What One Irish Town Taught the World About Saving Bumblebees

[00:00:04] Welcome back to Secret Pollinators. Today, we're going to Ireland. Picture a little seaside town north of Dublin called Skerries. The people there set out to save a ginger-haired bumblebee, one that's slipping away with a third of Ireland's wild bee species. Their secret weapon? It's pretty simple. It's letting the public meadows grow a little more wild.

[00:00:32] And that kind of sounds familiar, doesn't it? And this particular bee can do something a honeybee can't. It grabs a flower and vibrates, buzzes it like a tuning fork, to shake loose the pollen. And it's called buzz pollination, which we've talked about in other episodes. And it's the reason you've got tomatoes growing in your yard right now.

[00:00:55] So today, one Irish town, one disappearing bee, and the secret hum happening in your own backyard. So, let's learn about the Irish Carter Bee. Meet the large Carter Bee, which is the star of today's episode. She's got a coat of warm ginger hair. None of the bold black and yellow stripes you might think of when you think of a regular bumblebee.

[00:01:25] Just soft, rusty fuzz like she rolled in cinnamon. And she lives in flower-rich grasslands across Europe and in Northern Asia. And here's the twist that makes her interesting. Most of her range, she's a creature of the wild countryside. But in Ireland, she does something unusual. She thrives in towns, parks, roadside verges, and the scruffy edges of seaside communities. And that's where she's making her stand.

[00:01:56] And this matters, because she needs all the help she can get. The large Carter Bee is one of roughly a third of Ireland's wild bee species now threatened with extinction. And the broader picture is grim. Ireland's bumblebee monitoring has tracked a steady decline of about 3.5% every year since 2012. Year after year, the same downward slope.

[00:02:22] The official report called them in a precarious position. That's the bee. Now let's talk about the town that decided to do something about it. The Skerries Experiment Scaries is a small coastal town in North County, Dublin. And starting back in 2019, a local community group teamed up with the county council with a refreshingly simple idea.

[00:02:51] Instead of mowing the public green spaces into tidy little lawns, they let them grow. They managed them as meadows. Let the wild plants come back, like the clovers, the vetches, the knapweeds. The messy, flower-rich tangle that a bumblebee actually wants. They built what you might call a pollinator corridor. And we've talked about those in previous episodes, too.

[00:03:16] A connected ribbon of habitat running through a town specifically with the large Carter Bee in mind. Now, this isn't a tidy fairy tale where one town fixes everything. The national numbers are still heading in the wrong direction. 2024 was an especially brutal year for Irish bees. Mostly down due to bad weather. And one town, letting its grasses grow, doesn't reverse a county-wide decline.

[00:03:45] But that's not really the point, because the point is that ordinary people looked at a vanishing bee and didn't wait for permission. They changed what they could change. A patch of ground right outside their own front doors. And that, it turns out, is something every single one of us can do. So let's think about that for a moment. This is an American story, too.

[00:04:10] And you might be thinking, well, that's a lovely story, but it's in Ireland. A whole ocean away. Here's why it lands right in our laps. The larger Carter Bee isn't found in the United States, but the exact same story is playing out here with our own bees. Out west, the western bumblebee has been disappearing on a strikingly similar curve.

[00:04:35] A big, fuzzy, once-common bee, now harder to find than it used to be. So, different bee, same plot. And the scary solution? It translates perfectly, because you don't need a county council or acres of meadow. The whole insight of that Irish town is that bumblebees will use small, human-scale spaces. The scruffy edges, the in-between places.

[00:05:02] If we just give them something to forage on. And that includes planters on your balcony. So, your window box, that also counts. A single half-barrel planter on a patio. You know, a few square feet of let it grow a little wild in the corner of a small backyard. The bee doesn't measure square footage. She measures where the flowers are.

[00:05:31] A town in Ireland proved the model works in a public park. So, you can run the very same experiment in a pot by your back door. And I do it all the time. It just amazes me how many bees show up. The secret hum. Now, let's get to the magic trick. The thing that makes these bumblebees genuinely irreplaceable. Because it's not just that we'd miss them.

[00:05:59] It's that for some of your favorite garden plants, nothing else will do the job. And here's how it works. Some flowers don't just hand over their pollen. They lock it away inside tube-shaped structures called anthers. With only a tiny pore at the tip. Like a salt shaker with the holes at the end. Wind won't reliably get it out. And a honeybee can't crawl all over that flower and get any of that pollen out.

[00:06:27] I mean, virtually none of it. So, a bumblebee's the key. She lands, wraps herself around the flower, anchors on it with her jaws. And then she vibrates her flight muscles without flapping her wings. Really fast. Like we're talking vibrations that can exceed 400 beats per second. The flower shakes a little like a tuning fork. And the pollen comes pouring out onto her fuzzy body. And that is called buzz pollination or sonication.

[00:06:56] Which we've talked about in lots of other episodes. And the kicker is that a honeybee physically can't do it. Their flight muscles just don't work that way. And only about half of all bee species can pollinate. So, which plants need this? And this is the part I really want you to hear. Because it's probably growing in your patio right now. Tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, blueberries, cranberries, and yes, even kiwi. All of them release their pollen the best.

[00:07:24] And some of them only when a bee buzzes them. Without buzz pollination, it doesn't happen. So, the payoff is real and measurable. On buzz pollinated crops, bumble bees can outperform honey bees several times over. So, the next time you're standing on your... Standing on... Standing over your tomato plant and you hear that low fat buzz. It's a little different sounding than the rest.

[00:07:52] Well, that's the sound of your harvest happening. Standing on... What I'd really like everyone to be able to take away from this episode is that... The people of Skerry's didn't have a fancy budget or a research lab. They had a vanishing bee, a strip of public grass, and the decision to let it grow a little wild.

[00:08:18] And you have the same power scaled to whatever space you've got. A backyard corner, a balcony rail, a single pot of tomatoes catching the afternoon sun. The bee doesn't really care how big it is. She just wants flowers and the freedom to hum. So, plant something. Leave a little wild. And then go listen for that buzz. Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate it.

[00:08:46] And until next time, remember, watch those bumble bees. And all bees, because they're probably watching you back.