Honeybees are in serious trouble. Last year nearly a third of the UK's 240,000 honeybee colonies were wiped out, putting at risk the pollination of fruits and vegetables. Early indications of losses this year suggest the bees are faring slightly better, but a survey of beekeepers to be released this month is expected to show that around one in five hives didn't make it through the winter. Beekeepers can usually expect to lose 10% of their hives due to poor weather or disease.
No one is clear what is causing the high mortality. The National Bee Unit, which monitors bee health for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, has blamed too much rain - in the summer of 2007 and spring 2008 - for confining bees to their hives. This meant they were unable to forage and allowed the parasitic varroa mite, which sucks the bees' blood and is becoming resistant to chemical treatments, to spread lethal viruses. But there are other factors. In the countryside bees are getting a less nutritious diet, with acres of oil seed rape providing just one type of pollen for miles, and pesticides have been implicated in honeybee deaths around the world.
Honeybees are worth saving because a third of everything we eat relies on pollination by them. The consequences of losing our apian workers will be dire: food shortages and sky-high prices for many fruits, nuts and vegetables, as well as dairy and meat products, as most livestock is reared on honeybee-pollinated feed. Aside from man's survival, they are crucial for the environment, pollinating the flowers and fruits on which birds and small mammals depend. The abundance of flowering plants in parks and gardens means there has never been a better time for city dwellers to come to the rescue of the honeybee.
SOTT
SIGNS
OF THE
TIMES
OF THE
TIMES
Welcome to Sott.net
The World for People who Think
A group of insect-killing sprays known as neonicotinoids that are widely used in UK farming have now been banned in four other European countries because they are thought to be killing bees, according to the UK Soil Association which has written to the UK Environment Secretary of State, Hilary Benn urging him to immediately ban the sprays in the UK.
Italy has joined Germany, Slovenia and France in banning the sprays with the Italian government issuing an immediate suspension of them after it was accepted they are killing bees, the Soil Association said.
"There is worldwide concern at widespread, unexplained and devastating deaths of honey bees over the last two years," the association said in a press release.
Bee keepers have reported potentially catastrophic loss of bees from their hives ranging anywhere from 30-90 percent. Britain’s beekeepers have reported that close to one in three hives have failed to make it through last winter and spring.
Since their introduction by Bayer CropScience in the USA in 2003, the neonicotinoid sprays have been linked to the devastating loss of millions of honey bees in a number of countries.
Germany banned the pesticides after beekeepers in the Baden-Wurttenberg region reported that two thirds of their bees died in May following the application of clothianidin.
In 1995 bee keepers in North Dakota took Bayer to court when a third of their bees were killed by imacloprid. In France, a third of the honey bee population was killed after widespread use of imidacloprid.
[Link]
[Link]