'Extinct' bee to fly again
A BEE that died out in Britain 10 years ago because it was a “fussy eater” is set to make a comeback.
Several short-haired bumblebees will be brought over from New Zealand by Nikki Gammans of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust and by spring they should again be humming in the countryside.
Dr Gammans told the British Science Festival at Surrey University: “The short-haired bumblebee is a very fussy eater. It needs fresh pollen every day, and not any old pollen. It needs high-quality pollen that has been collected by other bumblebees.”
She will follow a method pioneered by Czech bee expert Jaromir Cizek, who discovered how to breed the short-haired bumblebee in captivity.
Dr Gammans’s team will use captive colonies of bumblebees to collect pollen, which is much more protein-rich than pollen collected by honeybees.
Then they will painstakingly brush the pollen off the insects’ legs before feeding it to the short-haired bumblebees.
The bees will be released in Dungeness, Kent – the last place where they were recorded in Britain.