Three Bees

[Bear]

I read in the newspaper this morning that bees are dying out in the UK, maybe all over Europe. One exception appears to be my herb garden !

[Julia]

Re: Three Bees

Lovely.
Couple of questions :-)
What type is the first 'bee' and what's the herb?

[Bear]

Re: Three Bees

Julia

I have no idea what type of bee the first one is. I am not even sure it is really a bee !

The herb is lavender, in full flower. It grows wild, in abundance, here but this particular variety is one we cultivate to use in our cosmetics business.

[Ian]

Re: Three Bees

The bee crisis pops up on the news a lot and one of the BBC Breakfast presenters is a bee-keeper (Bill Turnbull) - but I must say that when I looked out to the patio this morning there were quite a few bees about, especially on the honeysuckle. Ironically, there may be more bees in suburbia, because of flowers in gardens, than in the countryside

Ian

[Bear]

Re: Three Bees

You may well be right Ian. It appears to be accepted that the widespread use of pesticides and herbicides in agricultural areas is responsible for bee popultaion decline, even if the precise mechanism by which these chemicals act is not yet known. I know that our neighbour has suffered two years of systemic crop failure in his olive groves. He, like many Spanish, farmers is fanatical about a "campo limpio" or clean fields and he sprays broad spectrum pesticides and herbicides as if they are water. As a result he rarely sees bees or other sinects and few, if any wild birds. We, on the other hand use no herbicides and sprays at all and seem, for the moment at least, to be blessed with a wonderful insect population.

[Pops]

Re: Three Bees

The first 2 appear to belong to the hover fly family. (There are around 270 different ones so I can't name them without spending hours poring over piccies.) Some hoverflies are easily mistaken for small bee's.