This blog post comes from Caroline Drummond MBE, LEAF Chief Executive

Insects are estimated to contribute over £400 million per annum to the UK economy and €14.2 billion per annum to the EU economy through pollination alone.  Pollinating insects and agriculture need each other. They pollinate crops and agricultural land, which covers 75% of Britain.  In turn, this land is home to much of our wildlife and insects.  The role of the honey bee in pollination has been widely recognised, however, more recently, attention has turned to wild pollinators, such as bumblebees, solitary bees, hoverflies, and butterflies, and their important role in crop production.  This is particularly the case when it comes to crop production, one study found that bumblebees were twice as abundant as honeybees in UK oilseed rape fields.

This week I caught up with our Conservation Officer for east England, Sam Page. Over the last seven months, Sam Page, has been working with the Environment Agency to look at ways the sea wall flood defences on the Hoo Peninsula in North Kent can be managed more sensitively for bumblebees.  Read on to see what Sam's been up to.

By now, we would normally expect to see many more bumblebee queens on the wing, searching for nests and trying to gather enough food to raise their first few workers for the nest. But in most of the UK, the cold weather this Spring has meant that many queens simply haven’t left hibernation yet - I have only seen two myself this year, and early indications from our BeeWalk survey shows that almost no queens were spotted at all in March.

March marks the start of the new BeeWalk season. BeeWalk is our flagship survey, set up in 2010. It was created by Bumblebee Conservation Trust to monitor populations of bumblebees, because so little data has actually been collected on changes in bumblebee abundance over time. The idea is that volunteers walk a set route, once per month, from March until October. They then count the numbers of individuals of each species that they see on their walk, and report them back to us. Because the same route is taken each time, and is done so every year, we can then compare the results between years to see how the bees are faring. To learn more about Bee Walk scheme and how you can get involved, click here.

'What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet'. When William Shakespeare wrote these immortal words in Romeo and Juliet, he suggested that all roses were the same (in respect of their sweet smell, at least). Indeed, in Shakespeare's day, perhaps most roses were the same, or similar. But he wasn't to know that over 400 years of selection and breeding of roses by horticulturalists would result in a stunning explosion of roses in many colours, shapes and scents. But in the pursuit of beauty, insect visitors of roses have been largely forgotten. Many varieties of rose are now off-limits for bumblebees and other insects, but why?