“With almost every other creature, you have got this peak of diversity in the tropics where it’s warm, wet and highly diverse. “Bees are a rather strange organism in that the greatest diversity is in the temperate zones,” says Stevenson. Prof Phil Stevenson, lead author of the Kew report, argues that the bees native to our shores are some of the most varied and spectacular in the world – the equivalent of a ring-tailed lemur or Sumatran rhinoceros wandering through our gardens. When you’re only on single sites there is a real risk of extinction.”īeekeeper Tim Vivian with Abigail Redmond, a representative of the Bullring Birmingham, inspect bees. The six-banded nomad bee which used to be fairly widespread is now only found on a single site in Devon. “The large mason bee used to be found in southern England and Wales that’s now only found on a single site in north Wales. We are seeing some species that we know are really on the brink of extinction in the UK. “We are seeing threatened species becoming more threatened and more rare. Across the board we are seeing a loss of the abundance and the diversity of pollinating insects,” adds Whitehouse. “Our wild pollinators are in serious trouble. While the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization reports there are more than 90m honeybee hives globally, many rarer native pollinators are in increasingly precarious positions. “Honeybees are not in decline they are probably the most numerous bee on the planet,” says Andrew Whitehouse from insect conservation charity Buglife. This is quite a sensitive issue for a beekeeping association to take on … this is coming from the membership, it’s not something that a few people are campaigning for.” People think getting honeybees is going to save bees. Glassborow adds: “We have to change the narrative. Dale Gibson of Bermondsey Street Bees surveys bees kept at a brownfield site in London Docklands.
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