Professor Andrew Bourke (BIO) and external colleagues (Dr Claire Carvell and Dr Matthew Heard, Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Wallingford, and Dr Bill Jordan and Dr Seirian Sumner, Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London), have been awarded a three-year grant of £665,000 from the Insect Pollinators Initiative to conduct research into why the UK's bumblebees are declining.
The Insect Pollinators Initiative is a multi-agency initiative funded by BBSRC, Defra, NERC, the Scottish Government and the Wellcome Trust, coordinated by RCUK's Living With Environmental Change programme, to investigate declines in pollinating insects such as honeybees, bumblebees and hoverflies. These pollinators are essential to the maintenance of viable populations of crops and wild flowers.
The CEH/UEA/ZSL project is led by CEH and will use a novel combination of high-tech methods to unravel fundamental aspects of the ecology of bumblebees and so help researchers understand why some species are declining. Bumblebees are wild bees that live in colonies of at most a few hundred workers and a single queen. It is known that they need safe nesting sites and lots of flowers from which to forage for pollen and nectar. But it is unknown how the distribution of nesting and foraging habitats across a landscape, or habitat structure, affects in detail the use of space by nest-searching queens or foraging workers. The team will use analyses of DNA taken harmlessly from bees in the wild to estimate how far queens fly to start new nests and how far workers fly to forage. Using computer models, the team will then relate this information to a detailed map of the study landscape obtained using fieldwork and aerial scanning technology. The study will focus on five different species including the rare Bombus ruderatus, a UK Biodiversity Action Plan species. Because the study landscape contains wild flower strips sown alongside fields to attract pollinators, the research will help farmers and conservationists decide how such agri-environment schemes can be made as effective as possible.
Related articles: Nine projects funded in £10 million Insect Pollinators Initiative
The CEH/UEA/ZSL project is led by CEH and will use a novel combination of high-tech methods to unravel fundamental aspects of the ecology of bumblebees and so help researchers understand why some species are declining. Bumblebees are wild bees that live in colonies of at most a few hundred workers and a single queen. It is known that they need safe nesting sites and lots of flowers from which to forage for pollen and nectar. But it is unknown how the distribution of nesting and foraging habitats across a landscape, or habitat structure, affects in detail the use of space by nest-searching queens or foraging workers. The team will use analyses of DNA taken harmlessly from bees in the wild to estimate how far queens fly to start new nests and how far workers fly to forage. Using computer models, the team will then relate this information to a detailed map of the study landscape obtained using fieldwork and aerial scanning technology. The study will focus on five different species including the rare Bombus ruderatus, a UK Biodiversity Action Plan species. Because the study landscape contains wild flower strips sown alongside fields to attract pollinators, the research will help farmers and conservationists decide how such agri-environment schemes can be made as effective as possible.
Related articles: Nine projects funded in £10 million Insect Pollinators Initiative
