I suppose whereas most animals have been humanised through stories and images, that’s been much less the case with invertebrates, other than the obvious examples. They remain alien and other.

Yes; but even when we anthropomorphise bees we do it terribly. There are lots of stories where the main character is a male with a sting for instance. Male bees do not have the anatomical structure for stinging! ‘A Bug’s Life’ should really be a very short movie because ant colonies are very aggressive; they would have quickly dismembered those grasshoppers and fed them to the ant larvae.

Bugs are very, very different to us; which is one of the most interesting things about them. When we think about other vertebrates they have many similar behaviours to us. They have fur or skin, they usually give birth to live young, they have a house of some sort, they have males and females, they are the same sort of critter that we are. And then invertebrates have gone in a completely different way. Their skeleton is on the outside, their blood isn’t in tubes, they breathe through diffusion, they eat things that are completely poisonous to us or in a totally baffling way. They have been on this planet a lot longer than we have, yet we seem to dismiss them somehow. People that annoy you are ‘bugging you’.

Should we be thinking more about the purpose of insects?

There is a bit of a trap when you’re thinking about an ecosystem service perspective and that’s asking yourself ‘what does this do in an environment?’ Does it do something that’s anthropogenically valuable? Does it do something for us? A lot of the charismatic beasties that we like do; pollination is the most obvious example. But pollination isn’t just done by honeybees, by one shape and size of bee. There are many other types of bees with different body, face, and tongue shapes that allow them to interact with different types of plants. And there are also many types of flies that pollinate as well and we’re only at the beginning of finding out how much pollination flies do. There are midges that are extremely important in the pollination of coffee and chocolate crops.

But pollination is clearly not the only thing that insects do. So, for instance, there’s pest control; bugs eat other bugs. We’re only just discovering how much money spiders in crops decimate aphid populations; they are carrying out vast amounts of predation. You can see ecosystems all over the world where a key predator has been removed and the problems it can cause. Then there’s soil nutrient cycling; not just nitrogen and carbon, but all of the chemistry that’s rolling along. Any ecology is heavily reliant on those things at the bottom that are chopping things up, digesting it, pooping it out, turning it into something else; that are rolling it around, moving things up, down, and sideways. The more we learn the more we realise there are so many processes happening on a micro-biological level. There really is so much that we don’t know.

How things rot is vital. Gardeners may think about this, about composting, but for many people the idea of things rotting is something they separate from themselves. Things have to be recycled back into the environment and the more we separate ourselves from natural processes, the more we don’t take into account that we need to do something with them, the more we end up putting everything into a landfill making huge amounts of methane for years on end. It’s a really bad way of getting rid of food waste. Maybe involving fly larvae would be a much better way. Then you start thinking about food chains as well; of how this insect is eaten by this bird. And yet sometimes things don’t have to have a purpose; they have just managed to survive for a very long time and co-exist with us. This gives it an intrinsic value, doesn’t it? For simply being what it is and to exist in its own right. It’s another impossible flicker of life that is here.

There are millions of species of insects. We have 24000 identified species of insects in Britain alone and this doesn’t take into account arachnids, myriapods, crustaceans. On a garden scale a very famous naturalist called Jennifer Owen recorded everything she found in her Leicestershire garden for thirty years and there was over 2200 insects found in that period of time, some of which were new to science. The numbers are mind boggling which is perhaps why engaging with insects can be so daunting. There have been citizen science projects looking at exactly that, including the brilliantly-named 'Splatometer' - literally recording the number of insects that collide with cars.

Here’s a citizen science project using a phone-based splatometer.

What are the biggest threats to insects?

It’s what you would expect: climate change; habitat loss; agricultural intensification; and the arrival of invasive species. Habitat loss is a big one for me; whether that’s entire landscapes or the thinning of hedges. When we talk about ecosystem services we’re really thinking about bringing those things that are a little bit harder to quantify in typical economic terms into the conversation. Ideas of efficiency can end up being focussed on one very specific metric. So, for example a farmer might think that if she gets rid of a hedgerow she could grow more wheat. Yet maybe the hedgerow is a habitat for beetles and birds which decrease the crop pests that are feeding on that wheat. Maybe it will cost more in pesticides to kill the pests than has been made from growing the extra wheat

Can you tell me about the idea behind citizen science, and how people can get involved in this?

The U.K. has a really long history of citizen science, although now we often use the more recent term ‘community science’. We have over sixty years of volunteer bird recording data for instance. A lot of the big UK monitoring schemes for insects, and things that produce national statistics, come from very large long term data recording schemes that are observation based. The more people you can get involved in observing and recording the more data you can collect. This might be simple ad hoc recording projects or stratified projects, those where you take repeated observations from one site over a period of time, that can be anything from days to years. These are really helpful in creating trend data so we can really start to see what direction things might be moving in.

There are organisations that collate this material, such as the Biological Records Centre which has been working closely with the voluntary recording community since the mid-sixties. The Wildlife Trusts collate huge amounts of material from their different citizen science schemes; The UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology have schemes they run and mobile apps that you can download. The Natural History Museum has a really good list of projects where they need volunteer data. Then there are projects like the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme; Big Garden Birdwatch, Beewalk (a bumblebee monitoring scheme), the National Bat Monitoring programme and the UK pollinator monitoring scheme.

The Joint Nature Conservation Committee, who I used to work for, have survey protocols, training resources, and recording tools. (‘In the UK, there are a number of robust national citizen science schemes – many of which contribute to the official UK Biodiversity Indicators – that deploy volunteers across the country to collect data […] Citizen scientists play a pivotal role in biodiversity monitoring, contributing valuable data that spans across geographical boundaries.’) I would absolutely recommend looking at the Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) website. Although the project is over now that was a really good community science project and you can still look at their methodologies and instructions on how to carry out surveys.

(Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) was a UK-wide citizen science initiative founded and led by Imperial College London (2007 - 2019) enabling people to get hands-on with nature while contributing to important scientific research. OPAL was primarily funded by the Big Lottery Fund (BLF): https://www.imperial.ac.uk/opal/about/)

The thing to remember is that there are no Science Police; no-one is going to stop you if you want to carry out your own project rather than contributing to the many schemes that might be running. Like any kind of study the first thing you need is a question and an idea of how you’re going to do it. What do you want to know and what sort of scale are you wanting to work at? Do you want to know how many bugs are here in this patch of land today, or over thirty years? What do you want to sample and what kind of sampling are you willing to do? How destructive do you want to be? Do you want to use pitfall traps where things fall in and die? (Here’s a film from the Natural History Museum that shows you how to make one). If you want to identify species you do often need to kill them so you can look at them under a microscope.

You need to consider how much time you have to do this monitoring. Are there people around who can help you identify things? You need to be prepared to be disappointed. When I do bug hunts with kids the adults think we’ll find all sort of things. I can guarantee we’ll find woodlice, spiders and centipedes; I can’t guarantee we’ll find anything else but I don’t think that’s a problem. If you want to find butterflies it had better be a warm summer’s day with nothing more interesting for butterflies in the neighbouring garden.

You could do a pollinator count to start with; choosing a particular plant that you are going to sit in front of – like a manageably sized rosemary bush – and give yourself fifteen minutes to count and record how many bees and other insects are visiting it. You could take a rough guess of what they are, or take photos of them and identify them afterwards. Maybe there is someone – like myself – who can look at any photos that you have taken. You could do earth worm sampling, perhaps to investigate whether there are different earthworms in an organic area of your garden compared to a less organic area so that you can observe the changes that come from the way you manage your garden. Or a bioblitz, where a group of people go onto a site and identify and record as much as they can. All of these things aren’t just valuable as recording projects but also introduce you to the variety of what is around us.

There’s been a huge increase in projects over the last 20 years that have been facilitated by free phone apps. I have iNaturalist which helps with image identification and also has the idea of crowdsourcing at the heart of it; so there’s aways someone at hand who has information that can be helpful to you. iRecord also has an app, collects more detailed information and is UK focused, with a tighter connection to UK experts, (iNaturalist is global and has a simpler interface, along with the image ID feature). The Merlin Bird ID app, which is run by Cornell University in America, is a brilliant sound-based resource and they have lots of citizen science projects you can get involved in. These really help break down the barriers to participation.

While most types of citizen science projects are observational based there are also those that require people to engage more proactively in carrying out an experiment in their garden; to do some kind of manipulation. I’ve been involved in one recently around the idea of Bee Hotels. I’m looking at the size of the holes in these and what lives in them. Generally, you’re advised that a bee hotel should have 8mm holes, but there are many different sized bees and so I’ve asked people to build them with anything from 6 to 10mm holes and see what has used those over time. I have some community gardens I use but having the ability to get this out across the country is invaluable in terms of the data it generates.

Should we all have a bee hotel in our garden (if we have one)?

Why not? A bee hotel is trying to provide a very specific habitat that you may not otherwise have in your garden. They are for solitary bees or solitary wasps, cavity nesters, things that would live in a tube. They need to have cavities but they need to be the right size. A lot of the commercial ones aren’t deep enough; they need to be at least 10-15cm deep to make sure there is enough space for the cells with the baby bees. They need to be in the right place, high off the ground, in sunlight; they need to be warm and they need other resources around them that the bees want. There’s not been much research into the ongoing impact of putting these up in gardens but bees do tend to use them. I think the benefit of having a project like this may not be about recording the population of the insects themselves but more in the fact that you are looking at them, you are becoming more familiar with them which makes them easier to spot in the future. You’re also no longer just thinking that they’re bees but that they’re your bees. If you don’t want to put up a bee hotel and want to increase the habitat for solitary bees then just leave dead stems and plants that have died in the garden, or put them in a pile somewhere. The bees will find it if it’s there and they can use it.

You can learn how to make a bee hotel on the knowledge bank here!

Then there are bug hotels, which are different. A bug hotel is a selection of nooks and crannies that things will go into. Bee hotels should be off the ground where things can’t get in and eat the bees. A bug hotel should be on the floor somewhere sheltered. A pile of rotted logs partially buried in the ground makes an amazing bug hotel; anything with nooks and crannies and shelter. Dead hedges are brilliant; they’re a dry vertical compost heap with all sorts of places for things to hide.

Here are links for how to make your own bird habitats with dead hedges and log piles.

The thing to remember that if you’ve made something for animals to use, rather than letting the garden provide, that it isn’t something that should be there for ever. We’ve realised that we need to maintain bird boxes, bleach our bird baths, clean the bird feeders. If you’re putting in an artificial habitat you need to do some maintenance on them. I don’t feed birds in my garden because I know I will forget to clean the bird feeders.

Gardens are very interesting in that they’re not a natural ecosystem. Your lawnmower is a sheep; and you are wearing a lot of hats when you’re out there; doing the work of megafauna, of large herbivores, of flocks of birds. And however managed they are they’re also getting hit by everything that’s happening in the wider landscape. You have to change your cropping behaviours on a local level because of the change in the climate; what and where you can grow things.

There is a tradition that we need to keep our gardens extremely tidy, with no weeds or wild things, and with this that any insect is a problem which needs to be eliminated. There is the possibility, at a scale as small as a garden, that you may be able to keep on top of your aphids with your aphid poison; but you’d better like spending five hours of your day spraying aphids, because if you miss one aphid you’re getting more aphids later. You can push back against an ecological system but it’s going to push back harder. I like to approach gardening as strategically doing less.

Weeds are generally pretty good for insects. Anything that’s wild tends to be better because it’s requiring insects to come and pollinate it, whereas many bedding plants have often been selected not to produce seeds, and so often don’t have any pollen or nectar. There has been a recent study of plants that support insects and invertebrates and many of those that do the most work are considered weeds, such as thistles, dandelions and buttercups. Why are they providing so many resources? Because they have to!

Their success is down to the fact that with their high pollen and nectar count they are attractive and providing to so many species. (The 'Agriland' project recently looked at the nectar and pollen resources of wild plants.)

I love petunias but they don’t produce anything. They might support aphids but they don’t have much pollen or nectar; they don’t seed well. But I like them. So, I grow them in pots and also grow ragwort and dandelions as a form of ecological trade-off. And I will leave my lawn a little higher.

I know that insects can be an issue for many gardeners and that pesticides are seductive; but the poison in those will hit non-target organisms too, and may even bioaccumulate. You can always try companion planting; planting different crops and plants together to help improve their health. You can try planting marigolds next to your tomatoes as they repel many tomato pests. The critters that want to bother your tomatoes now have to go through a border of things that they don’t like. It doesn’t mean they won’t do it but you’ve made it more inconvenient for them. It also helps if there’s something else to attract their interest which is where the idea of trap crops comes from, where you grow something that insects like and so they come to that first and hopefully stay there. Nasturtiums are great for insects; every part of the plant is edible for an insect and they can be useful if you’re trying to grow cabbages. And they self-seed. You have to remember that all life is lazy and will do the thing that takes the least effort to get the reward it wants.

Slugs and snails can be harder to discourage, so you can try providing alternatives for them to eat or moving them into the compost bin and hope they like that buffet. Or if you kill them, I do it as fast and non-chemically as possible, even if that's squashing or cutting them in half with scissors! It’s a bit gruesome, but something else will be along to eat the dead snail very soon, and it'll be a safe meal. But also remember that most slugs and snails don't even eat crops; it's only a few species. I try to only go after ones that are actually eating my plants, the others are doing useful snail things elsewhere, and slug pellets don't discriminate. There’s a really good citizen science project about slugs; have a look!

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