Bee Population

Lord Moynihan Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2013 Lords Chamber

Moved By

[Lord Moynihan]

That this House takes note of the decline in honey bees in 2012 and of measures to combat the prevalence of disease in bee colonies.

[Lord Moynihan]

My Lords, in preparing for this debate, I would like to place on record my thanks to Phil McAnespie, president of the Scottish Beekeepers Association; Dr Stephen Palmer, a master beekeeper with over 30 years’ experience; Professor Ratnieks from the University of Sussex; Professor Poppy and Dr Newman from the University of Southampton; the British Beekeepers Association; Dr Peter Neumann from the Swiss Bee Research Centre; David Wootton, whose Bee Keeping: A Novices Guide is invaluable to the beginner and expert alike; and Richard Carlile, Bob Bridle and Robert Stovell, who assist me with the hives we manage for the love of beekeeping and no commercial gain at our home in East Sussex.

First, I have some positive news. Since I had the good fortune of securing a debate on this subject in 2009, in which my noble friend Lord Patten made a memorable and impressive speech, beekeeping has undergone a dramatic increase in popularity. The number of beekeepers has doubled in the past 10 years, with impressive developments in urban areas. There has been a corresponding growth in awareness and public concern regarding honey bees. However, I have tabled this Motion for debate because there is real and serious cause for concern about the plight of bees in recent years, as well as wider concerns about pollinators and pollution.

Before focusing on the situation in the United Kingdom, it is timely to remind ourselves of what is happening elsewhere in the world, summarised best in the findings of the United Nations Environment Programme Report, published as we headed into 2012, and well covered by Michael McCarthy, the environment editor of the Independent. That report demonstrated the decline in managed bee colonies, seen increasingly in Europe and the US in the past decade and now also being observed in China and Japan, with the first signs of African collapses.

The authors, who include some of the world’s leading honey bee experts, issued a stark warning about the disappearance of bees, which are increasingly important as crop pollinators around the globe. Without profound changes to the way human beings manage the planet, declines in pollinators needed to feed a growing global population are likely to continue. The scientists warn that a number of factors may now be coming together to damage bee colonies around the world, ranging from declines in flowering plants and the use of damaging insecticides to the worldwide spread of pests and air pollution. They call for farmers and landowners to be offered incentives to restore pollinator-friendly habitats, including key flowering plants near crop-producing fields, and stress that more care needs to be taken in the choice, timing and application of insecticides and other chemicals. Although managed hives can be moved out of harm’s way, wild populations of pollinators are completely vulnerable, the report states.

The way that humanity manages or mismanages its nature-based assets, including pollinators, will in part define our collective future in the 21st century. The fact is that of the 100 crop species that provide 90% of the world’s food, more than 70 are pollinated by bees. Some human beings fabricate the illusion that, in the 21st century, they have the technological prowess to be independent of nature. Bees underline the reality that we are more, not less, dependent on nature’s services in a world of 7 billion people.

Declines in bee colonies date back to the mid-1960s in Europe, but have accelerated since 1998. In North America, losses of colonies since 2004 have left the continent with fewer managed pollinators than at any time in the past 50 years. Chinese beekeepers have recently faced several inexplicable and complex symptoms of colony losses in both species. It has been reported elsewhere that some Chinese farmers have had to resort to pollinating fruit trees by hand because of the lack of insects.

The report lists a number of factors which may be coming together to cause the decline. They include: habitat degradation, including the loss of flowering plant species that provide food for bees; some insecticides, including the so-called systematic insecticides, which can migrate to the entire plant as it grows and can be taken in by bees in nectar and pollen; parasites and pests, such as the well-known varroa mite; and air pollution, which may be interfering with the ability of bees to find flowering plants, and thus food. Scents that could travel more than 800 metres in the 1800s now reach less than 200 metres from a plant.

“The transformation of the countryside and rural areas in the past half-century or so has triggered a decline in wild living bees and other pollinators”,

said one of the lead authors, Dr Peter Neumann of the Swiss Bee Research Centre. He continued:

“Society is increasingly investing in ‘industrial-scale’ hives and managed colonies to make up the shortfall and going so far as to truck bees around to farms and fields in order to maintain our food supplies. A variety of factors are making these man-made colonies vulnerable to decline and collapse. We need to get smarter about how we manage these hives, but perhaps more importantly, we need to better manage the landscape beyond, in order to recover wild bee populations”.

Moving from the international scene to the United Kingdom, the awful weather of 2012 has compounded the problems. The honey crop of 2012 was dramatically reduced, and there are concerns about how bees are currently over-wintering because of poor queen-mating during last season, leaving some hives queenless or with the real risk of becoming drone laying queens. The incidence of beekeepers resorting to regular feeding is known to have increased to record levels. As the BBKA honey survey found, the productivity of the average hive has dropped by 70% to eight pounds of honey compared to the more typical average of 30 pounds in the past. Losses have also occurred through starvation.

Of course, one bad year can ultimately be reversed, but the trend is disturbing, with a reduction in the British honey bee number of 75% in the past 100 years. Honey bees are in serious decline and that should be a matter of concern to all of us. For with their decline come wider issues around the importance of pollination for food production. It is incumbent on government, working with the beekeepers, to reverse this trend and to maintain high levels of pollination.

Diseases are important, but in my opinion the biggest challenge facing honey bees and much of British wildlife is agricultural intensification. Agricultural land makes up 75% of the United Kingdom. Despite the growth of beekeeping in urban areas and a welcome variety of flora in back gardens, it is on and around agricultural land where bees mostly forage and live. Even if we could cure all bee diseases, bees still have to eat. Of course, food production, at a time of rising demand, meteorological unpredictability and change, is vital, but in the coming decades we have to look for win-win situations in which we can make farming more wildlife-friendly, yet still satisfy growing consumption. One way we can do this for bees is to have more flowers in grazing land.

The use of pesticides has long been recognised as a serious problem. The neonicotinoid group of chemicals is widely used and may be having a serious and deleterious effect on honey bees, as was highlighted in the report provided for your Lordships before this debate. There will be those contributing to this debate who have far more expertise on this subject than I, but I would proffer one observation. My reading of the situation is that the use of insecticides in the UK is probably not the principal cause of the decline in honey bees or bumblebees. The increasing loss of biodiversity also affects the state and health of the insect population. Despite the greater awareness among the farming population, farming practices remain which are highly damaging to the welfare of honey bees. Widespread monoculture is a vector for disease and decline.

The diseases and pests of bees are also on the increase and the use of medicaments may be becoming less effective as the result of resistance. In addition, the British beekeepers have much to learn from a new generation of pests and parasites, previously unknown to these shores, which are making their way here. In the past few decades some additional pests and diseases of honey bees have been transferred from an Asian honey bee species, Apis cerana, which is very similar to the western honey bee, Apis mellifera. The best known of these is the varroa mite, but, even with varroa, existing diseases are not fully understood, and problems such as CCD—colony collapse disorder—are as yet not fully explained or resolved.

The solution to these challenges comes through research and education, and that is my key point today. In this context, the report of the Public Accounts Committee, published soon after our debate in 2009, is telling. It states:

“Despite their importance to the agricultural economy the Department has given little priority to bee health”.

In 2007-08, research expenditure in this field was just £200,000. In 2009, the department announced that this sum was to be supplemented by an extra £2.5 million over the following five years. However, this additional work to support the department's new bee health strategy will be diluted by including research into other pollinator insects as well as honey bees.

Regular inspections of colonies are also very important and enable the department to monitor the health of colonies and the incidence of disease and parasites. Nearly 80% of cases of notifiable disease in England are identified through such inspections, but the effectiveness of these inspections is hampered because around half of the estimated 37,000 active beekeepers in England have not joined the department's voluntary register, BeeBase. In marked contrast to registered beekeepers, very few reports of notifiable disease are made by previously unregistered beekeepers.

I ask my noble friend the Minister to provide an update on the current position and to confirm that the Government attach priority to ensuring that UK research councils and government-funded initiatives continue to support research into the health and welfare of both honey bees and other classes of pollinators. For example Professor Ratnieks, who has been undertaking considerable research on the Sussex Plan for Honey Bee Heath and Well-Being at the Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects at the University of Sussex, and who inspired me to keep bees as a hobby, is looking at ways to control or reduce honey bee diseases. In particular, he is working on hygienic honey-bees.

The word “hygiene” in this context requires a brief explanation. Hygiene is a natural disease resistance mechanism in which the bees themselves remove dead or sick brood, thereby reducing the incidence of brood diseases in a colony, including varroa. Hygiene occurs in British bees but is rare, so we have to look for hygienic colonies and breed from them. Hygiene is inherited and, as at least 92 noble Lords therefore understand, it is in the genes. Bees do not learn to do it; they do it instinctively if they have the genes. Only 10% or less of British bees are hygienic, so with focused research there is substantial potential to increase their contribution to healthy hives.

I hope the Government will look favourably on supporting research of this type, for such research is not a cost on the Exchequer. It is an investment in the future—an investment which will see returns well in excess of the sums under consideration. Healthy pollinators are the building blocks for high-quality food production. The seasonal bee inspectors do a great job and this is not the time to cut back their numbers or their workload.

As Tim Lovett of the British Beekeepers Association wrote in preparation for this debate, in general the BBKA and its member associations are cautiously optimistic about the future of the honey bee here in the UK. It believes there remains much practical applied research to be done to give beekeepers better tools to improve their bee husbandry skills and funds should be provided to fill these data gaps. It is hoped that the planned Defra public consultation on honeybee disease legislation and control will emphasise the need for effective measures to help the beekeeper to manage the health of their colonies and provide the necessary resources. Education and training are high priorities in the work of the BBKA and its member associations and it is hoped that the current modest contribution of funding from the public purse will improve the skill of bee-keepers and will continue.

However, poorly maintained hives can compound the problems we are considering today and well informed beekeepers are critical to the future welfare of honey bees. Relatively inexperienced beekeepers may also be a factor as diseased colonies, if not dealt with effectively, may act as reservoirs of infection. Current evidence is that, rather than there being a single smoking gun underlying bee declines, the cause is multifactorial. Factors include availability and a lack of diversity of forage crops. There is evidence that the immune systems of honey bees are impaired if they do not forage on a sufficiently broad range of flowers. This in turn may contribute to the prevalence and impact of particular pests and pathogens, such as the varroa mite and deformed wing virus.

While no single factor is, in my view, the cause of decline or poorer honey bee health, steps to control and understand the impact of the individual factors will contribute to improved hive and colony health. I urge my noble friend the Minister and the Government to redouble their efforts to support research in this sector and reverse the trends which are decimating populations of honey bees in this country and abroad.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Moynihan]

My Lords, it would be invidious and inappropriate for me to comment individually on the many contributions to this important debate. Suffice it to say that the quality of all contributions could not have been of a higher standard. We have achieved our collective objective, which is to provide the Government with an agenda, to keep them busy at least until our next debate which on current form comes round, like the Olympic Games, once in a quadrennium.

My sincere thanks to all noble Lords who participated in this debate; there is urgent and important work to be done, and I am grateful to my noble friend for his support as the new self-appointed chief bee inspector. We will hold him to that role, but I am particularly grateful once again to everyone who contributed today to what I believe has been a very useful and informative debate.

Motion agreed.