Buzz about town

What’s all the buzz about honeybees? These precious pollinators of fruits and vegetables are disappearing and threatening our food supply. Despite the awareness of the problem and the seriousness of the situation, why have we not solved the mystery?  Leila Sattary investigates

Over the past five years, an unexplained phenomenon has been affecting honeybee hives. Millions of bees have disappeared but beekeepers fail to find their little dead bodies. Given the importance of our yellow and black striped friends to our food supply, scientists, beekeepers and farmers are trying to find out why honeybees are dying in record numbers.

Colony collapse disorder (CCD), where honeybee populations decrease dramatically, was first noticed in 2006 in North America Western Europe. The abundance of four common species of bees in the US has dropped by 96% in just a few decades. Scientists believe that the diminishing bee population will have devastating implications for the pollination of wild and farmed plants. Bees pollinate 90% of the world’s commercial plants and they are the start of a food chain which sustains wild birds and animals. A healthy bee population is absolutely essential for the world’s ecosystem. There is no Plan B – we have to figure out what is causing the dramatic decline in the bee population.

The causes of CCD are not known. Initially certain pesticides were blamed but studies showed that there were no demonstrable differences in bee behaviour or mortality when pesticides like neonicotinoids were used on crops. France and Germany have banned the pesticide as a precaution despite the lack of evidence to showing any link between neonicotinoids and CCD. There is an active campaign in the UK that appeals to the public to sign government petitions to ban neonicotinoids. While we do use lots of chemicals in agriculture, there are a lot of us to feed and crop yields would be too small without them. Pesticides have been tested for safety and, most importantly, there is no substantive evidence to show that neonicotinoids actually makes any difference to bee activity. France and Germany are yet to find an increase in their bee populations as a result of the ban. Neonicotinoids are derived from the nicotine in tobacco plants and it protects them from pests naturally. This misguided activism actually suppresses progress to solving the CCD problem. This is a classic example of bad communication of science and the public getting on the bandwagon to save bees but without an understanding of CCD there is nowhere for them to direct their efforts.

There are many other theories to explain our dwindling honeybee populations – global warming, habitat disturbance, intensive farming, reduction in generic diversity, parasites. However, it is still not clear which of these is causing colony collapse disorder, or whether it is a combination of factors or something else entirely.

The one positive thing about CCD is that at least it has focused attention on bees. Most people now know that bees play a vital role in our food production but the recent media attention combined with a lack of scientific understanding is only causing more confusion. Every month there is different headline claiming that the explanation to CCD has been discovered. There are a number of science public engagement projects underway in the UK to continue to raise awareness of honeybees but without a scientific answer to the issue. Surely we should be focusing on finding the answer rather than telling everyone that there is a problem that is yet to be solved. The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council is coordinating £10 million worth of funding in their “insect pollinators initiative” which will obviously help but I am shocked that CCD is not yet understood and that it might potentially take hundreds of scientific studies to get there. With all of the scientific knowledge at our disposal, surely the scientific community can figure out the problem and find a solution. When you compare with some of the great scientific advances in recent decades, you would think something like figuring out why bees are disappearing would be a trivial task.