The British public has helped scientists uncover what looks like a substantial decline in one of the UK's most common bumblebees over the last 20 years. By gathering valuable information about the insects, citizen scientists from across Britain have shown that the common carder-bee made up less than 10 per cent of bumblebee colonies from 2007 to 2009. Just 20 years previously, they made up a whopping 21 per cent. This is the first time anyone has shown that one of the UK's big six common bumblebees may be in decline. 'There seems to be a clear shift in how common different species in the UK are,' says Dr Gillian Lye from the University of Stirling, lead author of the study, published in the Journal of Insect Conservation. Professor Dave Goulson from the University of Stirling and Lye came up with the idea of getting enthusiastic members of the public to help them get to grips with bumblebee nesting ecology when they realised they could get a lot more information than they could on their own. 'People tend to spend quite a lot of time in their gardens, so spotting bumblebees and following them to their nests is a real possibility,' says Goulson. In this latest study, Goulson, Lye and colleagues asked members of the public to send information about which species they saw and what type of nest the bees used to the Bumblebee Conservation Trust. They encouraged people to send photographs, so that Lye could confirm the species. In total, over a thousand people sent information about the nests in their gardens.
Source: Planet Earth, 8 December 2011
http://planetearth.nerc.ac.uk/news/story.aspx?id=1116
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