LONDON — They’ve been away, but now they are — hopefully —buzzing back to their rightful place in the bucolic British countryside.
About 50 short-haired bees were released into an English nature reserve Monday, about two decades after they were wiped out from most of rural Britain. Ecologists hope that with the support of farmers who have agreed to grow flowers and plants that help bees flourish, they will zip across the country again.
“Our farmland always used to have wildflower borders. We are just asking farmers to go back to the way things were, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive,” said Nikki Gammans, who is leading the ambitious project.
The population of short-haired bees has declined across most of Europe in the past two decades as their habitat was destroyed. The bees were declared extinct in Britain 12 years ago.
But they survived in Skane, southern Sweden, and three years ago, Natural England, a conservation program that advises the U.K. government, launched a program to bring the bees back into the wild along with the Royal Society for Protection of Birds, Bumblebee Conservation Trust and ecology research group Hymettus.
Britain has 250 species of bees, but numbers are falling fast, as they appear to be worldwide.
