arisaema seeds

[Véronique Macrelle]

you're lucky if you still have an abundance of insects at home.
Here, it's been a few years since hoverflies, bumblebees and butterflies disappeared from the garden. Even the flies don't seem that numerous any more. It's a bit strange: they came in 2 or 3 waves and then disappeared just as quickly.

In the garden, I'm feeling it more and more when it comes to collecting seeds for swaps and harvesting fruit.
the only blackcurrant bush that produced this year was a plant bought as being self-pollinating.
a Campanula pyramidalis flowered for 2 to 3 months... and yet I wasn't able to collect any seeds!

The weather here in 2024 wasn't too bad, with just one hot spell and rain every 10 days or so: the plants finally enjoyed it, even if some of the trees didn't recover from the previous 2 years of drought.

[Jeffnz]

Are you close to agricultural properties that may be using insecticides that will kill bees and the like?
In some places this has seen bee populations reduced or wiped out completely. Here we have illimitations on a range of insecticides sales to home gardeners, the applied logic being that DIY users are using such products indiscriminately. However commercial agriculture activity is not so heavily censored.

[Véronique Macrelle]

Yes, there are arable fields just behind the garden, on the other side of my hedge.

[Jeffnz]

Neonicotinoids are a group of insecticides used widely on farms and in urban landscapes. They are absorbed by plants and can be present in pollen and nectar, making them toxic to bees.
I recall many years' ago seeing a you tube video of an orcharding area in China where pear flowers were being hand pollinated to achieve fruit set, the cause was intensive long term use of pesticides.
Not sure of your relationship with your farming neighbors but a polite question as to what pesticides they are using may give an explanation of bee decline. Farmers are often sensitive to any questions on their use of chemicals as they are a necessary evil to achieving good crop yields, that latter usually the only focus of the farmers.

[Vinny 123]

Neonic's with a very few exceptions, are banned in the EU and UK and have been for several years. The exceptions have been primarily non-flowering crops, such as sugar beet. With only 4 beet processing factories still operating, beet is a realtively uncommon crop now as it is uneconomic to transport it far to be processed.
That said, recent research suggests that despite neonic's being used in minute amounts and also readily broken down by soil microbes, enough does survive in the soil to be problematic (including uptake by wild plants ("weeds"), which do flower and pose problems for insects).

The big agricultural problem is aphids, not so much in themselves, but as vectors for virus diseases.

What class of compound is the pesticide of choice for field crops now, I don't know, although a browse of a UK/EU agrucultural supplier would answer that.

If weather is poor, insect numbers plummet, or more accurately, never build up.