Back on Hive Watch - We Need to BEE Careful!

In this post I want to return to an environmental issue I explored in a couple of posts back in November, where I focused on the worrying evidence of bee declines and how this decline is commonly attributed to some methods of intensive management (bee-ing all of those naughty pesticides!). Although I did conclude that a range of factors have contributed to recent alarming declines, agricultural evolution and chemical usage are key factors.

A bee covered in pollen (Source: theguardian.com)

A recent article by the BBC sheds some interesting light on the bee decline issue in this respect, not only cementing this ecological change as a real issue but also relates the consequence back to the cause.

I'll explain what I mean. Globally, farmers have increased their use of pesticides...this has largely been done to help in the efforts to increase yields to meet the increasing demands of our growing world population...yet this increase in pesticide use seems to have contributed to the loss of our black and yellow friends...and with this loss, their is a loss of pollination services, which could actually leave us facing a potential food security crisis! So, in our human naivety, we may have actually reduced long-term yields in our attempts to increase them.

As this article highlights, a major reason behind this pollination capacity shortage is the increase in demand for biofuels, with crops such as oilseed rape being grown more widely across Europe for this purpose. These crops require high rates of pollination, and so even a suggested bee population recovery of 7% between 2005 and 2010 is not enough when considering biofuel feed crops increased their area by over 30% during the same period.

Bee hives in a field of oilseed rape - an ever-rarer site (Source: inhabitat.com)

The UK is at the epicentre of this issue, with only Moldova having a bigger honeybee shortage. Our position as a relative economic power within Europe makes this even more shocking. Action really needs to be taken now, as the UK and European agricultural sectors rely on it. Yields are hampered and crops are at risk with the current over-reliance on wild pollinators, which do not have sufficient capacity to provide the pollination services required.

Also highlighted in this article, and in the study by Tom Breeze and colleagues upon which it is fundamentally based, was the divergence between agricultural and environmental policies. If this pressing issue is to be resolved, linkages must be formed and simultaneous changes to both agricultural practices and environmental policies must be made. If business continues as usual, this partly agriculturally-driven environmental change will lead to a socioeconomic crisis...and who knows the environmental changes that may result from that?