A World Without Bees

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…