Bee un-happy

When the time came to step up and do the decent thing our Government chose not to follow the evidence and protect bees. Disappointing, but then you don't expect much in the way of common sense from the Palace of Westminster, do you? 
But it's nice to see that a Select Committee can look at a problem and see it for what it is. The Environmental Audit Committee has been looking at the impact of pesticide use on bees and other pollinating insects (read its report here) and says: “Defra seems to be taking an extraordinarily complacent approach  to protecting bees given the vital free service that pollinators provide to our economy."
Just as it took an extraordinarily complacent approach to the threat of imported tree diseases. After doing nothing for years it now has the huge problem of ash dieback to deal with.
The committee, with members from all parties, says a "growing body of peer-reviewed research" suggests that the use of one group of insecticides, neonicotinoids,  is having an especially damaging impact on pollinators. Neonicotinoids are put on crops like oilseed rape, maize and sugar beet as well as being sold for garden use, so there's a lot of the stuff around.
The MPs want an immediate moratorium on use of neonicotinoids until the science can show for sure whether they are harmful or not, which seems sensible. The committee's chairman says "there is no justification for people continuing to use these products on their Dahlias when they could be having a detrimental effect on pollinator populations".

Yellow peril?

Do you care about bees? Of course you do, so you'll probably have noticed that bees - and other pollinating insects - are  scarcer now than they were years ago.

And this could be one reason why. It looks like tiny amounts of pesticide in pollen grains collected by hard-working bumblebees could be poisoning their colonies.

A study at the University of Stirling has found that when bumblebee nests and their queens were exposed to one of a group of pesticides called the neonicotinoids they grew more slowly and colonies raise fewer queen bees. Neonicotinoids are put onto seeds and then spread through a growing plant, which means that some of the chemical is found in pollen and nectar; they are often used on oilseed rape crops.
The levels of the chemical the bees were exposed to was relatively low - just what you'd commonly find in the UK countryside. The researchers say that foraging bees can gather poisoned pollen from as far away as a mile from their nest and bring it back to their nest, where it is fed to grubs that should go on to become queens.
Queen bees establish new colonies in spring, so fewer of them has a big impact on bumblebee populations. Other researchers have highlighted the impact of neonicotinoids on bees and other pollinators and campaigners are calling on the government to ban their us.

Plight of the bumblebee

Sorry about the dire pun, but I couldn't resist it. An iron-hard freeze here this morning, so very much still winter but we are getting close to when queen bumblebees first emerge from hibernation here.

Anyone who cares about these things has been worrying about the decline in the populations of bees and other pollinators for years now, but  it's good to see that other people are cottoning on to the connection between good harvests and buzzy things with wings.

It's good to see that the farming media is reporting on the story and giving space to an academic, Prof Simon Potts of the University of Reading, to tell its audience that: "The value of pollination services to agriculture in the UK is about £440 million per year, with the most valuable contributions made by wild bees."

It's difficult to avoid sounding preachy on this subject, so I'll borrow from David Attenborough instead. He says: ‘If we and the rest of the back-boned animals were to disappear overnight, the rest of the world would get on pretty well. But if the invertebrates were to disappear, the world’s ecosystems would collapse.’