Buzzing bees and chocolate trees

It is estimated that the world’s insects perform an annual pollination service for all humankind worth $215 billion. In return, every year, we run up a pesticide bill of about $40 billion to exterminate them (this doesn’t include the $10 billion costs in social and environmental damage wrought by the same chemicals). Why is it still such a reflex in our encounters with invertebrates to reach for the fly spray? Here are two great books that try to change our minds on creepy-crawlies.

On the face of it, Dave Goulson has the more straightforward task. This is not just because the founder of Bumblebee Conservation over a quartet of books has perfected the art of turning the entomologist’s technical expertise into easy-reading everyman’s prose. He also laces his stories with rich helpings of wit and humour; and then there is the further advantage that his chosen insects are the nation’s favourites. The buff-tailed bumblebee was recently voted Britain’s most beloved invertebrate.

Goulson’s scientific quests take him into some extraordinary, seldom visited places. In the Gorce mountains of southern Poland he conjures a rural idyll of traditional pre-industrial communities, where the light touch of their extensive farming methods leaves room not only for bears and wolves, but also for what sounds like bumblebee and butterfly heaven.

In Argentina, by contrast, he shows us what can happen when humans meddle in bee affairs. One of the lesser-known aspects of this insect group is the human trade in commercial bumblebees for use in pollination. Much of the world’s tomato crop is produced thanks to these industrially reared bee nests. Unfortunately, several European species have now escaped in Chile and Argentina and introduced unfamiliar bee diseases that have devastated native populations. Goulson travels through thousands of kilometres of the Andes in search of one of the most remarkable and largest bumblebees in the world, whose queens are likened to ‘flying golden mice’.