A Sting in the Tale Read Online Free Page B

England, but during the second half of the twentieth century their numbers plummeted. By the 1980s they were known only in a handful of places, and one by one, those populations disappeared. The last individual was caught near Dungeness in 1988; it fell into a pitfall trap used to monitor beetles and drowned. No one has seen any since.
    Of course you will have worked out why these bees disappeared. It happened while I was growing up. When I was born in 1965 the short-haired bumblebee was still quite widespread, although not as far north and west as Shropshire. By the time I went to university in 1984 it was nearly extinct. I never saw one before they vanished.
    Here’s why: it’s Adolf Hitler’s fault. To be absolutely fair, it wasn’t entirely his fault, but he has to carry some of the blame. One hundred years ago, farming was not mechanised. Without mechanisation, fields tended to be small. Farmers depended on horses for power, and horses love to eat clover, so most farmers grew clover. Bees also love clover. Both the horses and other farm livestock needed hay for the winter, so most farmers had hay meadows. These were permanent features of the farm, cut once or twice a year, and sometimes grazed a little in the milder winter months. Artificial fertilisers weren’t available, so apart from a bit of animal dung the meadows were not fertilised. In the low-nutrient soils of hay meadows, wild flowers flourished, particularly those with symbiotic root bacteria that could trap nitrogen from the air and so didn’t need nutrient-rich soil. The main family that can do this is that of the legumes: vetches, trefoils and clovers (and also our garden peas and beans). Bees love them all.
    Arable crops need fertile soils. The traditional way to maintain soil fertility was to grow crops in rotation. For many centuries, European farmers used a three-year rotation of rye or wheat followed by oats or barley, then letting the field lie fallow in the third year. In the eighteenth century, a British agriculturalist named Charles Townshend promoted a four-year rotation, using wheat, turnips, barley and clover in succession. The nitrogen fixed by the clover boosted soil fertility in the following years, increasing yields, and the scheme was widely adopted. So, imagine Britain a hundred years ago; a patchwork of small fields, cereals and root crops intermixed with clover leys and permanent hay meadows. No artificial fertilisers, no pesticides. Lots and lots of happy bees.
    Then roll forwards a few years. The internal combustion engine had by now provided farmers with an alternative to horses, in the form of tractors. The booming motor industry demanded oil, and the petrochemical industry that grew up on its back made it possible to synthesise cheap nitrogen-based fertilisers. These greatly boosted crop yields and removed the need for rotations, so clover leys were abandoned. Moreover, horses were no longer needed, so no clover was necessary for feeding them.
    Silage making is an alternative approach to providing winter fodder for livestock. Where hay requires a dry period for harvesting, meaning that wet summers can be a disaster for farmers dependent on it to feed their animals, the grass for silage can be cut even when it is wet. With the addition of cheap fertilisers to hay meadows, the grass grows much more quickly and so can be cut for silage many times during the spring and summer, providing a larger and more reliable supply of winter fodder. An unfortunate side effect is that adding fertilisers to hay meadows quickly results in the disappearance of most of the wild flowers. The clovers and other legumes, which used to gain an edge from their ability to fix nitrogen from the air, lose their advantage when nitrates are poured on to the ground, and cannot compete with fast-growing grasses.
    None of this sounds good for bees, for fewer clover leys and fewer hay meadows means fewer flowers. So where does Hitler come in? By