Skills for Bees: Scotland

Skills for Bees: Scotland – recording bumblebees in the Cairngorms

For the past three years, Annie Ives has tramped the highways and byways of the Cairngorms National Park, one of Scotland’s unique and most special landscapes. Her mission: to spread the word of bumblebees as widely as possible.

Annie is the project officer for Skills for Bees: Scotland, a regional project of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust. Despite the huge variety of wildlife found in the Cairngorms – some of it unique to the National Park – we actually know surprisingly little about the bumblebees that call it home. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising: not many people climb mountains to look for bumblebees. Annie – with an ever-increasing band of volunteers – has been changing all that.

Everyone knows that bumblebees – and pollinators in general – are struggling. Fewer people know quite how much of an issue that is likely to be. Insect pollination is worth over £0.5 billion every year to crop production, while the wider value – helping flowers, trees and shrubs reproduce – underpins the whole food web, creating seeds and fruits for small mammals, birds, insects and everything else to feed on (which are then fed on in turn).

If you are standing in a fruit farm on the East coast, this may feel like an immediate problem. However, stood on top of Ben Macdui or Cairn Gorm, it can feel – like all your other problems – a million miles away. But climate change and other long-term, large-scale threats have been slowly extending into the wilderness, blanketing the region in their almost-imperceptible – at least at first – embrace.

The locals who farm the area, walk the hills, or just work in their shadow, love it. Through Annie, the Bumblebee Conservation Trust has been working to help them understand – and love in turn – their tiny furry neighbours. The aim of Skills for Bees: Scotland has been to create a network of bumblebee recorders, logging their sightings on iRecord or iNaturalist, or walking regular monitoring transects for the BeeWalk scheme. Ultimately, biological recording is integral in our efforts to save Scotland’s bumblebees – we can’t conserve what we don’t know about!

Despite the sparse human population of most of the National Park, almost 900 people have attended Annie’s bumblebee identification training days, surveying workshops and rare species surveys (focusing on areas where the existing data was threadbare or lacking entirely). A focus on mentoring and skills development has created a bumblebee-centric community in the hills, with many of our volunteers progressing from beginner to intermediate identification surveying, as well as cementing their skills at our practical field sessions and survey days.

399 people have attended our 32 beginners or intermediate bumblebee identification workshops, and another 65 have come along to workshops aimed at surveying for bumblebees through BeeWalk, the national bumblebee abundance citizen science scheme. They’ve obviously taken the lessons to heart – BeeWalks have been popping up in the project area at more than twice the national rate, while the number of iRecord sightings has increased five-fold!

Feedback from Annie’s events has been fantastic – ‘informative’ and ‘inspiring’ are two key ‘buzz’ words which regularly appear in free text comments – as volunteers attending the workshops have demonstrably enjoyed and valued learning identification and recording skills from an expert.

“I had always enjoyed seeing bumblebees but had no detailed knowledge of them or how vulnerable they were. Signing up and attending the Beginners Bumblebee Identification day in Ballater a few years ago was a revelation. Not only did it start my journey as a BeeWalker and Biodiversity Recorder, it also opened up the fascinating world of invertebrates. I now regularly record bumblebees and have two monthly bee walk transects. Getting real time evidence of how bumblebees are doing is important and knowing that it adds to a national picture spurs me on. Engaging with people on the walks is great. It is the other side of being a BeeWalker, you’re passing on your enthusiasm and interest to others. Also, when you become a biodiversity recorder you join a wonderful community of helpful and knowledgeable citizen scientists.” – Belinda Miller, BeeWalker & Skills for Bees: Scotland participant.

In return, Bumblebee Conservation Trust has gained a vastly better understanding of three nationally-rare bumblebee species: the Broken-belted bumblebee (Bombus soroeensis), Blaeberry bumblebee (Bombus monticola) and Moss carder bumblebee (Bombus muscorum). All three thrive in Scotland compared to the rest of the UK, but are likely to be threatened by the warming climate: it’s crucial that we get a good understanding of how they’re doing now as a baseline for a worrying future.

Annie’s project has nurtured a network of new citizen scientists, roaming the roof of the UK to record bumblebees. Its legacy will be a community of highly-skilled and confident bumblebee recorders in the Cairngorms National Park. They just might help us ensure the survival of some of our most charismatic insects nationwide.

Skills for Bees: Scotland thanks their funders: Cairngorms National Park Authority, Cairngorms Trust, and NatureScot.

This biodiversity data story was shared by Bumblebee Conservation Trust with the Better Biodiversity Data project, led and managed by the NBN Trust and supported by NatureScot and The Scottish Government.