Nature Recovery: Connecting Spaces for Bees (Ep. 27)

Today we’re focusing on the threats faced by wild and native bees in terms of loss of habitat. I have an insightful conversation with Aaron Bhambra who sheds light on the critical challenges that native bees are currently encountering due to habitat loss. We take a closer look at the Purple Horizons Project, an initiative aimed at restoring various habitats on the outskirts of the West Midlands in England to support pollinators.

Aaron shares his firsthand experiences of monitoring bee and wildflower populations within the project’s vicinity, highlighting the urgent efforts being made to safeguard the Tormentil Mining Bee. Discover the pivotal role that lowland heath plays in nurturing these vital pollinators and how the project is not only enriching biodiversity but also creating enhanced nature access for local communities. 

Aaron works for the Wildlife Trust for Birmingham and the Black Country as well as being a PhD. student at the University of Birmingham. His research focus is habitat fragmentation and heathland pollinators. He recently found two rare bee species at one of Walsall’s nature reserves.

Good to know

Lowland heath is a special habitat that provides an ideal environment for pollinators, especially ground-nesting insects like bees and wasps. With sandy soil and open spaces for nesting and foraging, lowland heathlands offer a sanctuary for these essential creatures, with diverse plant life providing crucial nectar and pollen sources. Lowland heath requires some kind of human intervention if it is to persist. Aaron mentioned re-introducing grazing cattle to the heathland around Walsall as a cost-effective way to maintain and encourage this habitat.

The Purple Horizons project is a major nature recovery project funded by Natural England. It’s restoring and connecting fragmented nationally and internationally-important heathlands in the West Midlands. The project was selected for the Public Sector Award at the West Midlands Combined Authority Natural Environment Awards. These regional awards recognize West Midlands organizations for protecting, restoring, and enhancing the natural environment.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Bee’s Knees. I’m your host, Jacy Meyer. The Bee’s Knees is a podcast wild about native bees. Wild and native bees are under threat worldwide. In each episode, we look at actionable things we can do to support these adorable little guys whose pollination work is crucial for maintaining biodiversity. Thanks for being here.

When we talk about loss of habitat being a big threat to bees, we typically think it’s because when the land’s use changes, there’s a loss of floral resources, which means a loss of food sources. But when meadows are converted to farmland or rural areas become urbanized, bees also lose places to nest.

Today we’re talking about one wide ranging nature recovery project called Purple Horizons. This ambitious project is led by [00:01:00] Natural England and works with partners including local councils and wildlife trusts. The project extends across 10, 000 hectares on the urban fringe of the West Midlands and is creating a mosaic of heathland, wetland, woodland, and grassland to recover and improve the area for reptiles, birds, and pollinators.

Our guest today is Aaron Bhambra, a PhD student at the University of Birmingham. He’s monitoring the populations of bees and wildflowers and taking drone images of various sites across the project’s area. One important aspect of his work is trying to help save the tormentil mining bee from becoming extinct in Britain.

Let’s talk to Aaron. Tell me about Walsall and your role in the Purple Horizons project. So Walsall is a town in the West Midlands and it’s located quite close to Birmingham, but it’s actually in an area called the Black Country. Um, and it’s a really densely populated area and it’s had a very long and intense history of mining over the past century.

And this is [00:02:00] because it’s an area, which is quite rich in natural minerals, and it has quite an interesting geology. There’s lots of sandstone, gravels and things like that, um, that have been mined out of Walsall to build the surrounding infrastructure of the area. But despite the area being quite impoverished, impoverished, it’s Got a substantial amount of a habitat which we call lowland heath, which is really quite interesting.

It’s internationally threatened. It’s actually rarer or more threatened than tropical rainforests. And we have a quite substantial amount of this in Walsall and in other parts of the Black Country and the West Midlands . So what benefits does this heathland offer bees and other local species? So Lowland Heath is a fantastic landscape for pollinating insects like bees and wasps.

It’s important for a range of different wildlife groups, but it’s particularly valuable for ground nesting insects. And this is because the site’s very sandy, and it contains lots of exposed areas of what we call bare earth habitat, which tends to be extremely scarce across the landscape. And the vast majority of bees and wasps across the [00:03:00] world nest underground in sand, and it’s no different in Britain.

The more exposed sand there is in a landscape, the greater the levels of nesting pollinators that that habitat is able to support. And so heathlands are, have very interesting plant assemblages as well. The plants that grow on these sites, they grow in quite arid, dry, almost desert like conditions. And so you get very resilient.

plant species growing in these areas that tend to be quite drought tolerant. And these plants provide a vital source of nectar and pollen for bee and wasp populations. And sometimes they’re the only plants actually in flower in that landscape and at that point in the season. So the open sandy nature of heathlands also makes them very hot landscapes, and that’s very attractive to many flying insects.

You get lots of different microhabitats, and that means that you create this perfect. Place for bees and wasps to find places to nest, but also to find places to feed from. The Tormentil Mining Bee. It’s listed as a priority species in England, but has been discovered locally [00:04:00] recently. Can you tell us about this bee?

I can, yeah, so the Tormentil Mining Bee, it’s a species of solitary bee, which is threatened nationally in Britain, and it’s actually considered to be caught in steep decline across continental Europe. And this is because of a loss of its natural habitat, lowland heath, which has been declining due to increases in urbanisation and intensive agriculture over the past century.

And this species is a specialist on a flower called Tormentil, hence the name. And it will collect pollen from this flower, and it will feed that pollen to its offspring. And it will Collect nectar from a few different other species, but it’s mainly focused around this one, one species of wildflower and in the early 2000s, the Tormential Mining Bee was found for the first time in Walsall by my mentor, Mike Bloxham, at a site called Pelsall Common.

So it’s like an old industrial, uh, heathland in the area. And however, the species has failed to turn up in any good numbers since then, and this might be because many of the heathlands in the area have declined due to a lack of management and due to succession, [00:05:00] um, in the area of the last 20 or 30 years.

Last year, however, several female Tormentil Mining Bees were found at another site in Walsall called Brownhills Common. It’s a few miles north. And this indicated that a metapopulation of this species existed in the North Walsall, South Staffordshire area and that work could be carried out to help conserve this special bee and that the records that we have of this species in our area could be of regional and national importance.

So your role in this project is particularly concerned with this bee. Can you share what you’ve been doing and what you hope to accomplish? Sure, so I’m a PhD student at the University of Birmingham and I’m an entomologist. I study and I like to record insects. But my role as part of the Purple Horizons project has been to carry out the species monitoring aspects of this research, to try to better understand which species we have in our area and how we can better conserve these populations.

So I’ve been going out and sampling the bees and wasps at 25 sites scattered across the West Midlands region over a two year period, and I’ve had a lot of help from really experienced [00:06:00] naturalists in the area, sort of teaching me about the history of these sites and how to sample correctly. We’ve also been flying drones over the site to take photos of the landscape, which we can then use to measure the size of specific habitats.

So we often hear about drones in news, which are used in things like war, but we’ve been pioneering the use of drones, or what we call UAV, for trying to improve the quality of our green spaces via nature conservation work and targeted habitat management work. So this work really enables us to assess the quality of these sites and how we might be able to improve them for pollinators, to identify areas where we can remove scrub or improve the extent of bare earth habitat.

And I’ve also helped secure funding for the projects that’s looking specifically at the Tormentil Mining Bee, um, and help. Design and supervise all the habitat creation work that’s happened at the sites in Walsall last year. Um, overseeing the creation of about four acres of pollinator friendly habitat in the borough.

So there’s a lot going on, but is it too soon to see any results? Uh [00:07:00] we’re unlikely to see results straight away as this is often quite a gradual process and it takes time over several years for communities to establish themselves, particularly with insects. What we might find is that several species of bee and wasps start to begin to nest directly into the exposed bare earth habitat that we’ve created.

I mean, that would be fantastic. And this is something that we will be monitoring next year. But it’s very likely that. By excavating, extracting large amounts of sand, we will have disturbed the seed bank hidden within the ground, and this may lead to an explosion of interesting plant varieties which have been dormant until now, a sort of natural setting without help from man.

The disturbance that happens to these landscapes would have taken place through grazing animals. They’d sort of be walking around, they’d be kicking up the sand, kicking up the dirt, and that would create these micro habitats which would lead to interesting plant assemblages forming. But what may also happen is we get things like heather or gorse or brooms.

So these quite characteristic heathland plant assemblages popping [00:08:00] up out of the ground because the seeds of relic populations of these plants have been within the landscape for many, many years. How long is this study going to last? It’s an ongoing project. The Purple Horizons project, it’s a landscape connectivity project that’s taking place between Sutton Park in North Birmingham through to Cannock Chase in South Staffordshire, and that’s an ongoing project to restore the heathland.

In terms of the Tormentil Mining Bee project, so at the moment, it’s been a one year project we’ve carried out bare earth creation last year. We did all the sort of habitat modifications in the previous year. And then this year we’ll be studying the results of those modifications to see if we’ve been successful.

But we envisage that we’ll try to continue the habitat management aspects of this work in subsequent years. So. I mentioned grazing animals in the previous question. One of the things that we’re looking at at the moment is to try to look at the feasibility of reintroducing grazing cattle to some of these sites, because that will be a sort of nature based solution of a way that [00:09:00] the nature can manage itself.

It’s much less cost effective, so it’s much more cost effective and it’s much more environmentally friendly. Um, So though the work that’s looking specifically at the Tormentil Mining Bee will probably end at the end of this year, there will be more projects and more work involving local conservation charities and land managers to focus on the habitats generally themselves and how we can improve those.

So why are projects like these so important, not only for pollinators, but the local environment in general? So large scale landscape restoration projects like this are vital for ensuring the long term survival and the resilience of a range of wildlife species across multiple taxa. Um, bare earth habitat is important, not just for bees and wasps, but for many ground nesting beetle species, um, as well as basking butterfly species as well.

They also provide areas for reptiles and amphibians to warm up on. And if we are serious about tackling biodiversity loss, then we need to think big and try to be daring [00:10:00] and bold with our aims. Um, so if you want to save plants and animals and improve biodiversity, then we have to emphasize protecting, enhancing and restoring habitats and landscapes, which these species depend on.

So, this is an extremely important project, not just practically for restoring and improving heathlands in our area. We’re very fortunate to have lowland heath in Birmingham, the Black Country. It’s not something that many cities can boast about, and we should really do our best to try to enhance these.

But it’s also important, just symbolically. The, the government is, uh, the organization that are funding this research and funding this habitat restoration work, and it’s nice to see an emphasis from them. They’re investing in our green networks, trying to invest in different ways of managing our sites and improving biodiversity.

So, both from the practical element and from a sort of engagement and symbolic element, it is really significant and one of the most important projects that’s taken place in our area for quite a while. Why do you do what [00:11:00] you do? Why bees? Um, so this is a, quite a difficult question to answer, really. My journey into entomology is quite unconventional, I think, for most people.
I initially was a history student, and I went to university and I wanted to work in local government. I was interested in sort of helping communities. But then I quite very quickly fell out of love with that, and I had a burning desire to do something with my community and do something, something like that, but I didn’t know what that was going to be.

And I didn’t grow up. With access to wildlife, I lived in Birmingham, which is a very urban area, and So I was quite limited with my knowledge of it and my access to it, and I didn’t know that I could have a career in this sector, really, until I left my history degree and I started volunteering at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which is a national conservation charity in Britain, but it’s got nature reserves all over the country.

And I did an unpaid internship, which is what people tend to do when they’re not really sure how to get a job in the sector that they want to get in. And it was quite a risk at [00:12:00] the time. A lot of my friends were going off and getting, you know, getting jobs and doing, doing paid work. And, um, but I was very fortunate that I actually met a very passionate and brilliant entomologist, Mike, who actually found the Tormentil Mining Bee.

One of your previous questions, which you asked. He ended up training me and just infectiously giving his passion over to me. And I became really fascinated with solitary bees in particular, because we had a lot of those species at this RSPB nature reserve. And I think I was just quite amazed that there were so many different species that you could find in an urban area, which are often considered to be quite species poor, and that they were absolutely beautiful.

They’re very colorful, very cute looking creatures, and they have really interesting life histories and life ecologies. And we know so very little about them, despite the fact that the insects make up most of life on Earth, we know very, very little about how many species there are alone, let alone what those species do.

So this fascination [00:13:00] led me to go back to university and I did a master’s degree at the University of Wolverhampton. And then after that, I just sort of felt like I’d only really touched the surface looking at bees. I was interested in nesting ecology and so I just continued down that journey and whenever an opportunity came up to learn a bit more, to be involved with a project, I just sort of threw myself out there.

Be bold and daring. I love that. Bees are so tiny, but their impact is so massive. Restoring these important landscapes is crucial if we are serious about biodiversity. And it’s not only for the bees and other creatures. Purple Horizons also hopes to create more nature rich spaces for local people to access and enjoy, so they can experience the positive health and well being benefits associated with spending time in nature.

My thanks to Aaron, and not only for his important work and passion, but also for taking the time to share this project. And some really interesting details about lowland heath . And thank you for being a part of The Bee’s Knees. I love that you care. [00:14:00] Until next time, let’s go big on biodiversity.