Prof. Dave Goulson will be talking about bumblebees to members of the Rother Environmental Group at its next meeting on Tuesday May 29.
Bumblebees are amongst the most important of wild pollinators; many wild flowers would not set seed without them, and they are the main pollinators of crops such as tomatoes, blueberries and raspberries. Many bumblebees are in decline, with three species now extinct in the UK and the first global extinction recently occurring in USA.
These declines are symptomatic of broader environmental damage that threatens our future wellbeing; the fate of man and bees are inextricably linked. Dave Goulson will discuss the drivers of bee declines, and the many things we can all do to halt and reverse them.
The venue is The George Hotel at 7pm
Photo: courtesy of Rother Environmental Group
Action on the horizon, this is in today’s FT: ‘The EU has agreed to ban a group of insecticides that have been linked to a dramatic reduction in bee numbers, in a move welcomed by environmental groups and criticised by the agrochemical industry.
Experts from the EU’s 28 states agreed on Friday to prohibit the use of a trio of toxic neonicotinoids, six years after the European Food Safety Authority concluded that the chemicals were harmful to bees.’