Teaching Bees To Work Where They are Needed

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26792, 8 June 1948, Page 4

Teaching Bees To Work Where They are Needed

When the fruit fails to set and the cabbages and clover run short of seed —and it is happening now—something has gone wrong with the balance of Nature. “ Blame the bees,” say the farmers. “Blame the fees,” say the gardeners. “There just aren’t enough of them.’ And it is true. In a creeper-covered house behind the White Horse Inn at Harpenden, Herts (writes Chapman Pincher in the Daily Express), tall. 35-year-old Dr Colin Butler is experimenting to find an answer. He explained why intensive farming during the last 10 years has made his work vital to our entire agricultural programme. No longer are there enough wind insects —bumble bees and the like—to pollinate all our field crops and fruit trees. More crops have been planted than wild (insects could cope with, and the wild-bee colonies have been decimated. For as farmers cleaned up their land, they destroyed the hedgerow nesting sites, cut the weeds which fed the insects until the crops blossomed, arid killed millions of bumble bees with poison sprays intended for pests. To increase the wild insect population is impossible. All that can be done is to replace them with hives of honey bees. This is Dr Butler’s problem. But he has shown that simply, increasing the number of hives is’ not enough. The bees have to be mads to work to order. His chief difficulty is getting them to patronise crops they dislike—red clover is one. This is among our most .important fodder crops, but its nectar is awkwardly placed for the short tongues of honey bees, so they ignore it. In East Anglia, especially, farmers are regularly failing to get it to set seed. Dr Butler thinks he may eventually breed a race of bees with longer tongues, but he is first solving the red clover problem another way—by what he calls “ fooling the bees.” He puts into the hive some syrup in which red clover flowers have been soaked. As the bees drink it they break up the scent of the clover, and this fools them into believing that red clover is yielding a good drink. The false news spreads through the hive, and the bees fly out in search of the flowers. Even if they find little •nectar in the red clover they keep on looking long enough to pollinate the flowers and set the seed. Dr Butler checks his theories oy marking bees with paint; then he follows them in the field and watches them at home in a glass-sided hive he has built in his laboratory. The final result of his work we will find in our larders.