Butterflies Aren't Red or Blue
I've just spent a very gentle couple of hours thinning apples in the orchard. It's a huge crop this year, and branches are groaning with the weight of it already. The same with our plums and damsons. The fruit set was really good, I guess down to the warm dry spring, and no late frosts. It wasn't down to the Labour government, odd though I have to say it.
Butterfly Bonanza
There are a lot of butterflies in the garden at the moment. It's a delight; Peacocks, Red Admirals, Tortoiseshells, Meadow Browns, Commas, Gatekeepers, Large Whites, Small Coppers, Woods... It's nice to think we've encouraged them, and I'm sure we have. Our planting and management is super on point. Earlier this summer we had Brimstones for the first time, for example, brought here by all the Buckthorn I've planted.
Simple Explanations
Much more important though has - very evidently - been the weather. People started commenting on social media about the bugs on their windscreens from around early May. A warm dry spring is great for butterflies and a host of other insects, and as the summer has gone on a predictable sequence emerges. Like 1976 we now have gazillions of ladybirds, which have scoffed all the aphids.
I guess the other factor has been a positive base effect. Recent years - particularly last year - have been so bad that 2025 seems doubly fantastic for people up and down the country. The 2024 Butterfly and Bee surveys were the gloomiest I can remember, following a wet cold Spring. This year it has been great to see how resilient nature is, and lovely to see it bounce back. It's just a year though, and not a new trend.
Let's be clear eyed about this. Our efforts to improve things do absolutely help. This has been one of Habitat Aid's key messages over the years. But we need to see them in context, and - well - as usual, it's complicated.If only it was all as simple as plant Buckthorn see Brimstone.
Fake News
Social media is of course fantastic at reducing issues like this to incredibly simplistic and usually downright wrong interpretation. My feeds have also featured people trying to politicise what's been going on. Pretty typical too.
The argument seems to be that it's not a coincidence that this fab butterfly summer follows the (Labour) government finally ending the last permitted agricultural use of Cruiser SB, a neonicotinoid based product, for treating potato peach aphid on sugar beet. So we can thank Labour for rescuing our butterfly populations from oblivion. And of course you can see the consequences of the Tories' failure to ban it when you go to Europe. Last summer we went on a driving holiday to France and I couldn't believe the number of insects on the windscreen. Etc. etc..
Neonicotinoids Again
I have talked about and actively lobbied against the use of neonicotinoids for many years. I found a blog from 2011 about them. The EU banned them in 2018, and not before time. They are STILL used here in flea treatments, which is having consequences in the broader environment. I'm beginning to suspect this application will prove to be much more damaging than Cruiser SB.
Neonics are doubtlessly very bad news and have had serious impacts. To connect banning their use this spring with national butterfly numbers is nuts, though. Their recent agricultural use has not been widespread across the UK. We don't have sugar beet within a hundred miles of here; there are apparently four processing factories in the UK, in East Anglia and the East Midlands, which is where it's grown. There's no-one growing beet in the London suburbs or the Highlands.
There's also the timing issue, in any case. You wouldn't expect any impact from stopping using them this Spring; it's too early. Anyway, it's going to take a while for any affected local ecosystems to recover.
No Agendas Please
So we get this kind of post:
"So many butterflies. And all because Labour finally stopped granting temporary 'emergency use' of neonicotinoids, which the tories had granted, every year, since we left the EU."
This is a) flat wrong but also b) let's not try to politicise this kind of issue. It's really unhelpful. Let's stick with the science. People need to understand the complexity and difficulty of what we're faced with. And it's nothing to do with Party politics.
