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Book review: 'A Sting in the Tale'

There are 20,000 bee species. Honeybees - "the anorexic cousins of bumblebees", as Dave Goulson describes them - have been domesticated for centuries and are drab in colour.

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Book review: 'A Sting in the Tale'

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by Dave Goulson

Cape

There are 20,000 bee species. Honeybees - "the anorexic cousins of bumblebees", as Dave Goulson describes them - have been domesticated for centuries and are drab in colour. Most bumblebees, of which there are 250 species, are more spectacular: the charismatic tigers of the insect world.

These wild insects are being commandeered by us because they are such expert pollinators. Insects are cheaper labour than humans and, as Goulson observes, bumblebees possess "powers of perception and learning that often put us mammals to shame".
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There has been a massive drop in insect life in the past half-century. The number of moths, a better-studied insect group than almost any other, fell by 40 per cent in southern Britain between 1968 and 2007. Bumblebees have also nearly disappeared in less than a lifetime.

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