- English Heritage has launched a three-year project training volunteers to cut meadows in Somerset, England, with traditional scythes instead of mechanical mowers.
- The work protects the shrill carder bumblebee, which now survives in only five areas of the U.K.
- Volunteers are trained by Exmoor National Park Authority, survey wildlife as they work, and are rewarded with bread and cheese.
Volunteers in England are cutting wildflower meadows by hand with scythes, rewarded with bread and cheese, to protect one of Britain’s rarest bumblebees from the blades of modern mowers.
The shrill carder bumblebee, Bombus sylvarum, nests at ground level among long grass, which leaves it badly exposed when a meadow is cut by machine.
“If you take mowers in here, there’s a risk that you can hurt them,” site manager Ed McGregor told BBC Radio Somerset, as reported by Smithsonian Magazine.
Project officer Joseph O’Shea told the Times that electric mowers are “so fast that things can’t get away.” A scythe moves slowly enough for insects to escape ahead of the blade.
So English Heritage has gone back several centuries, with a three-year project in Somerset. Volunteers are being trained by Exmoor National Park Authority and then sent to cut meadows at Muchelney Abbey and other English Heritage sites around Somerset.
The tool has a long pedigree. Scythes became common in Europe around the eighth century, and an experienced reaper could cut two acres of wheat in a day.
As they cut, the volunteers also carry out wildlife surveys, recording bee numbers, flowering plants and how insects move across the meadows, to build up a picture of whether the bees are recovering.
Volunteer coordinator Ginny Slade says the project shows how “traditional skills can still have a role in addressing modern challenges.”
The pay is in kind, and in keeping with the scene: everyone who picks up a scythe is rewarded with bread and cheese.
