i've been studying bumblebees as a scientist in the university for twenty something years now and i'm going to focus mainly mainly on bumblebees which are my kind of pet subject bees on television where they only ever mentioned one species the whole way through which makes me really angry come on anyway so i'm just going to show you a few few pictures to start with our big as you probably never seen before so they come in all of the scent from a particular species of orchid in each orchid be has a particular species of orchid that it gathers the scent from and want his legs are full of the scent and then go and it uses that sent to to woo female orchid be like five thousand copies bridge must have been somewhat annoying anyway so these are these are my favorites this is what i study bumblebees about two hundred fifty species in the world you've got forty six i think a life so this time of year is just finishing but if we follow it from the spring in the spring you see these giant furry bees coming up from out of the ground we probably don't see them coming up you'll see them flying a bite their queen bees that have been asleep about seven times as many male bumblebees born as new queens which when you think about it means that six out of seven male bumblebees never get to do the only thing that they were born to do just kind of depressing but anyway so so but said this thing about bumblebees being being kind of warm blooded they have a really unusual insects in that they thrive in cold climate so most insects get more common there's more species as you go ci and we think they're regenerated there and they spread west to europe and east through siberia into north america and then some of them made it right down through the mountains of central america and to south america which is the only place where they naturally in in in late winter and the air temperature is just about freezing but inside the baby it's in its body temperature about thirty five degrees centigrade so they can keep their body temperature that much higher than the surrounding air which is pretty amazing for a little little creature and there that this is an infrared picture you can imagine the bees being held in place with forceps and so i imagine she's really angry and buzzing away and you can see the four x the bit where the flight muscles of ours sort of glowing hot so so they that means they can live right in the arctic circle and what happened in the mountains and all sorts of places where other insects can't can't do anything because it's too cold but it comes with a huge cost so it's very energetically point is that they need they need loads of food to keep them going which means they need lots of flowers and i'll come back to to that in a minute oh actually before i go on to this let me just read you a tiny bit from the only bit i'll read from one of my books so this is my earliest memory of bumble bees and it's important to note that i was any i think about six or seven when this happened on one occasion after a heavy some really concerned but some of them are disappearing so if i first show you are a u k species this this is a thing called the great yellow bumblebee on the stinky when this which used to be found all over britain in the first half of the twentieth century but disappeared really rapidly during the twentieth century and now is only found in the wilds of the very far north and west of scotland but this isn't just happening here in britain it's happening elsewhere in the world it a relative of the species franklins bumble bee fairly recently went extinct closer to here actually on the california oregon border and that's the most recent global bumblebee extinction has gone from everywhere we don't have a really good monitoring scheme to tell us what the population is doing for particular for the common species we have maps like i've just shown you but they only tell you when something actually disappears it be better to have some sort of monitoring him  of numbers and in fact ideally what would have is a way of counting the nests of bumble bees because the nest is one breeding female the queen and and so that's actually probably the most useful measure of population size and if we could count twitching his nose at all and we had no idea what what was why he would find some and not others but he never really quite was the real deal and the funny thing was that steph after three years of trailing around behind this dog became better at finding the nest than he was  so why are they disappearing what's what are the problems i i don't want to go on too long about this because it gets a bit depressing but it is important so there's a number of problems that these face and i'm not going to i'll sort of weave through them reason quickly but they basically boil down to these four i think and these same pressures tend to affect lots of other creatures as well so the biggest driver is certainly in europe and i think probably all over the world is essentially the way farming has changed so these in britain which were almost all ninety eight percent of them were planted up in the twentieth century and they were full of flowers and they were replaced by huge monocultures and cereals or signage fields and similar things of of happened elsewhere in the world were lost lots of habitat that used to have lots of flowers in it and pretty obviously if you're b then that's that's bad or i'll come back to that in a second then there are issues with disease pesticides and and most recently this evidence get too warm and can't fly if the air temperature is too high there's a recent study was just published that showed that the southern edges of bumblebee ranges in europe and north america are all shifting have already shifted quite a long way north anyway so that they just go back to the first point agriculture intense forgetting this is an example of whatever flower rich grass and of which we used to have in europe tons and tons of this kind of habitat and you also in north america used to have some really beautiful distance there very largely and it's hardly surprising that if we if we get rid of habitats like this and then replace them with stuff like this then we won't just lose bees we're going to lose most of our wildlife and huge chunks of the surface of the down in street view and it looks exactly the same so this is this is northern france but that's i think that's belgium this is somewhere in the midwest of the united states i can you can you can drop it in all sorts of places in the all looks moving the bees and accidentally moving their their diseases around the world so honeybees are native to the americas a tall we brought them here hundreds of years ago and we accidentally brought a whole range of the diseases with them in their hives and they specific to honeybees so once they were here they happily jump tight into into wild bees in north america and it was taken honeybees all over the world and we've taken the full suite of honeybee diseases all over the world with them and then more recently we started doing that since since the one nine hundred eighty s we started doing the same with bumblebees which made things even worse so the reason this started is a belgian guy in the one nine hundred eighty s sorry dutch guy i think in the  that really dramatic decline of the rusty patch bumblebee in north america we think we haven't been proven beyond diet but we think was because of the a european disease being brought over with this trade in commercial bumblebees it was a terrible thing happening in science america at the moment where  the chilean government deliberately introduced european factory red bumblebees to chile in the one nine hundred ninety s and they again they didn't check but they were free of disease and it turns out they weren't they were carrying from european diseases and studied just near the university in south of england the management in north america is very similar and so this just one crop from when it was planted when it was harvested about ten months later gets twenty insecticide but but anyway i would just say this that that if you were growing food to feed your kids would you put twenty different pesticides on it and then anything else feed it to them i think you probably wouldn't think certainly wouldn't and yet that's what's happening in farmer's fields all over the actually if the list for an apple would be much much longer horticultural crops was sprayed with much much more generally a really horrendous list of has increased very rapidly over time that that graph is for the u k but it's it would be the same for anywhere in the world they prove really popular with farmers and particularly because they're very easy to use they usually use as a seed dressing up because it's kind of i don't know whether it makes me laugh or cry really but this is a special promotion a couple of years ago in the u k that the barrier put on their their bottle of the killing chemical came with free seeds for babies so that you could grow some lovely flowers and attract the bees and then kill them really effectively i don't know they did pull it quite quickly i think people thought it was perhaps taking the mickey slightly anyway when the doom and gloom these pictures show southwest china you might have seen these pictures before they've been in the newspapers a bit they show they look quite pretty don't they but they this is actually a really depressing sight because the do i started it because i was fed up with doing science and just just communicating with scientists so normally if you're a scientist you publish your research in scientific papers papers in journals obscure boring  which are read by the other five or ten people in the world that are interested in bumblebees and they're also scientists and i thought i said this at a conference to a science conference and one of them piped up and said actually we don't read them either which was one britain and it's created lots of habitat for the what i'm just going to talk to you about the things that it does all that anyone can do to help our babies so firstly the biggest business recreating one of these crossed arms and it takes takes a long time and isn't probably practical for most people but there are a lot of other things you can do if you don't have a field the very simplest thing you can do is just tell  people about it so i said right at the beginning that most people think there's only one species of the well obviously the more people that are aware that actually it's a bit more complicated than that there's lots of different species and they're all important then then that's got to be good because if people said that every child goes through a bug period but that he just didn't grow out of his and there's probably a few people here that feel the same i do but the sad reality is that most kids do grow out of their bug phase and by the time they're teenagers we could we need to do something about that i think this these pictures are a before and after so at the top there these are a group of like over there were seven or eight primary school kids in scotland will come they'll find you in the middle of the city and you'll be doing your bit you'll be providing them with some food and i haven't got time to go into all the kind of do's and don'ts of wild flower garden but just a broad they hideously colorful for most of the year horrible horrible things i don't know why anyone would want them they have these huge flowers with lots of bright colors they've been selected for this but they've lost their original  going anywhere near these things you should have lost their nectar or their pollen they've got extra sets of petals instead of stamens all the insects just can't get into them because they're so deformed flowers evolved to attract insects to pollinate the love it you have to watch these things coming and going they fill up the holes and then with their pollen and then they plug it with mud at the end of the hole so you can see when the bees have been there and the group live inside and then hatch out the next spring the autumn on the leafcutter bees which you also have over here which general issues of looking after the environment it's very easy to explain to people even people who aren't normally that interested in nature that bees are important because they do something tangible force pollinating but of course actually other species do things for all of these things are vitally important to us and i find it terribly depressing that so few people really care what he says so many people are detached from nature anyway what i would say if you to finish off that these have been quietly pollinating our crops for the last ten thousand years since we started growing crops all of that time because of the no thanks what have we just taken their services for granted but there is a real danger that those services are to disappear that there is these are going to disappear and we all need to do something to help and so if he can just do one of the things that i've talked about and if we can get everyone to day one of those things then we could turn cities into big kind of the how many bees as there are in there were how many types of be there are about twenty thousand different types how many individual pays i really haven't got a clue but it's been an awful lot  them different distances from home and the one got back from ten miles away but most didn't from ten miles away so i just remained lost forever wondering around the country so i guess  patient i was curious about the research that you have that the bees the ng able to tell whether another was at the flower can you same how about how you figured that out yeah  so to start with we it is it would get a very boring story if i went through the whole thing but to start with we look to see if the flowers that they were made avoiding had left food and we find that they  flowers and that didn't make these lands if so for flower had recently been emptied by a bee and then we added more nectar to it these would still avoid it so we could we knew it wasn't they weren't directly measuring the reward so we in the end more by a sort of being the only the any possibility we thought well maybe they can somehow smell where the bees have been so we start we started basically washing bees and putting the the the the you you mentioned that bumblebees distributed across the world and you mentioned that well like what areas would you say are decision and like evidence or like data for like bumblebees is there are parts of the world like that either need the most outreach you think that like we hear a lot about like the u k and the united states for instance like what about the other area we've got we have no clue really what's going on in play i mean the sad thing is so that those pictures i showed of the people hand pollinating that's really close to the place i pointed to on the map where where we think they came from originally where the most species of bumblebee live we actually haven't really got a clue what's happening in asia and clearly china you know it's a vast country is really hard to get in and nobody's you know really studying what's going on the opposite they don't have kind of you know citizen scientists counting bees or anything so so that's a big unknown and actually i mean as soon as you get into kind of eastern europe and be a japanese lady bird two to britain where i live and it's very pretty but it turns out that he loves to eat other lady birds and is eating its way through all so when i see a bumblebee on the ground in the summer and it's barely moving you mentioned something earlier that when i should feed it made a water give it give it some sugar i mean it might not work because because it might have a disease it might have been poisoned but you can't fix those things but if it's just run out of energy then you can say yeah give it give it some sugar water and very often they ten minutes l i also have a question so some times of bees are dying are there new times coming in to replace them or may be some that would be you know more suited to the new environments