What has Happened to the Bees?

There has been a lot of anxiety about bees lately. Rightly so, because, although they may look small and insignificant, the human race could not get on without them.   

Bees are responsible for pollinating three quarters of the world’s most important crops, and now they are under threat. Back in the 1970s, bee-keepers around the world started to report that honey bees were abandoning their hives en masse, for no apparent reason.

From 2006 this phenomenon, now know as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, started to increase at a truly alarming rate.  North America and the UK have bee especially badly affected. 

What does that mean for us? Don’t be fooled into thinking that the only foodstuff bees provide is honey.  Honey is a wonderful thing, no doubt, but bees provide us with so much more than that. Bees are pollinators, which means they transfer grains of pollen from one flower to another, an essential step in allowing plants to reproduce. About 90% of the world’s wild plants depend on pollinators, and farm crops depend on them too.

With a fast-growing human population world-wide, it is becoming increasingly challenging to find ways to feed everybody.  If the bees were to disappear, things would get even worse; the crops would not be pollinated, and soon there would be no fruit and vegetables. As things stand at the moment, we have no feasible man-made solution to replace or replicate what the pollinating insects do for us. With current technology, it is estimated that it would cost UK farmers alone £1.8 billion a year to pollinate their crop without bees.

 Some Amazing Facts About Bees

• Honey bees must visit some 2 million flowers and travel 55,000 miles to make one pound of honey

• The average honey bee flies between 12 and 15 miles per hour and flaps its wings about 12,000 times per minute

• Bees are sensitive to the Earth's magnetic field and can use it to navigate between nectar sources and the hive
  
  
• Bees communicate with one another using a complex language based on dancing waggling and shaking. Using these movements honey bee scouts can report back to the rest of the hive about the exact location of the best nectar sources, giving directions accurate to within 15 feet

Causes of Colony Collapse Disorder

Theories about the cause of CCD abound, and include parasites, GM crops, insecticides and radiation, but the truth is that nobody truly understands the cause, and until we do, we cannot be sure how to stop it happening. The most likely culprit for the phenomenon is the proliferation of intensive farming methods, especially the use of certain pesticides. According to the Soil Association:-

 There is strong evidence that neonicotinoids – a class of pesticide first used in agriculture in the mid 1990s at exactly the time when mass bee disappearances started occurring – are involved in the deaths. Another major factor is intensive agriculture – monoculture's and the widespread use of pesticide and herbicide contribute to a loss of habitat and food for bees.

Some Practical Things we Can All do to Help the Bees and Combat CCD  

 You don’t have to be a farmer to make a difference: you can use bee-friendly, organic techniques in your own garden.  For example, try and create bio-diversity by planting a wide variety of  flowers, trees and shrubs: the greater the variety the better! Don’t be too tidy: leave wild flowering plants  in place.  Many so-called ‘weeds’, provide an important source of late season winter food for bees. You could even plant a specific garden for bees, including flowers like rosemary, geraniums, lavender, poppies and sunflowers. It goes without saying that the most important thing you can do is to avoid the use of pesticides in your garden.

There is a ray of hope on the horizon. I am a keen plants woman, and spend a lot of time out of doors in my own garden and on my allotment, and although this is not a hard, scientifically demonstrable fact, this summer I have noticed a distinct increase in the local bee population.  Here in the UK we have just experienced a couple of years of warm summers and mild winters. Maybe this is only a local phenomenon, but it is likely that the recent good weather is one factor  that has played its part in helping the bees. The whole truth is likely to prove a whole lot more complicated.  We have been relying on bees, cultivating and studying them for hundreds of years, but there is still a lot for us to learn about CCD and the fascinating life of the hive.