A World Without Bees

What will 2010 bring for the honeybees? Well, initial indicators from the US are not good. Dave Hackenberg,  the Pennsylvania beekeeper who discovered colony collapse disorder, speaking to me last month for an article in the New York Post said that his bees had dwindled earlier this winter than previous years.

“We had around 3,000 hives at the end of the summer, but they started shrinking early, so when we came to truck them to Florida [in December to get them ready for the almond pollination in California in February] there was only 2,000 of them left,” he told me.

He predicts that it could be the worst year yet for bee losses.

We’ll have a better idea from the US come February when half the nation’s 2.4m (if there are still that many) bee colonies arrive in California’s central valley.

If you think pesticides are the main culprit in the mysterious bee disappearance , you can take comfort from a ruling made by a US  district judge just before Christmas. She ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to rescind approval for a pesticide, spirotetramat, manufactured by Bayer AG, which campaigners say is harmful to bees. Although the ban is based on EPA processes rather than product safety - the judge said the EPA didn’t properly seek comments or publicise the review process - it is perhaps indicative of a shift in attitude towards the mightychemical companies and their federal bed fellows.

Jeff Pettis, head of bee research at the USDA, told the annual meeting of the Entomological Society of America on 12 December, that new research into neonicotinoid pesticides showed that bees exposured to them didn’t die from the pesticides but ended up with three to four times as many spores of the potentially lethal fungal pathogen, Nosema ceranae. He also said that a comparison of hives trucked around the US verus stationary hives has found higher egg and larval losses in the transported colonies. Bees on the road also fail to mange their hive temperature at the necessary 34 degrees F. This could account for the loss of brood. So could this spell the end for migratory beekeeping. I think not?

The reason for the article in the New York Post, in case you were wondering, is that A World without Bees is now published in the States. It’s also been translated into German, where it is called ‘Welt ohne Bienen’.

Interest in what the public can do to save the bees continues. This month’s taster beekeeping courses run by UrbanBees are almost full.

The role of pesticides in the death of honeybees is once more in the spotlight. The Co-op group, which you may remember launched Plan Bee earlier this year,  was this week calling on government to fund research into the  impact of the neonicotinoid group of pesticides . The company has prohibited the pesticides on its farms until it is proven they do not harm honeybees.

None of the £10m set aside for pollinator research in the UK this year is going towards pesticide research. Why is this? Could it be because the funders, such as the Wellcome Trust and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the universities which could untake the research are all reliant on the pesticide manufacturers for future funding? Is the British government in the pocket of these giant chemical companies?

The Co-op is so convinced that university departments are influenced by these companies, it refuses to name the reseachers it has awarded a £100,000 grant in order for them to further investigate Italian findings that drops of water from sweetcorn (maize) plants irrigated wth the pesticides can kill the bees.

Despite Conservation charity, Buglife, collecting all the research there is on the harm neonicotinoid, imidacloprid does to the health and life cycle of bees and submitting it to Michael Jacobs, the prime minister’s special advisor on environment issues, last month, the government won’t budge on its position.

It says all the relevant research was done when the chemical was approved and it has seen nothing new to suggest that its poses “an unacceptable risk to the health of bees”. Has anyone read the Buglife report?

Perhaps Hilary Benn should have a chat with his Italian counterpart. Agriculture minister, Luca Zaia, has decided to keep the suspension of neonics for maize seed dressing in force until 2010 because he says there seems to be a correlation between their use and the depopulation of bee hives.

Sarah Brown, the PM’s wife, has wadded into the debate, bringing together beekeepers, campaigners, the Co-op and reseachers together for a secret meeting at Number 10 last month. Were the pesticide companies there?

One of the problems with getting these pesticides suspended in the UK, could be the stance taken by the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) which continues to endorse some of the chemical companies’ products as bee-friendly (not neonics, I must point out) and to receive money in return for educational purposes. It says it is better to have dialogue with these companies. Many of its members disagree.

The issue was raised at the official UK premiere of The Vanishing of the Bees film on Thursday night. The film showed French and German beekeepers taking direct action against pesticide manufactures and regional government for its stance on pesticides. This was in stark contrast to our polite placard-waving apiarists calling  for research money.

The film is a polemic that points blame at the neonics. US commercial beekeeper, Dave Hackenberg, who is credited with discovering Colony Collapse Disorder and features heavily in the film and our book, was flown in to answer questions. The man who has doggedly pursued the pesticide line when most scientists were obsessed with finding a new viruses firmly backed the film’s conclusion.

But let’s not forgotten that Dave’s type of beekeeping : thrucking bees thousands of miles a year, feeding them corn syrup solution and egg protein (because you’ve taken away all their honey, located the hives where there’s no natural food, and want them to work harder), and replacing the queen every six months just isn’t sustainable. It may be necessary to produce cheap food. But the bees are telling us at what cost.

The solution - replace intensive farming with a more sustainable way of producing which I’m afraid we’ll have to pay more for it.

Just seen a film that’s out next month in the UK, called the Vanishing of the Bees. It covers much of the same ground as A World without Bees, interviewing many of the same experts and beekeepers, but where I thought it did really well was following two US beekeepers who visit France to learn from their French counterparts about how they took on  the pesticide companies and won a decade earlier. There’s a great shot of beekeepers lobbing their empty hives over the gates of chemical giant Bayer and hanging an effigy of a beekeeper from a tree, and some good footage from Germany as well of Bavarian beekeepers placing beehives outside government buildings. British beekeepers marching on parliament with their smokers wasn’t so impressive.

It was nice to see Michelle Obama in the White House garden with the beehive near the end of the film when it was showing us what we could do to try and save the bees. But it made me angry that so little progress has actually been made on this front. Bayer and the other pesticide manufactures are still getting away in most countries with peddling their potentially lethal bee wares because no money has gone into tests proving their chemicals are the crux of the problem.  The £10m donated for pollinator research in the UK is no where near ready to be allocated. The Wellcome Trust and the other funders are still waiting for research proposals. But I’d be very surprised if any of it funds pesticide research. It’s laborious, unsexy work that most scientists don’t seem interested in pursuing. Maybe because lots of them are already, in one way or another,  funded by the chemical corporations?

Saw the film at Pestival, the arts event at the South Bank Centre in London this weekend in celebration of the insect. I was tweeting at a mass online honeybee colony role play at Tweehive. I was playing Queen Bee. It wasn’t very busy. My colony wasn’t 50,000-strong, more like a dwindling hive. But met some great people who are also trying things to help save the bees - bumblebees, as well as honeybees.

Myself and c0-author Brian McCallum are stepping up our effort to encourage urban beekeeping. We’ve made a film showing how easy it is, which is being screened in the Pestival bee cab, and we’re running more courses. We’re also planning to sell more honey to raise awareness about how delicious London honey tastes.

I can’t believe how interest in honeybees just keeps growing and growing.

Today I met up with an aspiring playwright who by chance bought the eye-catching paperback at the airport and is now penning a drama based around colony collapse disorder. Before she arrived for lunch, I read an article in the Independent on Sunday about the craze in beekeeping. For all you people who never thought wearing a beesuit remotely sexy, Scarlett Johansson, who apparently received a beehive as wedding present from Samuel L Jackson, may just change your mind.

How long before the WI bring out a honeybee calendar? I’ve just read a three-page spread in the July/August edition of the Women’s Institute magazine, WI Life, about the perilous predicament of British bees. This follows the 300,000-strong member organisation passing a resolution at this year’s AGM to save honeybees with a wealth of information on its website about just how to do this. The feature itself is not yet downloadable, but Tim Lovett, president of the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) is reported as saying that “pesticide-specific bee deaths in Britain have become practically nil, due to increased awareness and restrictions”. He chose his words carefully because the truth is the pesticides could well be playing a role in bee deaths in the UK, and the BBKA receives money from one of the main manufacturers of pesticides that have been implicated in bee deaths worldwide. It endorses some of Bayer Crop Sciences products as “bee-friendly despite many of its members campaigning against the link-up.

The article has reminded me to check what’s happened to the £150,000 donated by the Co-op - as part of its Plan Bee campaign -  aside from giving a small amount to map our native black honeybees. And where has Rowse Honey’s £100,000 for bee research gone? Both companies are deeply concerned about pesticide use, but I understand not much research is being done in this area, other than by the chemical companies themselves.

An influential committee of MPs this week said the government must fund more research into the “alarming decline” of honeybees.The call follows the setting up of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Honeybees, which is a group of MPs across the political divide (led by beekeeping MP John Penrose) who are going to monitor pollinator research in the UK and make sure the honeybee is getting her fair share, which should be most of that £10m pledged earlier this year by Defra, the government’s environment department, and other research funding partners.

Finally, the most fun you can have with bees without any chance of getting stung must be tweehive – a new bee forum on Twitter. It’s described as “a Twitter-based mass role play experiment in which you tweet as a bee and can follow the threads [immediate responses] as they come in.”

For Twitter virgins like myself, the official launch on Tuesday to which I was invited and taught how to contribute to (tweet) by my patient tweacher, was a revelation. Suddenly I could put out information about the latest bee article to other tweeters, on the tweehive thread  - or correct something they had tweeted - just by adding #tweehive to the end of my tweets.

My tweacher was pretending to be a drone writing love poetry to the queen, while other tweeters were busy worker bees, cleaning, fanning and foraging. His literary aspirations were not in vain because  tweehive was conceived as part of Pestival – an arts festival at the South Bank Centre 4-6 September in celebration of insects - where the Queen Elizabeth Hall is being transformed into Queen Bee Hall. Sounds fab, see you there…

Colony collapse disorder doesn’t look so bad this year according to preliminary results from the Apiary Inspectors of America’s annual survey of honeybee colony losses in the US.

Around 29% were wiped out this year, compared to 36% over the winter of 2007/08 and 32% the previous winter.

The study between September 2008 and early April 2009 of a fifth of the country’s estimated 2.3m colonies found that only 15% of all the colonies lost during the 2008/09 winter died with symptoms of CCD (no dead bees in the hive). This compares to a 60% that had CCD-like symptoms the winter before.

But before we crack open the champagne, or more appropriately the mead, the study found that while CCD may be on the wane, losses from other causes are still a significant concern with 58% of all beekeepers reporting above normal losses, with a third of their colonies dying.

The researchers say that the findings emphasise the urgent need for more research, not only of CCD, but of general honeybee health.

Jeff Pettis, co-ordinator of the US Department of Agriculture’s five year programme on honeybee health said: “While the drop in losses is encouraging losses of this magnitude are economically unsustainable for commercial beekeeping.”

A complete analysis of the survey data will be published later this year.

The survey results follow a report in the Economist of a supposed glut of bees in California this spring which raised questions about whether a global pollination crisis was real.

But when we tracked down Dave Hackenberg in Central Valley in March for the almond pollination he told us that he thought he’d lost another two thirds of his hives for the third year running.

“Those that didn’t chase [pollinate] pumpkins and apples are looking good, but the others….”

He said the reason that some beekeepers had done better this year was that they had spent a fortune feeding their bees lots of expensive supplements. He said they’d been able to afford to do this because of the high rental prices they’d received for bee hives in California in 2008. But that won’t last. Almond growers are now being forced to cut their acereage because of severe water shortages and prices for hive rentals could drop by as much as a third next spring.

If this happens, he warns beekeepers won’t be able to afford to feed their bees all the supplements they enjoyed this year so we could see another rise in mortality rates.

On a positive note, the plight of the honeybee is now firmly planted in the UK’s consciousness. Not only do listeners of Radio 4 keep abreast of issues at Ambridge with resident beekeeper, Jennifer Archer, but the Women’s Institute, that other bastion of middle England, has taken up the cause of the beleaguered honeybee voting last week to save the honeybee.

The WI’s 200,000 members plan to take direct action by working with local farmers to press for a good mix of pollen-rich flowers around fields, get their local council to use bee-friendly flowers in public spaces, and turn their own gardens into havens for pollen-hungry bees.

Also last week, Jordans – the cereal company – launched the Big Buzz. It will give away thousands of bee-friendly lavender and rosemary plants and seeds with on pack promotions, educate children at bee exhibitions, and promoting its Conservation Grade farming scheme (not organic but its farmers do support biodiversity and pollinators).

This all comes on the back of the Co-ops Plan Bee, launched earlier this year, with the fantastic news that the supermarket would prohibit suppliers of its own-brand fruit and veg from using eight of the neonicitinoid pesticides implicated in bees deaths around the world.

We like to think that in some way  A World without Bees has contributed to this groundswell of opinion behind saving our honeybees and other pollinators.  

At the Jordans launch at Kew Gardens, A World without Bees was quoted. The WI refers to it in its resolution briefing. The Co-op’s sustainable people have all read the book. And a presenter on BBC’s Springwatch last week read out a section on air. So the message is getting out there.

And it’s not just the UK that has gone bee mad. We’ve now got bee hives in the White House.

The challenge is how to keep the interest alive – and with it the bees.

Among the gloom of recession, some good news for honeybees last week. The European Parliament’s environment committee approved (November 5), new ways criteria for assessing the risk of potentially hazardous pesticides in farming that includes better protection for bees.

The MEPs voted on proposals aimed at halving the use of toxic pesticides in European farming by 2013. And they backed plans for pesticides producers to prove that a substance does not present “acute” or “chronic” risk to bees before a product could be authorised.

MEPs also voted to ban most crop spraying by aeroplanes and insisted on buffer zones protecting areas around sources of drinking water.

The pesticide industry argues that just because a substance contains hazardous properties does not mean it cannot be used safely. They warn that banning pesticides will drive up food prices. They are supported by UK food manufacturers and the National Farmers Union.

Elliott Cannell, of the Pesticide Action Network, an environmental group with backs the proposals, said that 180 global experts on environmental health supported 100% the MEPs stance that we need tougher laws in Europe on pesticides.

UK Green MEP Caroline Lucas says the concern lies not just with the behaviour of individual chemicals, but also how they react in combinations with each other.

This is one of the points we make in A World Without Bees - that no tests are required to assess the toxicity of a cocktail of pesticides with which bees may come into contact. Some studies have shown a 1000-fold increase in toxicity when pesticides and fungicides synergise.

The EU’s latest food monitoring report revealed that a record level of pesticides are being found in food items sold in the EU, with almost half of all fruit and vegetables – the same ones pollinated by honeybees – containing pesticide residues and five percent of them at concentrations above maximum legal limits.

Lucas said this was the highest level of pesticide contamination recorded in the EU, and represents an increase of around 20% over the past five years alone.

The MEPs vote follows a first reading in July 2007 of The regulation on the authorisation of pesticides, in which they agreed a call by German Green MEP Hiltrud Breyer that pesticides would not be approved for use in the EU if they are toxic to bees. It was feared that this first reading agreement may have been diluted.

MEPS will face a showdown with EU member states which favour a more lenient approach to pesticide use. UK Conservative MEP Robert Sturdy disagrees with his colleagues reiterating the arguments of agribusiness that monthly food bills will rise.

“With the current worries over food prices and food security, it seems absurd that MEPS are voting on the these proposals without the benefit of an impact assessment to make a more informed decision,” he commented.

A final vote on the proposals is due in January. If adopted the legislation could enter into force by the middle of next year.

During the last two months much has happened on the honeybee front. Apart from giving more talks about A World Without Bees at our local Waterstone’s in Clapham Junction and the Slow Food Festival at the South Bank, which had a day dedicated to bees, we have appeared on Newsnight (unfortunately no mention was made of the book), Sky News and UKTV’s Market Garden (again no mention of the book although that’s why we agreed to be interviewed, bloody journalists) talking about urban beekeeping.

More interestingly there have been several developments in honeybee deaths. First we had the news from a survey of British beekeepers that a third of honeybees in the UK had not made it through the winter and spring. As a result the honey association warned that English honey would run out by Christmas and no more would be available until summer 2009. It blamed the shortage on fewer honeybees and farmers devoting more fields to wheat, instead of borage. Although 90% of our honey comes from overseas, the UK’s leading honey company was so concerned by the crisis that it pledged from September, that for each jar of Rowse English honey sold in supermarkets 10p  would be donated to a fund dedicated to improving the health of the nation’s honeybees. The story was picked up by many newspapers, podcasts and blogs.

At a meeting of the National Farmers’ Union, Bee Farmers Association and British Beekeepers Association, Rowse agreed to donated £100,000 to bee research. It has also devised teaching materials to use in the classroom to raise awareness about honeybees.

But more importantly, last month Italy followed the lead of France, Germany and Slovenia in banning certain pesticides that are implicated in honeybees deaths. The Ministero del Lavoro della Salute e delle Politiche Sociali issued an immediate suspension of the seed treatment products clothianidin, imidacloprid, fipronil and thiamethoxam used in rapeseed oil, sunflowers and sweetcorn. The Italian government will start a monitoring programme to further investigate the reasons of recent bee deaths. We’ll be keeping a close eye on its findings.

And in this country the Soil Associaton wrote last week wrote to the environment secretary urging him to ban the pesticides in the UK.

Meanwhile, the German Coalition against Bayer Dangers has brought a charge against Werner Wenning, chairman of the Bayer Board of Management, with the Public Prosecutor in Freiburg (south-western Germany). The group accuses Bayer of marketing dangerous pesticides and thereby accepting the mass death of bees all over the world. The Coalition introduced the charge in cooperation with German beekeepers who lost thousands of hives after poisoning by the pesticide clothianidin in May this year. The pressure group suspects that Bayer submitted flawed studies to play down the risks of pesticide residues in treated plants. It says the accusation of flawed studies is confirmed by the Canadian Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) which judged on Bayer´s Clothianidin application: “All of the field/semi-field studies, however, were found to be deficient in design and conduct of the studies and were, therefore, considered as supplemental information only. Clothianidin may pose a risk to honey bees and other pollinators, if exposure occurs via pollen and nectar of crop plants grown from treated seeds”. PRMA adds: “It should also be noted that Clothianidin is very persistent in soil, with high carry-over of residues to the next growing season. Clothianidin is also mobile in soil.”

In the US, the National Resources Defense Council has filed a lawsuit against the federal Environmental Protection Agency for withholding information about the risks that honeybees face from systemic neonicotinoid pesticides.

Finally, on the research front trails are due to start this month in the States on an anti-viral agent developed by Israeli-US company, Beeologics that if successful could prevent Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus, which is implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder. Plant virologist Professor Ilan Sela who identifed IAPV in 2004 at the Hebrew University in Jersusalem, is Beeologics’ chief scientist.

It is two months since A World Without Bees was published. We have been rather remiss at keeping this blog up to date. Our excuse is partly that we have been so busy promoting the book, and keeping the day job going, that we’ve barely had time to draw breathe.

Last week, Alison appeared on the Richard and Judy show. Prior to that we had given radio interviews up and down the UK, and Alison was on the Radio 4 science weekly, Material World. We’ve also given a series of talks which began with a sell-out gig at the Hay Festival, followed by a talk in Oxford, two at The Guardian’s newsroom. This weekend we’re signing books at The Big Chill festival, and next Saturday we’re headlining Glastonbury, the town hall I might add!

It’s a great way to raise awareness about a very serious issue and the feedback we’ve had from the talks has been extremely positive and reassuring. Please post your thoughts on this website.

On Monday, we’re off to the annual meeting of the Society for Invertebrate Pathology at Warwick University. Why? The plenary seession is on Colony Collapse Disorder and some of the leading scientists quoted in the book will be giving the latest news on the ‘mysterious plague’. We’ll keep you updated.

It’s official. A lack of honeybees looks like leading to higher prices for food in the near future as farmers start to reduce the amount of vegetables they grow.

A North Caroliner farmer told Congress in June that he had had to cut his cucumber acreage in half because there were not enough bees available to pollinate them. “The simple fact is, no honeybees, no cucumbers,” Robert Edwards told the US House Agriculture Subcommittee. “Bees are as important to our crops as the water and sunshine,” he added.

The type of cucumber that Mr Edwards grows are difficult to pollinate, he explained. It is a very sticky plant that requires a high number of bees due to the increased effort that is needed on the part of the bee.

He warned that Congress needed to take the problem of disappearing and dying bees very seriously. “It is a real and growing problem that needs to be studied, addressed and corrected.”

Congress also heard that the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service now has documented evidence of the stress effects of long distance transport of bee colonies  for pollination. ARS administrator, Edward Knilping, said this would help to establish critically-needed management guidelines for beekeepers.

He noted that the new Farm Bill authorises up to $20m per year for the fiscal years 2008 to 2012 for honeybee and pollinator research.

Since we finished writing A World Without Bees last month - now published by Guardian Books - there have been a number of new developments. We wanted to start a blog where we could continue to report on Colony Collapse Disorder, what was happening to honeybees worldwide and raise awareness, as well as invite comment, debate and solutions.

We also wanted to find out what readers thought of our book . So all reviews are welcome.

In this our first post, I just wanted to draw people’s attention to the shocking news that Denmark has reported that more than half of its bee colonies have died over the 2007/08 winter. The huge scale of these losses is particularly worrying because in A World Without Bees we praise the Danish model of varroa control and suggest others could learn from Danish beekeepers’ three step programme: drone cell removal; organic formic acid used in the hive after the last honey harvest; and oxalic acid trickled over the bees before autumn.

Until this year, 60% of commercial beekeepers claimed that as a result of the three steps they had “never (yes, NEVER) seen damaged colonies or bees”, while 25% admitted to having just “single colonies now and then that have damage due to varroa”.

So what has gone wrong? Danish beekeepers are organising a conference with scientists to answer that question.

We hope that Danish apiarist, Asger Jørgensen, who is president of worldwide beekeeping organisation, Apimondia, will respond to our queries for more information.

Watch this space…