Quotes from Dave Goulson

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

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.

but then who said journalists need to know anything about their subject before spouting their ill-informed opinions to millions?

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.

Sadly, one of the few places where bumblebees generally won't settle is in the bumblebee nest boxes widely sold in garden centres. Whatever

We are committing ecocide on a biblical scale. I am in no way religious, but if you are, consider this; do you really think God created wonderful diversity and gave us dominion over it so we could exterminate it? Do you really think He or She is pleased with what we have done?

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.

a bumblebee with a full stomach is only ever about forty minutes from starvation.

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.

Smuts are parasitic fungi that are often spread by pollinators and so, in the case of campions, pollinators pose the double threat of both laying eggs that will hatch into voracious larvae and giving the flower a nasty dose of the clap.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is a popular misconception that native flowers are 'weeds', but of course a weed is just a plant growing where the gardener doesn't want it to be.

Take time to smell the roses and eventually you'll inhale a bee. Anon.

much of the peat sold in garden centres is now imported from other countries, notably from Ireland, Estonia, Latvia and Finland. Estonia is a wild and unspoiled country where bears and wolves still roam, and it is sad to reflect that great chunks of it are now being dug up so that we can grow begonias.

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.

We are all complicit, and farmer-bashing is not going to help. We need farmers, more than any other profession. If lawyers, politicians, bankers, university academics or salesmen were to somehow disappear tomorrow, I think the world would muddle through pretty well. Some things might even get better. But if farmers were to vanish, most of us would be dead within a year.