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.
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.
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.