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“In 1987 De Jonghe founded the company Biobest, which remains today one of the largest commercial producers of bumblebees. In 1988 they produced enough bumblebees to pollinate just forty hectares of tomatoes. By the following year they were exporting to Holland, France and the UK. Others wanted in on the action; the Dutch company Koppert Biological Systems began rearing bumblebees in 1988, followed by Bunting Brinkman Bees, also Dutch, in 1989.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“All of this means that it makes absolute sense for a colony to produce foragers ranging in size, for this allows it to efficiently exploit a broad range of flowers in the surrounding area: small, short-tongued bees for shallow and weak-stemmed flowers, and bigger, longer-tongued bees for the sturdier and deeper flowers.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“James caught and measured the size of hundreds of wild, foraging buff-tails in and around Southampton, and found that the average size and tongue length varied greatly depending on which flower he caught them on.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“This worked pretty well; the nests in gardens tended to grow much more quickly and become heavier than those on farms, presumably because they have more flowers.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“But on the other hand, there is no doubt that honeybees are a non-native species. It also seems to me common sense that flowers can produce only so much nectar, and that there can therefore be only so many bees in a particular habitat. Something has to give, and that thing is likely to be the local flower-visiting insects.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“The music of the busy bee Is drowsy, and it comforts me; But, ah! ’tis quite another thing, When that same bee concludes to sting! Andrew Downing (nineteenth-century American horticulturalist)”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“Take time to smell the roses and eventually you’ll inhale a bee. Anon.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees