Saving Bumblebees

Sustainability Science Centre is proud to present a sustainability lecture on 25 April 2018, with Dave Goulson, Professor at the University of Sussex.

Bumblebees are amongst the most important of wild pollinators; many wildflowers would not set seed without them, and they are the main pollinators of crops such as tomatoes, blueberries and raspberries. Concerningly, many bumblebees are in decline, with many regional extinctions and the first global extinction recently occurring in USA. Dave Goulson will discuss the drivers of these declines, including the impacts of pesticides. He will highlight the many things we can all do to halt and reverse them to ensure a future for these endearing and vitally important insects. Perhaps, if we save a bee today, we can save the world tomorrow.

Dave Goulson received his bachelor’s degree in biology from Oxford University, followed by a doctorate on butterfly ecology at Oxford Brookes University. Subsequently, he lectured in biology for 11 years at the University of Southampton, and it was here that he began to study bumblebees in earnest. He subsequently moved to Stirling University in 2006, and then to Sussex in 2013. He has published more than 270 scientific articles on the ecology and conservation of bumblebees and other insects. He is the author of Bumblebees; Their Behaviour, Ecology and Conservation, published in 2010 by Oxford University Press, and of the Sunday Times bestseller A Sting in the Tale, a popular science book about bumble bees, published in 2013 by Jonathan Cape, and now translated into fourteen languages. This was followed by A Buzz in the Meadow in 2014 and Bee Quest in 2017. Goulson founded the Bumblebee Conservation Trust in 2006, a charity which has grown to 10,000 members. He was the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council’s Social Innovator of the Year in 2010, was given the Zoological Society of London’s Marsh Award for Conservation Biology in 2013, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2013, and given the British Ecological Society Public Engagement Award in 2014.

Carsten Rahbek, Professor in Macroecology , Director of Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate (CMEC) at the University of Copenhagen, will moderate the talk.