Famous Quotes & Sayings

Dave Goulson Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 21 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Dave Goulson.

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Famous Quotes By Dave Goulson

Dave Goulson Quotes 775741

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

Dave Goulson Quotes 946875

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

Dave Goulson Quotes 552578

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

Dave Goulson Quotes 440917

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

Dave Goulson Quotes 2218653

The music of the busy bee Is drowsy, and it comforts me; But, ah! 'tis quite another thing, When that same bee concludes to sting! Andrew Downing (nineteenth-century American horticulturalist) — Dave Goulson

Dave Goulson Quotes 2139864

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

Dave Goulson Quotes 392858

But on the other hand, there is no doubt that honeybees are a non-native species. It also seems to me common sense that flowers can produce only so much nectar, and that there can therefore be only so many bees in a particular habitat. Something has to give, and that thing is likely to be the local flower-visiting insects. — Dave Goulson

Dave Goulson Quotes 2053605

Smuts are parasitic fungi that are often spread by pollinators and so, in the case of campions, pollinators pose the double threat of both laying eggs that will hatch into voracious larvae and giving the flower a nasty dose of the clap. — Dave Goulson

Dave Goulson Quotes 1256011

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

Dave Goulson Quotes 2140223

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

Dave Goulson Quotes 2109049

Take time to smell the roses and eventually you'll inhale a bee. Anon. — Dave Goulson

Dave Goulson Quotes 1981399

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

Dave Goulson Quotes 1752276

a bumblebee with a full stomach is only ever about forty minutes from starvation. — Dave Goulson

Dave Goulson Quotes 1574182

but then who said journalists need to know anything about their subject before spouting their ill-informed opinions to millions? — Dave Goulson

Dave Goulson Quotes 1331403

All of this means that it makes absolute sense for a colony to produce foragers ranging in size, for this allows it to efficiently exploit a broad range of flowers in the surrounding area: small, short-tongued bees for shallow and weak-stemmed flowers, and bigger, longer-tongued bees for the sturdier and deeper flowers. — Dave Goulson

Dave Goulson Quotes 1305778

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

Dave Goulson Quotes 129760

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

Dave Goulson Quotes 1250829

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

Dave Goulson Quotes 647305

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

Dave Goulson Quotes 498640

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

Dave Goulson Quotes 180481

Most of the rare species seemed to be very fond of clover, particularly red clover, and other wild legumes such as tufted vetch and bird's-foot trefoil, probably because these plants provide pollen that is unusually rich in protein. — Dave Goulson