Bee Population

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, I apologise to the House that I am not my noble friend Lord Knight of Weymouth. I should have spoken earlier in the debate and I am sorry for the shock that that caused the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, who had to come in early. My noble friend Lord Knight could not stay and I offered to stand in on the Front Bench for him.

I add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, for securing this debate and for his excellent speech, which gave a wonderful tour d’horizon of the issues, and to all noble Lords for their contributions. It has been interesting that we have had contributions not just from the amateur beekeepers—of whom I am one—but from the profession. I was very interested in the approach taken by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson. Sometimes, policy in this area seems to be dictated by the large number of amateurs, to the possible exclusion of the interest of those who have to make a living out of this operation. It must be difficult for Defra to come up with coherent policy in this area, but that should not stop us criticising its efforts to date, which I shall do later.

As I said, I am a beekeeper. I got into it because my grandfather, who was a doctor in the north-west of Scotland, kept bees. He had about nine hives at one stage. I got fascinated by it. I can still remember the excitement of lifting the heather honey and the effort it took to carry all the supers away, even as we were being pursued by large numbers of bees. I have two hives, sometimes three if I am lucky and capture a swarm. As we have heard, it is a rather odd industry. You can have a good year and have no honey and you can have a bad year and still get honey because you have managed to prevent your hives from swarming.

I am obviously not very bright about this stuff because in my research for this speech today I discovered all sorts of things that I thought I should have known. For example, I had spent a lot of time in my garden trying to align my beehives and my greenhouse in order to make sure that my tomato crop was properly fertilised, only to discover when I did my research that honey bees are absolutely useless at fertilising tomatoes. You need bumblebees because they vibrate at the right frequency and the pollen somehow shakes itself off and does the necessary. I wish I had known that because it would have saved quite a lot of effort. I also did not realise that the masonry bees that were in our house when we first moved in and which I carefully had excluded at great cost by professional insect killers would have been a blessing for my orchard; but you live and learn.

I am very enthusiastic about my bees. I am not very knowledgeable but I am quite good at talking about them, and that got me into trouble. I will indulge the House very briefly with a short anecdote. A few years ago, when I was working in No. 10, there was an initiative to think about ways in which we could look at environmental issues, including bees. I had been talking up my highs and lows in relation to bees and I got saddled with doing something on the bee front. I will not go though all the details, but eventually we decided that there was one thing that would be interesting and perhaps of long-term value. Chequers, although not owned by the Government or indeed by the Prime Minister but by a private and separate trust, had lost its bees some years ago and there were no bees there. It seemed a pity because such a wonderful estate—those who have visited it will know—could easily support a large number of hives. So I was charged with trying to get bees back into Chequers. It took a bit of time but, working with a local beekeeping association, I found a willing beekeeper, who helped with the negotiations with the trustees, who were very hard task masters. I discovered a fundamental flaw, which was rather surprising for that part of Buckinghamshire: Chequers has no natural water. As any beekeeper will tell you, bees need three things: a secure base, access to forage—particularly to the stuff that they use to gum up the insides of their hives so that they protect themselves again rain and wind—and water. Water is the element or the chemical that they use to get the nectar that they collect from the flowers to the right consistency so that it will stay in the comb and not ferment—you see how one can get carried away with these things and start boring people to death. Anyway, I got involved in that project and we ended up with two hives just as you approach the back of Chequers from the road. You can actually see them against the former orchard. They have been moved this year partly for weather reasons. I mention this only because it illustrates the problems that a beekeeper has. Two hives were put in four years ago. There was no honey in the first year, which is quite common. There was some honey in the second year, just at the change of government. I leave noble Lords to speculate what we felt about that. There was good honey last year, but over the winter one hive went queenless. We are now back to one hive and we are trying to recover. That is the story, in a nutshell, of what happens in beekeeping. I am sure that the Prime Minister now and in the future will have access to Chequers honey for himself and guests, should they wish to do so.

We have heard about the substantial challenges during this debate. We have touched on the weather, pests and diseases and loss of habitat. We have touched on how agriculture impedes the way in which bees operate, pesticides and the need to train better our beekeeping force—that is really important. We have talked about the need to register and keep a record of not only our beekeepers but our beehives. We had a good example from my noble friend Lord Rea about those who are operating outside the system. They are having a perfectly good time and doing all the things that we would want from our beekeeping activity but are not part of the formal systems.

All these issues, including the question mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, about leadership and who is in charge here, interact in a complex and varying matrix—compounded by the fact that there is an ongoing and chronic lack of research to help us understand all these issues and put in place appropriate measures to respond to the challenges. The only real research is the insect pollinators initiative. The IPI is centred on nine projects, each receiving about £1 million. Of those nine projects, only four are related to honey bees, yet there are real problems in honey bee health and numerous questions to be answered.

One good example is of the lack of effective medicines to treat the diseases that we already know bees face. The varroa mite not only debilitates bees, mainly through attacking the larvae of the drones—the males—but allows worker bees to be attacked by viruses because it weakens their strength. There are no effective medicines for that. We can add nothing except palliatives, which seem to have some effect in reducing the ability of the varroa mite to thrive. However, there is no killing of them. That simply reduces the numbers rather than destroying them. Why can we not get some research going on that? It seems absolutely vital to make sure that we can do that.

The foul broods, European and American, are terrible things to have happening to your colony. They effectively kill it off, yet they are very difficult to eradicate. Again, we are not on top of the chemistry there. Then there is nosema, which is likely to become much more prevalent following an absolutely ridiculous decision to permit the EU to withdraw the only known effective medicine on the grounds that it was affecting other animals and things, not bees.

I think I have eight questions to pose to the Minister. Some of them are obviously more detailed and I would be happy for him to write to me at the end of the debate if that is a better way of doing it. The first is about agriculture, which was touched on by many noble Lords. Clearly, the use of our landmass in relation to the production of food and the way in which it interacts with bees is important. The way that agriculture is operated has a significant impact on bees. It affects the quality and diversity of habitat within the landscape. Can the Minister say what the UK Government could do to further “green” farming in the UK and provide much needed support to fruit and vegetable growers, perhaps by encouraging and supporting environmentally friendly farming systems? Here again, research would be important because we simply do not know the pollination requirements of crops, so if there was more information that was better disseminated to farmers and better applicable to bee keepers, that would certainly help.

A number of speakers mentioned pesticides. They clearly are having an adverse impact on bees. Why would they be used if they did not? What is worrying is how they may be affecting the breeding success of our bees and their resistance to disease, which is a component of that. Will the Government commit to introducing a targeted reduction of pesticide use by 2020? Perhaps that could again be with funding for research on the impact of all these pesticides on bees, not just honey bees but others which are available to pollinate.

Agri-environment schemes, which have been mentioned, have great potential to provide forage and nesting sites for bees but the uptake of the most beneficial options has been limited. What support will the Government give to Natural England to improve the uptake of those options and develop more targeted objectives for agri-environmental schemes? I think that would help.

Many habitats of national conservation priority provide important forage and nesting resources for bees, yet despite protected designations they are in decline. Can the Government strengthen protection for these sites by designating more sites with priority habitats for bees, reforming environmental impact assessment regulations and improving cross-policy co-ordination to deliver the strongest benefits to bees over the whole landscape?

One of the earlier speakers mentioned planning. Despite the importance of bees to the economy—and of course to human well-being—the new planning guidelines do not provide detailed information for local authorities so that they could develop green infrastructures that might benefit bees. I am thinking here of things such as allotments or flower-rich road verges. Why would it not be possible for the Government to introduce new guidelines for local authorities that integrate these beneficial options and ensure that environmental damage is reduced?

There is also the question of whether we should make a special priority for bees. Several bee species are recognised as national conservation priorities but, as a group, bees have never received very much formal monitoring. Will the Government include bees as a priority species, for example, in the new England biodiversity strategy? Will they establish a network of experts to advise local authorities on developing bee-targeted action plans?

A policy on bee health is limited by a lack of research on possible cures. We really must change that. There is also a rather adverse regulatory structure, which does not take the needs of bees into account. Can we have some initiatives in that area? Perhaps there should be a trial period, within which restrictions on veterinary medicines, which apply largely to animals and not to insects, could be lifted.

Finally, will the Government take steps to create a statutory beekeeper register? Again, without the actual knowledge of how many beekeepers we have, how many hives, and what effect they are having on the environment, we will not be able to make progress on this. That goes alongside a cause which I absolutely endorse for national standards for education and training. Like a number of other noble Lords, I was trained by a local volunteer. It was a terrific exercise—heavily weather-dependent, so I got only two out of the four possible slots, but it was enough to get me going. There is no national accreditation for this, and it really would help if we had a common standard to which everybody was working.

In that context, I just wanted to make one other important point that has not yet been raised. We are talking about the bees we know—the bees we can identify as being related to the hives that we ostensibly organise, although the truth is that we are not very good at running them. There are probably at least as many wild bees about which we know absolutely nothing. I am almost certain that my bees are bred and crossbred with the wild bees in the area. What do we know about their disease resistance, their capacity or their livelihood?

A few years ago a book entitled A World Without Bees was published. It was written by Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum. A number of noble Lords will know about it. It was an interesting book, but the most interesting thing about it was its starting premise. It was a quotation attributed to Albert Einstein, no less:

“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the Earth, then man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man”.

It probably reads better in German. It seems to be the case that Albert Einstein never actually said it, but that should not devalue the message it gives across—a message which has been running through this debate and is something of which we must take account. Bees matter: we must do something about it.