Hoping to create a buzz about the bees

Another Life: There were days this spring when the polytunnel became a fiery furnace, pitching me out to dry off in a chill breeze from the sea - and others, all gloom, when I worried that, even under plastic, the young pepper and tomato plants would curl up and die.

Through it all, the early bumblebee queens kept buzzing, fresh out from hibernation in the hedgebanks, and they are there in the tunnel now that I need them, nuzzling at the flowers on the early broad beans.

The bumblebee's vital role in pollination of wildflowers and crops has made decline among its species one of the more worrying of our many ecological casualty lists. Even in Ireland, where far less pesticide sprays are used than most European countries, loss of habitat has taken its toll, and the current avalanche of building and roadmaking is eating further into the remaining wild corners .

We have 13 kinds of "true" bumblebees (those with annual colonies of workers and with Bombus in their name) and another six "cuckoo" species which expect their larvae to be fed in someone else's nest. More than half of all these species are in decline, as are a great many - perhaps 45 per cent - of our 81 species of "solitary" bee. Overall, a dozen Irish bee species are endangered and a further 30 are at risk.

Typical of those in crucial danger is the great yellow bumblebee, Bombus distinguendus. Once widespread, if never abundant, across the island, and all round Dublin city, it has now been forced to the far west of Ireland, to the last intact flower-rich sand dunes and stretches of machair grassland. With fewer than 20 populations, it has been driven almost to extinction.

Even once-common bumblebees have been vanishing from farmland with flowerless fields mown for silage. The big Bombus lapidarius, once very obvious with its black body and red tail, was completely missing in a two-year survey by Veronica Santorum of the University of Limerick. This was part of the Ag-Biota project, funded by the Environment Protection Agency, to explore the impact of various farming methods on the Republic's fauna and flora.

The major work on our bumblebees, however, is a whole-island research project, "The Conservation of Irish Bees", funded by the Higher Education Authority under its North-South Programme of Collaborative Research. It involves Dr Úna Fitzpatrick and Dr Mark Brown in the School of Natural Sciences at Trinity College, Dublin (TCD), and Dr Rob Paxton and PhD student Tomás Murray in the school of biological sciences at Queen's University, Belfast (QUB).

They have set up a database of the island's bees, enriched by more than 3,500 of their own records since 2004 (among them, five species new to Ireland, all solitary bees). Their surveys showed the habitats most at risk: sand dunes, dry and flower-rich calcareous grassland and - of course - the last scattering of hay meadows. Fragmentation of habitat is a big part of the problem, since bumblebees need a network of populations to keep up the gene flow of their species. Conservation has to look at whole landscapes with this in mind.

Unsurprisingly, the UK is far ahead of Ireland in having biodiversity action plans for its threatened bumblebees - the Republic has none so far: the only insect we protect is the marsh fritillary butterfly. Northern Ireland published a management plan in March to protect its share of Colletes floralis, a little mining bee that burrows into sand dunes such as those at Magilligan. Ireland is, as it happens, the last Atlantic stronghold of the species in Europe.

The whole-island database of records, still far from complete, has been a model of co-operation between university and non-university scientists. Dr Úna Fitzpatrick will expand on its potential today at a scientific gathering in Wexford. It is a conference of key figures associated with the National Biological Records Centre, the sorely needed conservation and educational resource about to begin work at the Waterford Institute of Technology. Among her team's efforts to "create a buzz about bees" will be a colourful pamphlet. And from July, websites set up by TCD and QUB will show what species to look for in particular habitats in particular months.

The Wexford meeting, already briefed on information systems abroad, will hear from other Irish scientists with recording schemes for birds, cetaceans, seaweeds, plants and dragonflies. There will also be critical discussion of the five-year work programme for the centre, drawn up by a scientific management group chaired by Dr Liam Downey. Somewhat controversially, the work will be outsourced through a major service contract, to be awarded in July. But, done well, it could confirm the need for the centre as a permanent and prestigious arm of Irish biological science.