Bumblebees may be busy as ever in your backyard, but their future looks precarious at best. Foreign bumblebees imported to pollinate plants in commercial glasshouses could decimate natural populations if their use is not strictly controlled.
Non-native bumblebees have already escaped and survived to breed in both Chile and Japan. “We wanted to determine whether or not escaped commercial bees could survive in the UK countryside,” says Tom Ings at Queen Mary, University of London. “Unfortunately, we found that they could” (Journal of Applied Ecology, DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2664.2006.01199.x).
Commercial colonies were better at foraging for nectar than native bees, and…
