Bee Population

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

My Lords, I add my thanks and congratulations to my noble friend on having given us the chance to debate this important topic this afternoon. I am the eighth speaker on what is a fairly narrow subject, so I will endeavour not to re-plough the ground that has already extensively been discussed.

I grew up in a bee-focused household. After the war, my mother began to raise and look after a few bees. We reached a peak of about 60 or 70 hives, which represents a tonne of honey. In my teenage years my pocket money was supplemented by having to look after these beastly things. I had to carry the heavy supers out of the fields back to decap them, extract them, strain them clean, bottle them and label them, and to do so in the height of summer in a room that was completely sealed and therefore roasting hot, because if it was not sealed you had some angry bees joining you very quickly indeed.

In addition, the local authority pest control department quickly gets to know that you are the source of bee collection, so when there is a problem with a swarm and a householder rings up you are sent to pick up the swarm. My noble friend Lord Patten talked about the dangers of being under the tree with inebriated bumblebees. Up the tree, on a ladder, trying to scoop a swarm into a box is a challenge of a different kind.

More seriously and most importantly, we used to get calls from local farmers asking us to move our hives to the edge of their fields to improve pollination. My noble friend Lord Patten referred to apples. The area I am talking about, south Shropshire and north Worcestershire, is a big cider apple-growing area and bees are the major pollinators of these fruits. Moving hives is also a challenge because it has to be done at night: you seal up the hives, strap them together, put them into the back of your pick-up truck and drive them to the edge of the field. Invariably, from time to time one of the straps comes loose, the hive breaks open and the result is not attractive for the driver.

Despite all this, I admired the determination and single-mindedness of bees. When I was about 18, I was told by a doyen of the British Beekeepers Association that to make a pound of honey the bees would fly 24,000 miles around the world and would visit, depending on the size of the flower, between 3 million and 9 million flowers. I thought that was a pretty impressive achievement. Clearly, bees also did an enormous amount in improving crop yields and increasing biodiversity.

As for my personal experience of bees, I liked bees but they did not like me. I was stung so many times during those years that I now have an extreme allergic reaction to bees and therefore have to carry an Epipen antihistamine injector with me as my reward for having stolen all that honey.

My family’s bee colonies have experienced the familiar story that has been described earlier in this debate; that is, weakening and dying colonies. A lot of focus has been put on varroa and similar diseases that kill outright. Like my noble friend Lord Moynihan, I wonder if that is not too simplistic an approach. Yes, we have seen hives dwindle and die and sometimes it has been because of varroa, but more often there appears to be a gradual diminution of the health of the hive, which precedes complete collapse. The diseases that weaken hives include the chalkbrood fungus, which kills the larvae, and nosema apis, which causes dysentery in the hive. These and similar diseases cause enormous stress.

Stress and bees may seem an unusual combination but when you move hives, even if you take them to the edge of a field where the pollen collection opportunities are very great, it is two or three days before the bees settle down and start to fly normally. It would be very helpful if the Minister could spend a minute or two explaining to my noble friend and me what is the wider view of colony susceptibility. We could usefully spend some time trying to pick apart the different strands of that problem.

As my noble friend also said in his excellent introduction, there have been attempts to increase the number of hygienic honey bees. He gave the figure of 10%; I am told that it is about 15%. Nevertheless, as he pointed out, it is important to see whether we can increase those strains to tackle those diseases in a different way.

As an alternative approach to improving the health of a hive, there is the facilitation of food collection. Research has shown that, in spring and early summer, bees, on average, fly only about 700 metres to find food. By March, that figure has risen to nearly 4,000 metres. That is another type of stress for a hive and, as many noble Lords have said, is a direct result of the intensification of our agriculture. We need to find ways to increase pollinated habitats. Perhaps the Minister could update the House on developments in that area through the environmental stewardship schemes or similar policies. We need not just to increase the pollinated habitats, because, as the noble Lord, Lord Jones of Cheltenham, said, certain plants in the pollinated habitats can be particularly effective and helpful to bees, and we need to focus on them.

That takes me to the important point: who is in charge of all this? My research, via my mother, found a range of bodies involved. Of course, there is Defra. There is the 10-year healthy bee strategy referred to by my noble friend Lady Byford. That covers England and Wales, but not Scotland. There is a five-year insect pollination initiative, which is led by the research councils, also includes Defra, and covers Scotland. There is the Natural England environmental stewardship scheme and the Veterinary Medicines Directorate, covering the licensing of honey bee medicines. Are those bodies, plans and programmes properly co-ordinated to best effect, and, if so, by whom?

The debate has, understandably, focused on honey bees, but I add my support to those noble Lords who have talked about the importance of alternative pollinators: bumblebees, moths, which have not been mentioned in the debate so far today—67% of common species have declined in the past 40 years—and butterflies, which are making a comeback in ordinary species, but specialist species appear to remain in decline. There is work to be done. Research and assistance is needed if we are to reverse those trends, which broadly follow the decline of the honey bee.

To conclude, it is easy to see this issue as one of the availability of honey—the Rupert Brooke romantic vision, “Is there honey still for tea?”—but it has a much wider dimension. A 2009 study by Reading University suggested that a total loss of pollinators would drastically cut the yields of oilseed rape, orchard fruit, soft fruit and beans. The Reading estimate of the cost was £400 million, or 13% of UK farming income. That, in a nutshell, is why my noble friend Lord Moynihan has performed such a valuable task by introducing the debate today.