Native British bees are dying out — and with them will go flora, fauna and one-third of our diet. We may have less than a decade to save them and avert catastrophe. So why is nothing being done? The Bee has value, to the UK economy it is in the region of £1 billion a year, and 35% of England's diet is directly dependent on them. It is an equation of stark simplicity. No pollination: no crops. There is nothing theoretical about it. The reality is in (or, more accurately, not in) the hives. The United States has lost 70% of its honeybee colonies over the past two winters. Losses in the UK currently are running at 30% a year — up from just 6% in 2003. The ecology of our planet is changing drastically. Growers of beans, oilseed rape and fruit especially have reason to feel alarm at their disappearance.
So vital are they to the productivity of the fields, and so lethal the pressures on them, that farmers are having to import captive-bred reinforcements, many of them southern-European species raised in Slovakia. The total annual influx is reckoned at some 100,000 nests, each containing a queen and 200 workers. These and other drastic measures are being taken to patch up the damage done to eco-systems, but it may be too late, read story here.
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