Dave Goulson > Quotes

“This simple fact explains an awful lot about the biology and conservation of bumblebees. They have to eat almost continually to keep warm; a bumblebee with a full stomach is only ever about forty minutes from starvation. If a bumblebee runs out of energy, she cannot fly, and if she cannot fly, she cannot get to flowers to get more food, so she is doomed”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“but then who said journalists need to know anything about their subject before spouting their ill-informed opinions to millions?”
― Dave Goulson, A Buzz in the Meadow: The Natural History of a French Farm

“The key to helping our rarer species to thrive is probably simply to add more flower patches to the landscape, making it a little easier for them to find food and keep their nests well provisioned.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“In flight a bumblebee flaps its wings 200 times per second (which equals 12,000 rpm), roughly equivalent to the speed of a high-revving motorbike engine.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“When will we realise the hypocrisy of our situation? On our own planet we are the bad guys, thoughtlessly annihilating life of all kinds for our convenience. We intuitively grasp that the aliens of the movie 'Independence Day' have no right to take our planet; I wonder what goes through the mind of an orang-utan as it sees its forest home bulldozed to the ground? There should not have to be a 'point of slugs' for us to allow them their existence. Do we not have a moral duty to look after our fellow travellers on planet Eart, beautiful or ugly, providing vital ecosystem services or utterly inconsequential, be they penguins, pandas, or silverfish?”
― Dave Goulson, Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse

“Since the grasses are being parasitised, they grow less, leaving more room for other flowering plants. Pywell demonstrated that sowing rattle seed into an English meadow significantly boosted the diversity of flowers present by suppressing growth of grasses.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“Sadly, one of the few places where bumblebees generally won’t settle is in the bumblebee nest boxes widely sold in garden centres. Whatever”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“The mutualistic relationships between bees, the flowers that they pollinate, and the bacteria that live within the roots of those plants are at the heart of the functioning of a natural, species-rich meadow. The problem is that these relationships can be ruined by application of a sack of fertiliser, which allows the grasses to swamp the legumes and other wild flowers, swiftly resulting in a bright green, flowerless sward, with no legumes, no Rhizombium, and no bees. In the farming world this is known as "improved" grassland. In the 1940's Britain had in the region 15 million acres of flower rich grasslands. It is hard to get precise figures, but about 250,000 acres remain; a staggering loss of over 98 percent. Fertilisers were cheap, and successive governments were keen to persuade farmers to boost productivity, so ecosystems that had taken hundreds of years to develop were subject to swift and wholesale destruction.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“Conservation is not something that should be left to others. It is easy to get depressed and despondent at the impending extinction of the polar bear or the tiger, or at the horrific progress of deforestation in the tropics. Perhaps governments or scientists or organisations such as WWF can do something to help address these situations, but as an individual it is very hard to know where to start – it all seems so remote and dauntingly complex. In contrast, conserving bumblebees is something anyone can do. A single lavender bush on a patio or in a window box will attract and feed bumblebees, even in the heart of a city.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“Ugly or beautiful, it is the little creatures that make the world go round. We should celebrate and appreciated them in all their wonderful diversity.”
― Dave Goulson

“There is a popular misconception that native flowers are 'weeds', but of course a weed is just a plant growing where the gardener doesn't want it to be.”
― Dave Goulson, The Garden Jungle: or Gardening to Save the Planet

“We are committing ecocide on a biblical scale. I am in no way religious, but if you are, consider this; do you really think God created wonderful diversity and gave us dominion over it so we could exterminate it? Do you really think He or She is pleased with what we have done?”
― Dave Goulson, Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse

“much of the peat sold in garden centres is now imported from other countries, notably from Ireland, Estonia, Latvia and Finland. Estonia is a wild and unspoiled country where bears and wolves still roam, and it is sad to reflect that great chunks of it are now being dug up so that we can grow begonias.”
― Dave Goulson, The Garden Jungle

“In general, old-fashioned cottage garden perennials are the ones to go for, particularly garden herbs – lupins, hollyhocks, scabious, lavender, chives, sage, thyme and rosemary and so on. Most are easy to grow and low maintenance, so they are well suited to busy modern lifestyles – gardening for wildlife is easy.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“You might think this messy shambles couldn't possibly make any significant contribution to feeding the world, but you would be wrong. Allotments can be surprisingly productive. In fact studies by the Royal Horticultural Society and Which? magazine, which accord with historical records of food production during the world wars, suggest that a competent allotment holder or gardener can get yields between thirty-one and forty tonnes per hectare. To put this into context, a farmer gets about three and a half tonnes of oilseed rape or eight tonnes of wheat per year from every hectare of land, and will apply about twenty different pesticides plus fertilizers to achieve this. Thus an allotment holder or gardener can grow between four and eleven times the weight of produce that one might get from an intensively farmed arable field...Bear in mind also that only one-third of the UK wheat crop is good enough for human consumption, the remainder going for livestock feed. In contrast, 100 per cent of the allotment food is available for humans to eat.”
― Dave Goulson, The Garden Jungle: or Gardening to Save the Planet

“In high summer males can be very common. They sit around on flowers drinking nectar. They prefer flowers with big sturdy heads such as thistles and natweeds and gangs of males can often be seen clustered together, reminiscent of a group of men propping up the bar in a pub.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees by Dave Goulson (28-Apr-2015) Paperback

“James caught and measured the size of hundreds of wild, foraging buff-tails in and around Southampton, and found that the average size and tongue length varied greatly depending on which flower he caught them on.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“It is quite likely that you have never heard of water bears, also known as moss piglets or, more properly, as tardigrades. These tiny, eight-legged creatures, which rarely exceed one millimetre in length, are amongst the hardiest animals on Earth. They can survive a decade without water, being cooled to -273°C, heated to 150°C, crushed at 6,000 atmospheres pressure or exposed to 1,000 times more radiation than would kill a human. I have absolutely no idea why scientists have taken it upon themselves to try so hard to kill these innocuous little creatures.”
― Dave Goulson, A Buzz in the Meadow: The Natural History of a French Farm

“Wie durft te beweren hoe het land eruit hoort te zien?”
― Dave Goulson

“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”
― Dave Goulson, A Buzz in the Meadow: The Natural History of a French Farm

“Tal vez si aprendemos a salvar a una abeja hoy, podamos salvar el mundo mañana.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“This is not just about bumblebees, but about creating a future environment for our children to enjoy, where there are still flowers, bees, butterflies and birds, and healthy crops to eat.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“Universitair docent is een behoorlijk raar beroep. Om te beginnen staat college geven laag op het lijstje van kwaliteiten waar sollicitatiecommissies van universiteiten naar op zoek zijn. Het belangrijkste criterium is de staat van dienst op onderzoeksgebied die de kandidaat met zich meebrengt. Dat verklaart waarom het sommige docenten ontbreekt aan zelfs de meest basale communicatieve vaardigheden of aan wat voor sociale vaardigheden ook.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“Apenas empezamos a vislumbrar la complejidad de las interacciones entre los seres vivos del planeta, mientras que, en general, seguimos despilfarrando recursos que son irreemplazables, despreciando las cosas que nos permiten seguir vivos y hacen que la vida merezca la pena.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“It is the threat of extinction of large mammals such as tigers or rhinoceros that tends to capture the public’s attention, but arguably it is the loss of the smaller creatures that should give us most concern. Insects are responsible for delivering numerous ‘ecosystem services’ such as pollination and decomposition, and there is no doubt that little life on earth (including ourselves) could survive without them.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“This worked pretty well; the nests in gardens tended to grow much more quickly and become heavier than those on farms, presumably because they have more flowers.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“Take time to smell the roses and eventually you’ll inhale a bee. Anon.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“In 1987 De Jonghe founded the company Biobest, which remains today one of the largest commercial producers of bumblebees. In 1988 they produced enough bumblebees to pollinate just forty hectares of tomatoes. By the following year they were exporting to Holland, France and the UK. Others wanted in on the action; the Dutch company Koppert Biological Systems began rearing bumblebees in 1988, followed by Bunting Brinkman Bees, also Dutch, in 1989.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“a bumblebee with a full stomach is only ever about forty minutes from starvation.”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees

“Many bees evolved longer and longer tongues to make it easier for them to reach nectar hidden within flowers; some now have tongues longer than their bodies.fn1”
― Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees