Weird Weather Killing Off Honey Bees

Hundreds of beekeepers marched on the British Parliament this week calling for government action to halt the alarming crash in honeybee numbers - blamed in part on weird weather.

In just 12 months one in three honeybee colonies in Britain have been lost and it is feared that there is nothing that can be done to prevent a repeated loss of two billion bees this winter.

“The number of losses that have been seen in this country are frightening,” says Cliff Poulton of the New Forest Beekeepers’ Association.

“This winter I know I’m going to have problems with my bees because I didn’t get my queens mated.

“I’m going to have to really mollycoddle them to get them through.”

Such is the extent of the problem, Rowse Honey, the UK’s leading honey company, has warned that English honey will run out in the supermarkets by Christmas.

So why are bee numbers and the honey they produce in such decline?

Well there is no question that two poor summers have had an effect.

“I have had no honey available for harvesting this year or last year,” explains Terry Payne, a beekeeper in Iwerne Minster and secretary of Blandford and Sturminster Beekeepers’ Association.

“My problems stem from the very poor weather we have had over the last couple of summers.

“Bees collect nectar from plants to make honey and plants produce nectar when the weather is right – when it’s warm rather than cold, and damp rather than wet.

“The summer that we have had this year and last year was so poor that there wasn’t much nectar around and the bees couldn’t forage properly and they couldn’t make enough honey to see them through the winter, which is what beekeepers rely on.”

Naturally the weather is not something that the government can control, although the British Beekeepers’ Association (BBKA) claims that they could be investing more money into research towards finding preventatives and cures for diseases, which are also responsible for the decline in honeybee numbers.

Currently the government puts forward a paltry £200,000 a year towards bee health research, something that the BBKA want to be raised to £1.6m – which was outlined in the petition delivered, by hundreds of BBKA members, to No 10 yesterday.

“The increased funding we are asking for is a drop in the ocean compared to the billions of pounds the government has found for bank bailouts,” says Tim Lovett, president of the BBKA.

“Bees are probably one of the most economically useful creatures on earth, pollinating a third of all we eat.

“They provide more than 50 per cent of pollination of wild plants on which birds and mammals depend.

“We must identify what is killing them, and that means research.”

The association estimates that five years of pollination by bees would be worth £825m to the agricultural economy and that they are asking for less than one per cent of that.

However, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs says that it cannot afford the sum.

“To solve these problems we need comprehensive and co-ordinated research to be undertaken urgently,” says Mr Lovett.

“One thing is clear – current levels of government funding are nowhere near enough to support such research.”