People are worried there are fewer bees this year. Here’s why we should all be concerned about our declining insect population

Have you seen fewer bees about? Professor Dave Goulson responds to the recent worries about the lack of insects in gardens

By Dave Goulson

Published: Wednesday, 10 July 2024 at 14:17 PM

For the last few days, social media has been awash with panicked nature lovers asking this question. The Times newspaper published a piece about it this week. Many people are finding their gardens are silent; no buzz of bumblebees, and few or no butterflies or other insects of any type. I’ve seen it myself. My garden is devoted to wildlife, two acres of rural Sussex, pesticide-free and filled with wildflowers, but there is scarcely an insect in sight. In May it wasn’t too bad; there aren’t many garden butterflies at that time of year, but we had plenty of bumblebees and it was a good year for hairy-footed flower bees. By mid-June, it seems that the insects disappeared. What happened? Where did they go? Are we experiencing the ‘insect apocalypse’?

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There is probably no sudden crisis, no cause for immediate panic. Insects populations are incredibly weather-sensitive, and we have had a truly awful, wet, cold and windy spring and early summer. British insects have encountered unpredictable weather for millennia, and they bounce back as soon as things warm up. There are other specific reasons why insects might seem scarce right now. Two of our common bumblebee species, the early bumblebee and the tree bumblebee, have short colony cycles and naturally die off in late June.

Our civilization would collapse without insects

Many of the bees I saw in May were early bumblebees, which seemed to have a reasonably good year, and their natural disappearance created a big drop in garden bee numbers. As for butterflies, some of our more conspicuous and common species, such as peacocks, are currently larvae and pupae. The spring generation of adults is dead, and the summer generation has yet to emerge. Many of the common brown butterflies, such as the meadow brown, gatekeeper and ringlet, have just one brood per year and the adults are just beginning to emerge, a little late due to the cold weather. My fingers are crossed that there will soon be throngs of them flitting about the meadow areas of my garden, weather permitting.

There are some aspects of the recent paucity of bees that I cannot easily explain away. The red mason bees in my bee hotels vanished mid-season, leaving many holes unfilled. Maybe the weather? Common carder bumblebees were common in May, but most of them seemed to have vanished along with the early bumblebees; common carder colonies normally last until September, and should be building to peak strength about now…

The real reason to panic is not this temporary blip, but the long-term global trend. Our best estimate is that insect abundance is declining at about 1-2 per cent per year, year after year. This decline probably began at least 80 years ago, maybe more, but nobody was counting. A German study found that flying insect biomass collapsed by 76 per cent between 1989 and 2016. The Kent Wildlife Trust and Buglife run a UK-wide count of bug splats on car number plates and found a 78 per cent decline in the 20 years from 2004 to 2023.

Insects are adaptable, resilient creatures, and they could recover swiftly if we gave them the chance

Insect eating birds such as spotted flycatchers, cuckoo, nightingale, swallow, house martins and swifts have all declined in abundance. In 11 years living in Sussex I have not yet seen a single spotted flycatcher – a species that was common in gardens when I was young. It is four years since I last heard a cuckoo. Overhead, there are no swifts screaming, no swallows or martins. Given the vital importance of insects as food for other creatures, as pollinators of our crops and wildflowers, as recyclers and as pest controllers, these ongoing declines should terrify us. It may sound dramatic, but our civilization would collapse without insects.