Everyone across the UK is being urged not to kill flies, wasps or bees that come into your house this summer.
It’s become a regular occurrence every year. The sun comes out, you throw open your windows and doors and before too long, all sorts of winged insects fill up your house, with flies buzzing around your head and bashing into the glass in futile attempts to get back outside. But this summer you’ll probably see fewer flies and wasps than ever before coming into your house or flitting round your garden (even if it doesn’t feel like that this week).
And that’s why people are being urged not to kill them, even if they are annoying you and flying around your face.
It’s because the UK’s insect population has collapsed by 60 percent in the past 20 years, according to studies. Some figures now put the mass die-off at more like 80 percent.
Conservation charities Buglife and the Kent Wildlife Trust asked members of the public to count the number of insects which splatted against their vehicle number plates, reports The Natural History Museum, and compared it to a similar study from 2004. They found that counts were down the most in England, where 65 percent fewer insects were recorded.
This is bad news because if insect populations die off, the entire food chain could fall apart and create food shortages.
Paul Hadaway, the director of conservation at Kent Wildlife Trust, said: “The results from the Bugs Matter study should shock and concern us all. We are seeing declines in insects, which reflect the enormous threats and loss of wildlife more broadly across the country.
“These declines are happening at an alarming rate and without concerted action to address them, we face a stark future. Insects and pollinators are fundamental to the health of our environment and rural economies.
“We need action for all our wildlife now by creating more and bigger areas of habitats, providing corridors through the landscape for wildlife, and allowing nature space to recover.”
People online have in the past shared their techniques for killing flying bugs at home including traps, electric rackets and sticky fly paper, or sicking their cats on them.
But in the face of such startling figures, the best advice is to shoo flies and wasps back outside rather than kill them.
Joshua Tennenbaum, operations director for Arizona Pest Control, says flies and crane flies especially should be left well alone.
He said: “They don’t bite. They don’t have the right mouth parts for that. They eat dead and decaying matter,” Tennenbaum explained.
“They’re actually pretty vital to the ecosystem and the way the nature decomposes.”
According to Smithsonian magazine, flies play an increasingly important roll in the food chain and pollination.
It reports: Flies generally get a bad rap. People associate them with dirt, disease and death. “No one except entomologists really likes flies,” says entomoligist Jonathan Finch. “Yet there’s good reason why we should cherish, encourage, even nurture them: Our future food supply could depend on it. The past few years have seen growing recognition that flies make up a large proportion of wild pollinators.”
The Natural History Museum goes on to paint a grim picture of how badly our world will be affected if we carry on seeing insect numbers dropping: “The decline in insects affects all the major groups. In the next few decades, as many as 40 percent of the world’s species could become extinct, including bees, ants and butterflies.
“These insects represent some of the most significant pollinators of plants. While plants are pollinated in many different ways, insect-pollinated crop plants such as apples, pears, cucumbers, watermelons and almonds, will become significantly less productive without pollinators and could fail altogether.
“The impact of insect loss goes far beyond our food supplies, however, as animals such as birds which depend on them for food will also be hit.”
Rather than killing bugs, you could set up an insect house, and stick to real grass rather than plastic grass. Other tips include mowing the lawn less regularly, like in No Mow May, as longer grass provides a home for more insects, and creating log piles for beetles to chow down on.