Imagine if every garden in the UK was wildlife-friendly, planting herbs, wild flowers from the cottage garden, and healthy vegetables grown by themselves, maybe there was a homemade place for solitary bees to build nests in the corner. Why can’t we ban pesticides in gardens and cities? Some cities around the world have done this and there is no pest flooding.
Imagine again, if the land of the town hall is used to raise wild animals and plants: the roadside lawns and the island roundabout do not take every five minutes to cut, but instead plant wild flowers; the lawns in the park can grow for a long time. We should convince local authorities not to place annual flower bed plants every spring, but to plant perennial plants that attract bees and butterflies in the narrow flower beds of the park. On campuses in universities and middle schools, we can also build some hay grasslands with flowers. In industrial and technological parks, do not plant evergreen exotic plants, but plant native shrubs that can bloom, so that they can provide food for bees and berries for birds.
Golden Bumblebee, Image source: Pato Novoa/ Wikimedia Commons
Why can't you plant apples, pears and plum trees next to suburban streets? In this way, residents can pick fruits next to the streets, and children can also taste the taste of apples on the way to school. We can plant green plants on the roofs and walls of buildings; protect the rich brownfields of wildlife and plants to open them to the public, rather than laying them all into asphalt; green the city, letting wildlife live in it, and create the largest nature reserve in the UK, without any extra money at all. Our children can also be closer to nature and respect nature more. They can catch grasshoppers with their hands in the tall grassland, observe bees flying among purses and beans, and can find salamanders and skeleton lice in local canals.
If all this is the gift we want to give them, it's time to act now. I eagerly hope that our descendants will have the opportunity to get close to nature so that they can fall in love with nature.
What I fear most is that my grandchildren (if I have) grew up in a gray, exhausted reinforced concrete world, unable to get close to nature at all, nor know and care about what they have lost, because nature has almost disappeared. This is not necessary because we can green the city.
Since increasing urbanization is inevitable, we should use our imagination to turn our urban areas into an extension of nature reserves, where humans and wildlife can live side by side in harmony. Perhaps it is a bit whimsical to expect our city to become a "rain forest of Britain", but if we really try it, our descendants will definitely be grateful.
"The Bee Search: A Entomologist's Global Journey", written by Dave Goulson, translated by Wang Hongbin and Ran Hao, Yilin Publishing House, November 2021.
Almost everyone has a time to love insects
We hike towards the forest 500 meters away from primary school. The children walked hand in hand and chatted excitedly. I led the team with some insect nets and collecting plates in front, and their teacher, Ms. Shaki, followed behind, doing her best to keep the children in formation.
This was an afternoon in 2009, and the weather was very good and the sun was shining. As the semester was coming to an end, I took my eldest son Finn and his classmates at Dunbran Newton Elementary School to catch insects. Dunbran is located in central Scotland, a small town on the western edge of the Oshill Hills, and not far from the wilderness. After arriving at the forest, I distributed the insect-catching net and other equipment and taught them how to use it. This group of seven or eight-year-old children were already impatient. In their hands, all the nets appear huge and clumsy, and the butterfly-catching nets are enough to fit smaller children into them.
These kite-like insect trap nets look very useful, but if you want to catch flying insects, there is another tip: gently turn the insect trap net to let the frame of the insect trap net press the net bag, seal the bottom of the net bag, and prevent the insect from flying away again.I taught them to place the collection plate (a huge rectangular cloth propped up with a wooden frame) under the lower branches and let them shake the branches vigorously. The insects landed on the white cloth, stumbled and fled in a hurry. Everything immediately became lively. We need to use this sturdy white net (worm catcher net) to hit the tall grass hard and keep the net port facing forward. I found that to do this, I needed to bend over and stick my butt out, and wave it in an arc from one side of my body to the other. When I did this, it looked like I was dancing the Morris solo dance in broken steps. After this "dance" was over, I tightened the net to prevent the insects from running away. I called the children over to check everyone's capture results.
Opening the insect catcher is always a fun experience, a bit like opening a Christmas gift because you don’t know what good things will be inside. Children shouted one after another as many small creatures—ants, spiders, wasps, beetles, flies and caterpillars—fly out of the web, jumped out or twisted and crawled out. I taught them how to use insect collection bottles to catch the smallest and most vulnerable bugs, and also divided them into several bottles for prey, and then sent them to disperse. The children ran towards the bushes, slammed them hard, swept around, or sucked them hard with insects, playing with them, making their eyes shine, and they were having fun. We opened the rotten wood and mossy stones (and then carefully restored them) and found many tideworms, stubborn and horoscopes. Whenever they catch something new, they will always come over proudly for me to see. From huge red slugs to fragile ordinary grasses, they catch a wealth of things. Suddenly, an excited scream came, and it turned out that a child had caught the queen bee of a huge European bumblebee. The bumblebee buzzed loudly and protested to us. Finn couldn't resist the temptation to act as a master of everything and introduced everything to his classmates.
screaming bumblebee. (Picture source: Ivar Leidus/ Wikimedia Commons)
The scene of insect catching is extremely chaotic. However, about an hour later, we harvested bugs of all shapes and sizes. We put them all in jars, placed them on a collection plate, and sorted them by family to understand the differences between fly and wasps, beetles and bugs, centipedes and horseland. I told the children about their rich and unique lives: which insects eat feces, which eat leaves, and which eat other insects; parasitics will eat caterpillars from the inside out; cicadas will hide in balls made of their own saliva most of the time.
When we release these bugs, I encourage the kids to get those bigger and stronger guys. There is a beautiful simian bug with bright green and rust colors on its body, with a clear edge on its back and a pointed end. It took a few steps proudly, then flapped its wings and suddenly flew away from our hands. An incompletely developed shrub spotted with bright leaf green mixed with small black spots. It seems to be a little myopic, and it needs to use huge tentacles that are more than three times longer to explore the road. A weak red horn seemed to be unable to believe that it would be released. It stared at us carefully with its protruding big eyes, then spread its glittering wings and flew away quietly.
When I saw the smiling faces of the children, I couldn't help but think of the great biologist Edward Wilson's words: "Every child has a time when he loves insects, and I never came out of it." Why do children naturally love nature? Why do they like to collect shells, feathers, butterflies, embossed, pine cones, or bird eggs? Why do they like to catch all kinds of small lives and are willing to observe and collect them? These questions are interesting to think about.
I guess that in the distant past, when humans rely on hunting and gathering for their lives, this curiosity is of great significance to humans, because if we want to survive, we must accumulate knowledge related to nature, especially which animals and plants can eat, and which will bring us danger. This curiosity also gives us some subtle clues from nature.Interpreting bird behavior may allow humans to discover the dangers they are about to face and perhaps to know where food and water are located. People often ask me where my fascination with nature came from, as if I was a different person. But in fact, I think I'm very typical, as Edward Wilson said, almost everyone has a time to love insects.
produces fear and aggressive behavior, which stems from their ignorance of insects
A bigger question is, why do most children lose interest in insects and thus lose interest in nature? These children could still stare at the tide worms crawling in their palms when they were eight years old. What happened to them? Unfortunately, by the teenagers, the flying insects and the buzzing sounds they make most children feel fear and aggressive, which are all due to their ignorance of insects. They would most likely slam the poor little creature and stomp them through their feet. If you just wave your hand in fear and drive it away with a boo, it would be the best result.
What's wrong with this? Why did their childhood love become the extreme disgust they are now? It reminds me of the children of Dunbran, who are now teenagers. Are they unfamiliar with insects? Do they still remember that sunny afternoon? Remember the things you found that fascinated them? Will parents’ fear of insects also affect them, causing them to overreact to spiders hanging from curtain rods or wasps entering a family picnic? Today, our family has moved from Scotland to Sussex, south of the UK. However, Finn told me that most of his new friends also had no interest in wildlife. They don't feel what the natural world has to do with them. They are more likely to be interested in football, gaming consoles, or posting selfies on social platforms. On the way home from school, they would throw beverage cans and potato chip packaging bags into the hedge without thinking. In their eyes, bird watching is nothing fun, and collecting, shooting, raising butterflies or moths is a hobby that only fools and freaks have.
red koala bee. (Image source: Ivar Leidus/ Wikimedia Commons)
I boldly guessed that this change occurs because in the urbanized modern world, children have too few opportunities to contact nature. Only when growing children often have close contact with nature can they cherish nature. It’s hard for them to fall in love with something they don’t know about growing up. If they had never been to a grassland full of wild flowers in late spring, never smelled the fragrance of flowers, never listened to the singing of birds and insects, and never admired the scene of butterflies flying past the grass, then when all this was destroyed, they would not care at all. If they never had the chance to climb in the ancient wild forest, never kicked the musty leaves and emerald green indigo, never smelled the rot and growth of mushrooms, then it would be difficult for them to understand how wasteful it is to cut down the tree into particleboard.
Even if I have Shakespeare's talent, I cannot truly express the beauty and magic of the natural world. Some excellent nature documentaries have been released in recent decades, allowing us to enjoy the strange creatures that we don’t have the chance to see locally. Although this is a good start, I don't think it's enough. We need to get the kids out of the house and let them lie on the ground and search for the fun of nature. In my opinion, spending ten minutes watching shrub spots is more valuable than spending ten hours watching birds of paradise in distant tropical forests in TV documentaries.
Of course, unfortunately, not many children now have the opportunity that Wilson and I have ever had to cultivate an interest in nature. From a larger environment, I don't think the kids will have the chance to discover and contact nature like me in a corner of the British countryside in the 1970s. Today, most of the world's population lives in cities, and in the UK, this proportion is as high as 82%. Children no longer can wander around without restraint as before.
Since I was seven years old, I have been playing in the countryside near the village.Sometimes I went missing for hours with my friends and my parents didn’t know where we were going. We climbed trees, fished in the lakes and rivers, and camped in the forest. Now, even children living in rural areas do not have such freedom. Because their parents are worried that the vehicles they are traveling with will pose a threat, that's absolutely true. Another part of them is worrying that their children will be kidnapped by ubiquitous bad guys, which is a bit of an unfair worry. My thoughts may sound a bit irresponsible, and I think it should be given more opportunities to explore and do some silly things to take risks, which will allow them to learn a lot. In my childhood, I did a lot of such stupid things, didn’t I survive?
I collected the horse land, tide insects, beetles, and the red mites that crawled by in the yard
My earliest memories were about various insects, which penetrated into the depths of my soul. When I was five years old, I found some caterpillars of cinnabar moths. They had horizontal lines and black and yellow bodies, and were eating very much on the European Thousand Miles Light leaves that grew in the cracks in the playground of my elementary school. I made a lot of these bugs into my lunch box, took them home, and picked thousands of miles to feed them. I was extremely excited when they grew into moths. These moths are not very fly, but are very beautiful, shining, with magenta and black colors. (I later learned that this is a toxic sign, the result of the accumulation of toxins used by European Thousand Miles Light to protect itself in their bodies.)
I collected the horse land, tideworms, beetles in the yard, and red mites that hurriedly crawled over the short cement wall in front of the house in good weather. I packed them in jam jars and opened in rows on the bedroom windowsill. Most of these poor creatures are probably dead, but I learned a lot from it. Later, my parents bought me a book called "Oxford Insects Book" with the purpose of letting me understand the treasures I collected, and I benefited a lot from it. At night, I carefully studied the watercolor illustrations and made plans for my local adventure. I think I can find more legendary creatures—Broad-tarsy aurora, Emperor's Fly and Ochre-Ghostly Hawk Moth.
Heather Bumblebee. (Image source: Ivar Leidus/ Wikimedia Commons)
At seven years old, we moved from a small semi-detached house in the suburbs of Birmingham to Edgemond, a small countryside in Shropshire, which gave me more opportunities for my biological hunting. I made some friends with similar interests at school. For lunch we searched for beautiful mulberry caterpillars on the hawthorn hedges surrounding the school, like black velvet, decorated with stripes formed by clusters of red, black and white bristles, like Mohican headdresses. On weekends, we would walk around the hedges, grasslands and sprouting forests around our village to search for other species of caterpillars.
My parents gave me another gift—"Caterpillar Observation Manual". With the help of this book, we try our best to understand the bugs we find and find the appropriate leaves to feed them. I found their picky eating habits very interesting. Most moths and butterflies caterpillars only eat one or two leaves, and would rather starve to death than eat anything else. There are also several less picky caterpillars, such as the leopard moth's larvae are very large, this black and orange bug is furry, and they eat almost everything except grass. Once, we saw a larva of a black belt two-tailed boat moth eating willow leaves. These green and black bugs are strange. When frightened, they will raise the end of their abdomen and extend a pair of red tentacles back and forth from the forked tail to show the threat. I waited for nearly a year and didn't see them turning into moths until the beginning of the following year. They are fat, furry like kittens, and black spots grow on their white bodies and wings.
I started collecting bird eggs when I was only seven or eight years old, and my father did similar things when he was young. In my memory, almost every boy in the village will collect bird eggs. (I don't know what the girls are doing- I don't have sisters and I go to boys' middle school, so I didn't know until I was fourteen that there were still girls.) Let’s play to see who can find an unusual bird’s nest, and they are still full of covetousness for each other’s gains. Of course, this time, it is also inseparable from the help of the "Observation Manual" series of museum books. I still keep the Bird Egg Watch Manual that has been turned into pieces, which is almost 50 years old.
I remember finding a blue bird egg with light brown spots abandoned on the slopes of Mount Langmaid in southern Shropshire. I was confident that it was the egg of the ring-necked troll, a rare bird I had never seen before and lived in the highlands. My friends were skeptical about this and we also argued about it for several days. Judging by my "hindsight", this is just a crow's egg. In this process, we learned a lot of natural knowledge about birds. Because most of each bird builds nests in specific places and with specific materials. On several occasions, we found the nest of the silver-throated long-tailed tit, which is woven from spider webs and soft moss, a particularly beautiful spherical structure.
I started with this and developed to collecting butterflies, followed by moths, then beetles, and finally, I became an expert in identifying them. The skill of feeding moths and butterflies gave me the benefit of collecting perfect, defiled adult specimens. But, by the age of twelve, I finally got tired of killing these cute creatures, and the ultimate goal of feeding was to release them back to nature. It is particularly worth mentioning that I have raised hundreds of peacock butterflies and nettle butterflies. I searched for caterpillars from nettles and kept them in my own cage so they could avoid zombies and small bees. In the wild, most of these butterfly caterpillars cannot escape the claws of these parasites. It was a relief to see these newly feathered butterflies try to fly for the first time, watching their wings dry little by little, then flap their wings, fly high up, and eventually fly away from our yard.
If there is no soil and bees, what's the use of money?
Now, human activities cause species extinctions from time to time, and climate change is threatening most of the world, making them no longer habitable in the near future. At the same time, the earth's surface soil is losing at a rate of 100 billion tons per year. Against this backdrop, environmental issues are rarely mentioned in the political agenda, even the Greens are no exception. The focus of the debate among politicians is mainly on the economy. But, without soil and bees, what's the use of money?
If we want to save the world and ultimately save ourselves, then we need more people to pay attention to its destiny. First of all, we need to provide children with more opportunities to explore nature, let them snag the mud and catch frogs and climb into hedges to catch caterpillars. We need to give them the opportunity to express their curiosity about nature, let them observe butterflies breaking out of their cocoon, watch tadpoles grow limbs, and experience the excitement of finding snake lizards under the wood. If we provide them with these opportunities, it is possible that they will love nature, cherish nature, and strive for the future of nature.
Bluebell Flower Woodland. (Edmund Shaw/ Geograph and Wikimedia Commons)
I am very lucky to have the opportunity to get the above experience when I was a child. This experience has prompted me to spend my whole life exploring the mysteries of natural science. I had the honor of traveling around the world, observing bird-winged butterflies passing through the rainforests of Borneo, listening to the howling monkeys declare their territory in the forests of Belize, and many impressive experiences, which are endless.
I don't know how much time I spent looking for insects, birds, reptiles, mammals and wildflowers near home, in France and the UK. It was really my luck to grow up in the countryside. My career is also a blessing, it gives me the opportunity to pursue the most interesting bees in the world and hopefully learn more about them, revealing the still unknown details of their lives, and finding ways to protect them so that others can have the opportunity to see them in the future. This book describes these journeys in searching for bees.
We will start with home, starting with those corners hidden in the UK, where wildlife remains vibrant.After that, we will go abroad, first on the wild mountains of Poland, then to the Andes and Rockies of the New World, where the tragedy of the bumblebee is taking place. Finally, we will return to England to witness the resilience of nature, which will be encouraging and hopeful. Welcome to my "Looking for Bee" and embark on a global trip with me.
This article is selected from "The Bee Search: A Entomologist's Global Travel", and the subtitle was added by the editor. All the pictures used in the article are from the book.
Original author丨[English] Dave Gulsen
excerpt丨An Ye
edit丨Luo Dong; Zhang Ting
introduction part proofreading丨Chen Diyan
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