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Dropping like flies…
• I AM afraid there is nothing surprising about the rapid decline of bees (Our bees are dropping like flies; but why? November 6).
In my 70 years, the entire insect population of Britain has almost been wiped out.
As a child, my memories are of the hum of flies trying to eat my food, of maggots in old meat, of buzzing bluebottles, sticky fly-papers, fear of centipedes and earwigs under flower pots, hundreds of woodlice under bits of old wood, ladybirds flying away home, dreaded daddy long legs, moths battering against oil lamps, and the annual invasion of flying ants.
No boy in the UCS Natural History Society, with self-respect, did not have drawers full of beautiful butterflies, varieties of bright green beetles, and every type of bee stuck down on card and cork with pins and neatly labelled.
Then, when we first lived in Hampstead, there were beautiful privet hawk moth caterpillars in hedges, and the garden was strewn with spiders’ webs in the morning.
Wasps upset jam teas.
Then in the 1980s garden sheds were not complete without a shelf full of every type of poison. Now these packets and sprays are getting old since they are not used any more. All the insects have packed up and gone.
Our ignorant leaders, being largely town-based lawyers, not scientists, have turned their attention to the human species, and are using depleted uranium in the killing fields of Kosovo, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia and Afghanistan. Soon we will be declining like the bees. It has a half-life of 4.6 billion years and is now blowing all over the place.
Nicholas Wood
MA RIBA FRGS |
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