Britain’s red-tailed bumblebees may have an unlikely saviour in solar farms

November is when bumblebees disappear for the winter. One of the most common of the UK’s 24 species is the red-tailed bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius). These social insects live in burrows, breed in colonies and forage all summer. At this time of year, the workers and male bumblebees, having mated, die off and next year’s generation of queens burrow into holes in the bottom of hedges and old walls to hibernate until the warmth of spring. While still classed as common, this impressively large black species has been plummeting in numbers over the past 30 years. Intensive farming has partly destroyed its habitat. An unlikely potential saviour of this species, and its bumblebee cousins, is the large number of solar farms planned across the country. Researchers looked at the 1,042 existing solar farms and discovered that at those managed for wildlife, with flower plantings and hedges, the number of bumblebees more than doubled. Solar farms that were simply turfed had little or no beneficial effect. Although the benefit of sensitive planting was confined mostly to the solar farm, if the surrounding farmland was sterile, a network of linked and suitably planted solar farms could make a huge difference to the UK’s future bumblebee population.