A Sting in the Tale Read Online Free Page A

up by Frank Buckland, Her Majesty’s Inspector of Fisheries at the time, whose remit seems to have extended well beyond fish. He wrote back to England with a request for bumblebees to be sent on the steamships which regularly plied between Britain and New Zealand. The first, rather ill-thought out, attempt to do so involved a Dr Featherston digging up two carder bumblebee nests in late summer and sending them to the Honourable John Hall of Plymouth, New Zealand, in 1875. They arrived in January and, inevitably, were all dead. Bumblebee nests naturally die out in September, and in any case there were no flowers on the ship for them to feed on, so this scheme was doomed from the start.
    Eight years later the idea was revived with rather more competence. A Mr S. G. Farr, secretary of the Canterbury Acclimatisation Society (of whom more later), contacted Thomas Nottidge, a banker from Maidstone in Kent, asking for more bumblebees to be sent. (They also asked him for a few hedgehogs while he was at it – as you do.) So it was that, in the autumn of 1884, Nottidge offered a bounty to farm labourers for every hibernating bumblebee queen that they could find. Hand digging, clearing and widening of ditches was a common autumn and winter practice on arable farms when there wasn’t much else to keep farm labourers busy, and these labourers often turned up the plump hibernating queens as they dug, suggesting that queen bees particularly like to hibernate in ditch banks. As a result, a total of 282 queens were obtained and placed on the SS Tongariro , one of the first steamships to be built with a refrigeration unit. This was essential as the hibernating queens would otherwise have become too warm when crossing the equator, and would have woken up and quickly died. The Tongariro left London in December 1884 and arrived in Christchurch on 8 January 1885 (high summer in New Zealand). When they were warmed up, forty-eight queens proved to still be alive. They were fed with honey and flew away. A further consignment of 260 queens was sent that same January on a sister ship, the SS Aorangi , and arrived on 5 February. Of these, forty-nine were still alive and were released.
    We have no idea what species of bumblebee these ninety-seven queens belonged to, or how many survived long enough to build a nest and produce offspring. What we do know is that some thrived in their new home for, by the summer of 1886, bumblebees were seen up to 100 miles south of Christchurch. Indeed, by 1892 bumblebees had become so common in some areas that honeybee keepers feared they might become a pest.
    British bumblebees flourish in New Zealand to this day. On their long boat trip they also left behind many of the diseases and parasites that attack them in their native land, which probably helped considerably. The species that survived are an odd selection. We might have expected them to be the most common Kent species, but either our most common species were not included or they failed to survive. The four now found in New Zealand are the buff-tailed bumblebee, the garden bumblebee, the ruderal bumblebee and the short-haired bumblebee. Of these, the buff-tailed is by far the most common – they are everywhere, from the gardens and parks of Christchurch to the spectacular fjords of Milford Sound, where I have seen them feeding on the flowers of the gigantic New Zealand flax. The short-haired bumblebee is the least common, but if you know where to look, they can still be found in central South Island.
    Sadly, two of these species have not fared so well in the UK. The ruderal bumblebee was once known as the ‘large garden bumblebee’ because it was a familiar sight in gardens throughout much of England. Nowadays the ruderal bumblebee is an exceedingly rare creature, found only in a few places in the East Midlands and East Anglia. The short-haired bumblebee has fared even worse. One hundred years ago they were common in the south and east of