🐝 London’s Urban Bees 🐝 And Why You Should Care About Them

Why Are There So Many Bees in London?

There is a common misconception that urban environments do not allow bees to thrive, but the millions of parks, gardens, and green spaces that London offers provide a great place for bees to live. Estimations suggest that city bees can actually be up to 3 times more productive than those who live in other parts of the country.

The reason that bees do so well in the city is because of the types of plants that grow here and the length of the seasons. The variety of plants in London’s parks and gardens gives bees a wide range of sources of pollen and nectar over a longer foraging season, as they flower at different times throughout the year. Cities like London also trap heat, meaning that urban bees can start foraging earlier and continue later into autumn than their rural counterparts. These longer seasons and the varied food supply give the bees a better chance of finding enough food to get them through the winter, and the lack of harmful pesticides found in agricultural areas means they have a higher chance of survival.

The biggest challenge in maintaining London as this bee-friendly haven is keeping the foraging areas clear. In a city that loves to build, keeping green spaces open and available for bees to find their food is likely to be an ongoing issue.

How Do Bees Find Food in The City?

Many of London’s honey bees rely on chestnut and lime trees, flowerbeds in parks, and brambles along train lines to provide the majority of their sustenance.

When searching for food, if a bee doesn’t already know where to find it, they will simply fly around for up to 6 miles from the hive, using their sense of smell to find a good source of pollen or nectar.

When the honey bee finds a good foraging spot, they tell the rest of the hive by doing something called a waggle dance. They use their relative location to the sun as a reference point, to create an angle between the sun and the food source. When they return to the hive, they waggle their thorax along this angle line to tell the other honey bees where to go to find the food. The harder the bees waggle, the better the quality of the food, and the longer they waggle for, the further away the source is. Using the waggle dance means that the hive as a whole spends less time searching for food, meaning that they can thrive in the city and are able to support between 20,000 and 60,000 honey bees in their colony.

Whilst the honey bees use the waggle dance, it is thought that bumblebees pass on information about food sources through sharing the pollen that they find. Bumblebees also live in much smaller colonies of around 50-400 bees.

The Threats Facing Our Bees

The reasons for this population decline are many, but it is widely agreed that intensive farming and use of pesticides is one of the main causes of bee deaths and colony collapse. Pesticides are harmful to bees because they often contain potent chemicals that impact their abilities to forage properly, putting strain on the hive, limiting the amount of pollen they can collect, and causing premature deaths. When pesticides impact the colonies in this way, on average around 30,000 bees will be lost per hive.

Another big problem for bees is the loss of diversity in natural landscapes due to modern agricultural practices. Farmers favour vast fields of the same crop, however for the bees, this means nutritional deficiencies and the length of their foraging season is drastically reduced. Once the crops have been harvested, the bees are left with no food supply and have to search further afield, causing them a great deal of stress.

Other threats facing bees include climate change impacting the way that the flowers grow, urbanisation destroying habitats and blocking bees’ pathways, air pollution restricting their sense of smell, and the risk of highly contagious and harmful viruses spreading between hives.

Thankfully, the Covid 19 lockdown put an unintentional halt to some practices which are harmful to bees, such as mowing roadside verges. Bees depend on full, flower-rich verges to sustain them, as just one hectare can produce 60kg of nectar. That’s enough for over 6 million honey bees! Fewer cars on the road also reduced the air pollution which prevents bees from finding food, and it meant that less bees were killed by road traffic.

Despite this, the future of our bees is uncertain, and the risk of extinction is very real. But why does it matter?

What Does This Mean for Us?

Bees are absolutely vital to our food security. Albert Einstein is often credited with saying that ‘If the bee disappeared off the face of the Earth, man would only have four years left to live’. Whether he really said this or not, if the bees did disappear, we would certainly be in trouble.

90% of the world’s population is fed by crops pollinated by bees, and about a third of what we eat comes from these plants. Without bees, staples such as fruit and vegetables, nuts, beans, and even cotton would be almost impossible to grow, and many medicines derived from flowers would be lost. We are dependent on food and produce which only grows because of bees and their hard work.

The economic impact of wild bee extinction would be enormous. It is estimated that in order to manually pollinate their crops, farmers would have to spend £1.8 billion every year.

Luckily, the complete disappearance of bees isn’t an imminent threat, but their depletion will have a huge effect on the stability and cost of our food supply, as well as the health of the environment. The decline in bees is a problem that affects us all. We should all be doing what we can to protect and preserve these vital pollinators for the benefit of ourselves and the world around us.