Sniffer dog Toby takes lead role in bumblebee conservation

Kirsty Scott, The Guardian 30 Aug 08;

In the long grass near the edge of a small loch, Toby the springer spaniel is hard at work. Harness on, head down, he zigzags through the undergrowth until something stops him in his tracks. He puts his nose to the ground, tail flicking frantically. Before him, hidden in the vegetation, is a remnant of a bumblebees' nest.

Toby is the latest weapon in an effort to try to understand what is happening to Britain's bumblebees. He is the world's first bee-sniffing dog, trained by the army, and based at Stirling University, where researchers have a £112,000 grant to study the bees' decline.

Like honeybees, the British bumblebee is under threat. There used to be 25 different species of bumblebee in the UK. Three are extinct and up to seven more are close to extinction. Habitat loss is the biggest threat. Intensive farming means fewer areas where the bees can flourish, such as hay meadows and clover leys.

"If we are going to conserve them, we need to know more about them, where they live, what causes the nests to die," says Professor Dave Goulson of the university's school of biological and environmental sciences. "The last few years have been really bad for bumblebees. We think it's probably the weather, but we don't know. We need to know how many nests there are. We need to find the nests to know how long they live and what destroys them."

The trouble with bumblebees is that their nests are smaller than a honeybee hive and are often hidden underground. As few as 50 bees can live in one nest. One of the bees' main predators is the badger, and it occurred to the Stirling team that if badgers could sniff out bee nests, then so could a dog. They approached the army and provided the funds to train Toby, who had been rescued from an animal pound in the Midlands and now lives on a farm with his handler, PhD student Steph O' Connor.

It is absolutely crucial work, says Goulson. "Bumblebees are very important to the environment as pollinators of crops and flowers, but sadly they are struggling to survive in the modern world of habitat loss, pesticides and intensive agriculture," he said. "Further decline in bumblebees could result in a downward cycle of poorer harvests and sweeping changes to the countryside, as wild flowers set less seed and disappear, which, in turn, could have catastrophic effects for other wildlife."

The university team works alongside the Stirling-based Bumblebee Conservation Trust, which, with the help of the RSPB, recently set up the world's first bumblebee sanctuary in Fife, a large wildflower meadow, which is attracting a wide variety of bees.