The Bee Wall

This is the Alverstone Bee Wall. Made in chalk block, brick and timber, it forms part of Alverstone Mill, a grand old residence not far from Sandown on the East coast of the Isle of Wight. The original water mill dates back to Domesday, but the current fabric of the place is mainly mid-19th century onwards. I make the short journey from home every April on a pilgrimage to see its bustling community of flower bees Anthophora plumipes nesting in a vast network of eroded and excavated burrows. With them are their nest parasites, the black bee Melecta albifrons, along with an ecosystem of other hymenoptera, beetles, spiders and molluscs that share, steal, use and reuse every hole and tunnel throughout the year. At its buzzing peak the wall is an awesome wildlife spectacle, loved by residents and visitors alike, especially as you can get right in there with no fear of attack (these are solitary bees in aggregation, not hive species primed for defence)!

I’ve known the wall for 30 years. I have no doubt it’s been a living thing for 50, probably 100, maybe more. We venerate the grandeur of the century-old beech and hilltop pine, fight for their replacement, their replication and propagation, and quite right too; the bee wall deserves exactly the same; it is every bit as much an icon of ecological meaning.

The bee wall is of course a happy accident and has survived because none of its successive owners has rushed to fill in the gaps, seal the surfaces or poison the inhabitants, they are sensible people who know that the holes are small and superficial and pose no threat to the structural integrity of their estate, they are people who love and take seriously the privilege of stewarding such a landmark safely into the future, connecting built and natural heritage, combining ecological health with cultural wellbeing. The wall is so much a part of Alverstone now, that its bees have, I’m sure, achieved the same prophetic significance as the ravens in the Tower. No more bees, no more Alverstone.

Imagine how easy it should be to fill every city, town and village with bee walls and their kin, to deliberately and with intentional ecological design, create fully optimised built habitats for wildlife of every sort, from subterranean to skyrise, in every street, school hospital, factory, motorway, sea defence, river bridge and hotel. So why don’t we? Why are we content to see the biological productivity of the bee wall and do nothing to replicate, propagate and augment its values, its impact, its message, everywhere?

Because we have allowed a miserable, atrophied, sterilised and intensely bourgeois materiality (often masquerading as aesthetic) to infect everything around us. It poisons public policy, council chambers, civic sensibility and hope for the future every bit as much as the knuckle-dragging environmental ignorance and inexhaustible greed of so much corporate development. When vistas of sprayed and dying urban flora cheer your shrunken heart because ‘I pay my taxes’ then you’ve not only doomed yourself, but everyone in your neighbourhood. Can BNG help? Well maybe, but LinkedIn is already awash with landbankers actively dissuading developers from even attempting onsite urban wildlife work because why would you when you can squeeze in another unit and buy their shiny and distant biodiversity units, separating people even further from the natural world around them? For all its undoubted ingenuity, BNG is an industry-led financing scheme wholly dependent on the endless generosity of the Bank of Nature. The Natural World allows you to deplete its capital and lends you the full amount in human currency that you define. You get the full benefit upfront in planning approval, land value and 30yrs cash. You pay back at 0.3% pa and at the end of 30 yrs can fully liquidate that capital if you wish with the loan written off. Oversight is based on your own reporting. Try getting enforcement on that one promised swift box in a vast ressie hellscape and you'll understand why I have worries. The truly transformative gains for wildlife (and people) through development and construction are actually waiting for us in a new focus on transitional habitats, successions, seral stages and ecotones, a world invisible to the metric. But that's another story.

I used to think that the way to break down these barriers was a patient negotiated settlement for wildlife, but I don’t anymore. Infantilising massive commercial entities by claiming that they are ‘doing their best’ is subsidising them with your time and your mind and is as much a part of the con as the endless awards that exceptionalise what should be simply standard work for wildlife, perpetuating the dominance of the inadequate, trivial nonsense that passes for industry gold standard.

Remember ‘Wildlife Rebellion’? It was the successor to the ‘People’s Walk for Wildlife’ in 2018, the ‘People’s Manifesto for Wildlife’ came out at the same time. It felt like a time of change, a time of hope. Covid stopped the movement in its tracks, as it did so much else, but I still believe in this urgent need for a revolution in the relationship between people, wildlife and place.  It’s much too late for performative greenwash, even if it does drive those ESG billions round the globe. We need real things that really work. We need local solutions scaled by burgeoning replication, not the anaesthetising conceptualisation of great ideas that feeds us tasteless doughnuts and circles the corporate wagons.  We need bee walls.