I wanted to share three videos / documentaries I’ve seen in the last year on the subject of wild bees in England.
The first is on Dave Goulson’s youtube channel. Goulson is a Professor of Biology at the University of Sussex and the author of several books on insect ecology and the founder of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust.
In this video he explains how to make a bee hotel for the hairy-footed flower bee using clay to simulate the kinds of clay banks they usually nest in.
The second video is a short film produced by Fera (a British clothing brand) on Matt Somerville and his hobby of making bee hives over winter for wild honey bees.
Somerville talks about the widely held theory that the British honey bee cannot exist without being domesticated by beekeepers, and his fascination from childhood of watching wild hives making their homes in tree cavities. He has spent the last 14 years fashioning bee hives out of huge logs to fight back against lost habitat for the wild honey bee. The film focuses in on his craftmanship, showing how he makes the hackles (the cone shaped roof) from reeds and the process of working the logs to have the ideal cavity to home bees.
And lastly, last night I watched Martin Dohrn’s film My Garden of a Thousand Bees, a 50 minute documentary made in Dohrn’s backgarden in Bristol during the pandemic lockdown. It follows him working out how to film various species of solitary bee, how he created space for food and homes for the bees, and the life and behaviours of the bees he’s found.
The second half the doc focuses in on the intelligence, individuality and decision making of female bees as they build their nests, it’s this part where the wonder of the world around us shines. Everyday we take for granted the intricacies of the lives of small creatures and this doc is great at building a kind of empathy with the bees as well as wonder.
I watched it on BBC iPlayer but it was originally shown by PBS where it is still available if you’re not in the UK.
