I don’t need Friends of the Earth, whose efforts at protecting bees I commend to all, to tell me that bees are in decline. A video taken in my old garden at Hook Norton in 1996 is proof enough. Some 12 years after it was taken I watched for the first time in disbelief. Above the flowers there was a constant flow of movement as bees, hoverflies and other invertebrates moved through the garden like a spinning thread. I’m afraid I rarely see that 17 years on, despite the fact my garden at Spring Cottage is full of bee-friendly flowers. It is very depressing. I’ve been into bee watching since the early 1980s, when I tracked red-tailed bumble bees in Northamptonshire, to help bee research. I remember being unsure whether they were red-tails (Bombus lapidarius) or not because the bees were so small. Eventually I had to send one off to Cambridge University for confirmation. I learnt not to go on size, but markings. A red tail has a black body and a red tail, but when a colony is young the first bees out are very small. I got very excited when I had a nest under my study window recently, although most nests are only used for one year. Every year the lawn is covered with little grey pyramids of soil, set round neat holes and these are made by hundreds of Ashy mining bees (Andrena cineraria) active in late Spring. I find I cannot weed out the blue muscari bulbs which pop up announced as much as I would like to, because these mining bees forage on them all the time. We have the Tawny mining bee (Andrena fulva) in another area, although there are far fewer. Bee flies predate the mining bees by dropping their eggs from the air in Dambuster style. We think we also have the predatory Cuckoo bee Nomada lathburiana, though at first we thought it was digger wasp. The bee flies flock to the primroses with their permanently straight proboscis jutting out. We allow everything free rein, all part of being green for you can’t discriminate between predator and pest, or divide saint from sinner. Eventually they balance themselves out. The chief causes of decline are loss of habitat, particularly our flower-rich meadows. Many were ploughed up in the Second World War, but it’s still happening today. Too many fields offer a monoculture useless for wildlife. Pesticides and herbicides have reduced wild flowers on the verges and headlands and verge mowing and car exhausts have both added too much nitrogen, encouraging coarser plants.

In other areas fertiliser run-off from arable fields has seen off wild flowers. Add in Myxomatosis, a viral disease of rabbits which arrived in the 1950s and decimated the population, leading to short turf becoming ungrazed. It’s all contributed and it needs a government policy to preserve what habitat we have left. In the meantime gardeners must encourage bees by allowing them grassy, undisturbed banks for hibernation. Nectar is really the least of their worries.