Securing a better future for bees will need all interested organisations to be mindful of all the evidence and focus on the bigger picture, rather than use select research and expert opinion to sensationalise issues and drive their own agendas, says the NFU.
The New Year started with the headlines ‘Farmers face a £1.8bn sting from death of the honeybee’ (Daily Express) and ‘British crops to feel sting in big honeybee collapse’ (The Times). Journalists had picked-up on research done at the University of Reading that basically showed that as areas of crops requiring some pollination (particularly oilseeds) had expanded across the EU, the numbers of honeybees had not.
The point of the research, in showing the growing gap between demand for pollination services and the availability of managed pollinators (honeybees), was to highlight the importance of wild bees in providing pollination ‘security’. But this point was lost on the journalists, who preferred to cobble together sensational and inaccurate doom and gloom stories about bees and farming.
Journalists ignored the critical fact that to date there is no evidence that there is a wide scale lack of pollination impacting on crop yields. It is really important for us to identify gaps, but it is equally important that before we take action, we understand to what extent the gaps matter.
Interestingly, on the subject of honeybees, recent research from the University of Exeter has shown that market forces are the strongest driver of changes in honeybee numbers – basically the high costs of beekeeping and the low profits from selling honey drives beekeepers out of the profession and our stocks of bees fall as a result. It is remarkable that the UK has one of the lowest self-sufficiency figures for honey in the EU – we only produce about 15-20 per cent of the honey we consume, whereas the average across the EU is over 60 per cent. What does this tell us about consumer support for British honeybees?
This research also showed that the strongest driver of honeybee colony decline is the combination of the parasitic mite Varroa and viruses, which will come as no surprise to beekeepers. Neonicotinoid insecticides were also looked at, but the study of existing evidence showed these were not a driver of honeybee declines.
Despite such research, campaigning organisations continue to misuse dramatic figures about honeybee losses as a reason to bang the drum about pesticides and the impacts of ‘intensive’ farming.
Recently published research on the impact of neonicotinoids on bees, like the work done at the Universities of Sussex and Stirling, adds interesting pieces to a complex puzzle, but it does no show that neonicotinoids are causing unacceptable harm to bees in and around agricultural fields, and is very far from demonstrating that neonicotinoids are causing any widespread decline of bee populations.
While it is good that researchers are using field-realistic doses, with bees fed on pollen and nectar containing residues of neonicotinoids at levels similar to those found in the pollen and nectar of treated crops, these experiments are still based on containing bees in a laboratory-situation and feeding them exclusively a diet of pesticide treated food. This artificial situation is clearly very different to that experienced by bees freely foraging on a range of foods within fields and surrounding habitats. As such there is still a big question mark over how representative such studies are of the real-life situation facing bees.
Last month a three day conference in London on ‘The impact of pesticides on bee health’ bought together research experts from around the world to discuss the current evidence. At the end of the three days it was still very clear that the evidence is far from conclusive. Despite attempts to agree a common understanding of what the available research tells us, no consensus could be reached about whether or not pesticides are impacting on bee health out in the real world. In fact the experts weren’t even able to agree what evidence would be needed to prove that pesticides are harmful. However there did appear to be some consensus that the available evidence does not show that pesticides are the cause of any insect declines.
Going forward it is this kind of broad analysis, balanced perspective and thorough understanding of the evidence-base that is going to prove absolutely vital to producing a strong and successful National Pollinator Strategy.