Bee Population

Lord Patten Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten]

My Lords, it is not all bad news for bees. It is truly paradoxical that at a time when, as my noble friend pointed out in his introductory and wide-ranging speech, there are so many major threats to the health of our honey bees, the number of people taking up beekeeping is surging, with the numbers of those seeking membership of the British Beekeepers Association having doubled in the past three years. After listening to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Rea, I do not know whether he may also be seeking membership of that great organisation.

It is, however, equally paradoxical that at a time of challenge to our honey bees the numbers of bee inspectors have plummeted. I have never seen one of these great public servants, a bee inspector. I have been looking out for them but I have never spotted one. I do not know whether perhaps they wear a uniform. I do know that in statute they have more or less unfettered and police-like powers of entry in the matter of hive-patrolling. So my noble friend Lord Moynihan and other noble friends—such as, in his beekeeping activities in Wiltshire, my noble friend Lord Marland, who is sad not to be taking part in this debate—should watch out for the thud on their drive of the boots of the bee inspector, if such a person still exists. I wonder whether they are in as much decline as our honey bees. I ask the Minister what their role now is. Are they of any help or are they in fact extinct? I look forward to hearing more about them later.

All that said, the problem that we face is Europe-wide, just like the ash tree issue. That is complex, but the threat to honey bees and bumblebees is even more complex. In the matter of bees, as in the matter of ash trees, I assure the Minister—a countryman himself—that I do not blame the Government for every lack of foresight or lack of action. That is too easy to do. It is a very complex problem and we are all—farmers, beekeepers, the agrochemical industry and others—up to our necks in the issue.

I know that up to one-third of our domestically produced diet is bee dependent; it needs pollination, as my noble friend Lord Moynihan pointed out. Of course, bees do not have a monopoly on this activity—there are other pollinators—but they are certainly the nation’s prime pollinators both for legumes such as peas and beans and for top fruit such as apples and pears, for which they are absolutely vital. Overall, the impact on our rural productive economy of substantial failure in the pollination cycle has been estimated—as my noble friend Lady Byford pointed out—at many hundreds of millions of pounds. That was pointed out also by my noble friend Lord Moynihan.

That the problem is not fully understood is self-evident. It cannot be explained, otherwise, with the expertise of your Lordships’ House, we would have had the explanation by now in the debate. Just as there are cyclical changes in climate, with the Met Office recently “fessing up” that there has been little global warming since 1998, so there are sometimes extraordinary population explosions in the animal world, mirrored by equally extraordinary population declines on other occasions, generally but not always self-regulating after a period of mutation. There is an unpredictable asymmetry to these swings of nature, in which mankind is sometimes potentially a damage-doing participant—as the noble Lord, Lord Rea, pointed out—but sometimes merely a puzzled spectator, as are many of us in your Lordships’ House today. We are unclear about the root cause or causes of the problem.

Good science will one day reveal whether what we are discussing today is simply one of those cyclical swings, willingly working itself out over time, or whether this time there is some terminal quality to what is going on in this country. I do not know the answer but I suspect that the trend is not down to a single cause. A consensus seems to be emerging from noble Lords on both sides of the House that there is probably not one single cause but a mixture, from the spread of the varroa mite, to which my noble friend Lord Moynihan first alerted me in 2009, to the currently fashionable suspicion that we may be having a Silent Spring for honey bees because of new “killer pesticides”. I simply do not know. That would be an easy explanation but, as I understand it, it is not clear scientifically. The only assurance that I seek today from the Minister, in addition to confirmation of the existence or non-existence of bee inspectors, is that the Government and our European partners are doing all they can, as quickly as they can, to deal with the issue through good science of the highest quality. In the end, that is what we who are not scientists must depend on.

In the mean time, I have two suggestions of a rather pragmatic sort. First, there is a need for ever-improving pest and hive management that not only strives to find ways of dealing with the mite but involves better treatment of gut diseases by antibiotics, ever-closer attention to hive hygiene and particularly to the introduction of new forms of hygienic bees—pinpointed by my noble friend Lord Moynihan—and very careful temperature control in winter. It is a matter of integrating all measures to sustain our colonies—easier said than done in your Lordships’ House but critical to their preservation.

Secondly, much can be done by farmers and landowners in the smallest of ways by sustaining wild plant species that provide nectar for bees. The cumulative effect of changes to relatively small patches of land over a number of years could well be one of the factors in the decline of pollinating insects such as bees. This has occurred not just because of monocultural clearances in the agricultural landscape but because of nectar-producing plants in patches here and there being effectively crowded out by the growth of more competitive plant species, encouraged by airborne nitrogenous compounds being deposited around them just like fertiliser. Undoubtedly we need food and good agriculture, but it is also a fact that intensive monocultural agriculture offers little forage to pollinators—QED. That is just a simple fact.

So let us hope that with the Government having done all they can, the honey bee will bounce back like its relative the bumblebee, having drunk too freely of the flowers of that beautiful lime tree tilia petiolaris. It is a magnificent tree. It is highly floriferous and is wonderful for human beings to smell, but it is deeply narcotic to the bumblebee, as anyone who has stood underneath tilia petiolaris, as we do in our West Country home, has seen. After a short period of sniffing—or perhaps I should say snorting—by the bumblebees, they generally fall intoxicated to the ground, on their backs, legs twitching. There is a short recovery period, then they generally bounce back, although some, like humans, often return, recidivist-like, to the scene of their earlier intoxication. They are rather like the old habitués of the Bishops’ Bar in the old days of legend in this House—a long time before I came to join your Lordships and naturally much before the time of anyone represented in the Chamber today. One can only hope, as I do, that the honey bee turns out to have the same bounce-back resilience of the lime flower intoxicated bumblebee, recovering from the damage that, alas, both bumblebee and honey bee have had because of nature and self-indulgence.