Bee advocate, wildlife gardener and naturalist Brigit Strawbridge Howard was alarmed the moment she realized she knew more about the French Revolution than the native trees around her. Howard’s realization that she had lost touch with the natural world led her on a journey deep into the fascinating world of honeybees, bumblebees, and the often unsung superpollinator solitary bees, chronicled in her book Dancing with Bees: A Journey Back to Nature. Howard writes, speaks and campaigns to raise awareness of the importance of native wild bees and other pollinating insects. She lives in North Dorset, England, with her husband, Rob, where they love to bee-watch in their backyard garden.

Initially, apocalyptic headlines about bee decline and colony collapse with female worker bees leaving hives and not coming back alarmed me from a human food chain perspective. It happened to be around the time I realized I had completely lost touch with the natural world I so loved as a child. I started looking for bees and became completely immersed in their world; the more I watched them, the more I lost track of time and the more questions I had. I also began to more worry about the bees themselves than about their decline’s effect on us.

Bees go out specifically to collect pollen and nectar to feed their larvae; other insects eat pollen and are important pollinators, but don’t collect it for their young. They also tend to visit the same flower species again and again, which other pollinators don’t always do.

I dropped out of school as a teenager. Bees are the only thing I’ve truly ever studied; I am self-taught in insect biology and ecology. I have read scientific papers that I would have never thought were for the likes of me in my quest to understand more about bees.

What is one of the most interesting aspects of bee behavior?

Some years ago, I remember vividly a day on my patio listening to bees with my eyes closed and seeing if I could recognize them by their buzzes. Bumblebees have a deep booming buzz, for example, and I recognized this, but suddenly it changed to a high-pitched sound like a dental drill. I opened my eyes, and it was a bumblebee going round and round the sides of a Welsh poppy, sounding really frantic and having a pollen bath. As it turns out, she was sonicating, otherwise known as buzz foraging. This is how bees pollinate tomatoes. A lot of flowers don’t give up pollen easily, but the bumblebee knows exactly what to do. It grasps the flower and continues to vibrate without moving its wings. This produces high-frequency vibrations that trigger the tomato flower to open and explodes pollen out onto the bee.

What are a few ways that we can help support bee populations?