21st May
The latest batch of a bee once extinct in the UK has been released in Dungeness.
A new group of short-haired bumblebees, comprising 46 queens, was brought to the RSPB reserve there on Monday.
Earlier this month, a team of scientists and volunteers travelled to Sweden to collect queens and brought them back to Royal Holloway University of London to be screened for disease.
The RSPB says that a warm spring and a bumper crop of the bee’s preferred early foraging plant, white dead nettles, meant the team were able to collect all the queens in just two and a half days.
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