Ana Lopez Moreno | Madrid (EFE).- The Iberian Peninsula “is a privileged place for bees”, and especially for wild bees that “are the largely forgotten ones as they are not honey producers”, despite the fact that they fulfill an “essential” function for the conservation of the environment, says the professor at the University of Salamanca, Félix Torres.
This Hymenoptera taxonomist recalls that “there are some 22,000 species of bees in the world, at least 1,200 of them in Spain” and their size is varied since “the largest measures five centimeters and the smallest barely two millimeters”, so who recommends using a net to observe them and learn to differentiate them since “the butterfly net is not synonymous with killing insects, its use must be demystified.”
Wild bees constitute “85% of the world’s bee species”, they do not live in hives since they are solitary and can hide in cavities to protect themselves from adverse factors such as humidity or parasites or build their nests using their own glandular secretions – such as saliva and wax- or external materials -such as mud-.
A project in Villalar de los Comuneros
The town of Villalar de los Comuneros (Valladolid) is home to a “key” project for the conservation of wild bees through the ecological recovery of the environment, developed by the Group for the Rehabilitation of Native Fauna and its Habitat (GREFA) after the assignment for ten years by the City Council of a plot, old landfill.
This space has become “a milestone for the town” because in it “we are recovering native fruit trees such as acerolas, cermeños, vineyard peach and up to five different varieties of cherry trees,” said Fernando Blanca, GREFA manager at the facility.
Last winter “many different species, including seeds for auxiliary fauna” were sown there, which “may be preventing pests from destroying the crops” and an example of this is that “the peas on this plot have not been lost, unlike other crops in the area affected by the aphid”.
Bees improve and protect the entire ecosystem
Thanks to the multifunctional bands that separate one plantation from another, it has been possible to increase the pollination of the wild bees present, “which improves and protects the entire ecosystem,” Blanca certified.
The Villalar Nature Interpretation Center (Civillalar), also managed by this conservation NGO, includes an innovative initiative for the biological control of the peasant vole, which gradually colonized Castilla y León through irrigated crops and caused especially significant problems in 2007.
“There had never been an alert like this in the Iberian Peninsula”, certified Fernando Garcés, coordinator of this project at GREFA, because in addition to destroying crops “the rodent affects flocks of sheep and can be dangerous to human health by catch tularemia,” a bacterial disease that causes serious infections.
Biological control of the vole plague in Villalar was “pioneering” and is based on increasing the density of natural predators such as foxes, kestrels and owls.
In the case of birds, the NGO has installed nest boxes, “one per hectare”, with an average occupation of 50% although “when there are a lot of vole, the occupation usually exceeds 90%”, says Garcés.
Now, from Civillalar, institutions are being invited to bet on this type of activity, since the use of chemical rodenticides “has been prohibited due to the environmental risks they pose” and for this reason it promotes group visits to explain how to improve the Biological control of both native species and pests using natural methods. EFE
