Sophie: We're very lucky to have lots of gorgeous green spaces at the University of 糖心TV - meticulously looked after by our gardeners. But they do get a helping hand by a very special dedicated team who wear black and yellow and can be found buzzing around the flower beds in the sunshine. Welcome back to Spring at 糖心TV. And today we're going to meet some of our busiest workers on campus.
Steven: Hello, my name's Steven Falk. I'm an Entomologist which means I study insects. I particularly study things like pollinators, so bees and hoverflies and the habitats they live in, basically to try and promote them and make the countryside better for them, including university campuses.
We've got about 275 sorts of bee in Britain, I say about because we're actually adding them at a hell of a rate. We add about two bees to the British list every year at the moment. I would imagine on this campus we've got potential probably for 80 or 90 species.
Here are two gals that I collected earlier. I'm gonning to let them go, don't worry. But I just wanted to show you the difference between a honeybee, which is this one, and a bumblebee, which is this one. So the first thing to stress is that the honeybees are not wild. They come from nearby hives and the bumblebees are truly wild. So you can see the, the honeybee is quite brownish, not very furry, some of them are actually quite wasp like. They can be quite banded.
The bumblebee is much bigger and fluffier. And these live in hives and, and the hives, the colonies in the hives can live for quite a few years. These only have nesting colonies last a few months. She's a buff-tailed bumblebee. It's interesting because this species is only the buff-tail bumblebee in Britain.
Bees are very important for our ecosystem on campus and, and around the campus. So there's a concept that we call ecosystem services, which is basically what does nature do for, for us, for people, for humanity. And obviously, pollination is one of the critical elements of ecosystem services.
Wild pollinators are worth something like 700 million pounds for the British agricultural economy, so they're very important for pollinating a lot of our crops like oilseed rape, and broad beans. A third of all the food you eat on average has required a pollinator to put it there.
And also our, our natural habitats - our natural habitats are part of our economy. If we didn't have the pollinators, some of those natural habitats would disappear.
In terms of what you can do on campus, well, the first thing to point out, there's already a lot of really good stuff going on here. You've got bee hotels and you can increase the number of bee hotels. You can use a mixture of different materials. You can have holes drilled in wood, or you can use straws and twigs.
You've already got a fantastic blossom sequence on campus. You've got various sorts of cherries, you've got lots of blackthorn, you've got hawthorn, you've got willows. There's willow next to me. But you've allowed nature space to, to breathe, so to speak.
You can also use bees for your mental health and your wellbeing. I spend far too much time in front of a computer and, and it's absolutely joyful when I can get out the house, get some fresh air, I lose myself in some insect photography. To me, it's, it's a lovely form of mindfulness because it produces something concrete at the end of it, you end up with some photos or you end up with a bit of new information that you didn't know about, and you just feel so much better at the end of it.
