Down with the bilberry bees

After the most rainless spring that I can recall, the vegetation on the moor tops is frazzled to an August tinder. The full sweep of folded slopes look grey rather than the usual heathery brown, and even the deepest gullies are dry bottomed and crunchy underfoot. Yet the strong north-easterlies have kept the entire season freeze-dried, and there are almost no swallows through the blue overhead, while the pipits, parachuting down in song display, whose notes are flat at best of times, were picked to desultory shreds by the currents of cold air.

It was so dry that I could at least lie among the bilberry bushes to escape the wind and there, in a condition of enforced sloth, I chanced upon a search method for the creature I’d come to see.

On earlier visits I’d had tantalising bumblebee sightings in the middle distance over the moors, their course wandering and wind-blown, tormenting my eye with a zigzag line. While orange-bodied and deeply unfamiliar they were unmistakably bees, but they seemed to vanish completely like a lizard’s tail whipping down a hole.

Down here, however, under the bilberry canopy, I gradually began to hear bees all around, trundling amid the vegetation. With patience, and by parting the foliage like some giant in a forest, I found them crawling from one bilberry flower to another, tapping each pink bell for nectar, then barrelling through to the next.

They were mountain bumblebees, Bombus monticola, patchily distributed and declining, and usually found above 1,000m –and arguably the most beautiful of their British family. Their shoulders are dandelion yellow, but much of the abdomen is a soft-apricot plush.

They look like animate furry fruit bonbons. The queens hatch late and their preferred food is bilberry (another name is “bilberry bumblebee”) and heather, but here I could appreciate another of their adaptations to such a wind-battered environment. They weren’t so much bumbling through the air like most of this insect group, but scrambling amid a moss-softened understorey and, thus, keeping to a microclimate far warmer than the one just a few inches above.

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