Honeybee highways

Louise Tickle, writing for The Guardian about habitat corridors writ small:

With more than 90% of the country’s flowering meadows gone because of intensive agriculture, what’s left is just fragments of land offering the occasional oasis of nectar. Getting bees, and the pollen they carry, from one fragment to the next – which may be hundreds of metres away – is a problem. And this is where hedgerows come in.

It’s well known that hedgerows are used as corridors by birds and mammals. What Ollerton, his colleague Dr Duncan McCollin, and their PhD student Louise Cranmer discovered by close observation of their subjects’ flying patterns was that the nearer bees and butterflies got to hedgerows, the straighter they flew alongside them.

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