British Beekeepers' Association Members Worries Growing Exponentially As Colonies Keep Failing

[hatrack]

EDIT

When he sensed that his audience might be losing concentration in the mid-morning heat he asked them to name other adult bee diseases. The response was sluggish, but then the names emerged: nosema, bee paralysis, sacbrood virus, brood diseases caused by bacteria such as European foul brood and American foul brood. Then there was the potential catastrophe of the acronym CCD, the cause or symptoms of which no one claimed to fully understand, but whose name suggested a sort of bee Armageddon: Colony Collapse Disorder. But the problem with bees should not just be of concern to those gathered in a small English lecture hall, but a matter for us all. The question of dwindling honey supplies is one thing, but the greater threat is to apples, pears, raspberries, cherries, strawberries, blackcurrants, broad and runner beans and oilseed rape, and about 20 other crops dependent on insects for pollination. For bees are not just part of the foodchain; they are its clasp.

In the last few months, the British Beekeepers' Association (BBKA), which claims almost 12,000 members, has begun speaking words of doom. 'Nation's honeybees could be wiped out in 10 years' the organisation claimed in December. 'The British Beekeepers' Association has alerted the government and we want action. BBKA will launch a campaign to make sure this action happens.' To date, the campaign has raised public awareness but has achieved no increase in government funding. 'Defra has been alerted to a potential disaster but has chosen to ignore it,' BBKA's president Tim Lovett told me. 'It's utterly short-sighted.'

One of his problems is that his members are seen as eccentrics engaged in a haphazard activity. Some are. But there are about 240,000 colonies of bees in the UK, managed by 44,000 keepers, a ratio that suggests the amateur plays almost as significant a role in honey production and pollination as the professional. In 2001, it was estimated that the value of bees to pollination in England - the boost in crop production - was £120m, a figure that the BBKA has now revised to £165m in the UK. (The plight of the bumblebee should also be recognised: Britain's changing landscape, not least our love of silage and decking, has led to the extinction of three of 25 species and a threat to seven others; orchard pollination will have suffered as a result.)

The BBKA lives a multi-tasking life. It is a repository of fun facts (on average, a hive produces 55lb of honey per year, making a total of 6,000 tonnes in the UK annually - about 20 per cent of the honey we consume; to collect a pound of honey, a bee can fly a distance equivalent to flying twice around the world, visiting flowers more than 10,000 times - for more facts, see box below.) It acts as cheerleader for the novice (what to do when bees escape the hive and swarm around your garden) and hosts a blog for the worried ('Despite me having put up an extra fence and having the bees at the end of the garden on the far side from her, the mad neighbour came round with an inflamed eye tonight'). The BBKA also offers disease insurance and other services, and it campaigns for more research into those things that threaten its existence. Membership has increased by almost 4,000 over the past seven years, boosted by younger enthusiasts in cities. 'The real problem is, you can no longer be an amateur in the old casual sense,' Lovett says. 'If you are, you lose your bees.'

EDIT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/25/conservation.wildlife

[jwirr]

1. I know that there are a lot of bee colonies in Iowa and Minnesota

but I do not know if this is happening to them also. Anyone?