Short-haired bumblebee coming home

British conservationists have drawn up plans to repopulate the countryside with a species of bumblebee that was declared extinct here nearly a decade ago.

A queen short-haired bumblebee

The short-haired bumblebee officially died out in the UK in 2000, but descendents of the doomed community live on in small pockets of New Zealand, where they were taken to pollinate red clover in the late 19th century.

If the project is a success, it will mark the first time bees have been reintroduced to any country after the indigenous population died out.

Bumblebees and honeybees have been in decline nationwide in recent years. Bumblebees have suffered a dramatic loss of natural habitat, including wild flower and hay meadows, while disease and parasites have wiped out colonies of honeybees.

Scientists at the Bumblebee Conservation Trust will visit MacKenzie County in New Zealand's south island this autumn, and spend up to two months hunting and capturing queen bees as they emerge from hibernation. The area is one of the last strongholds of short-haired bumblebees in New Zealand.

Any queens that are netted will be reared in captivity on the island, by feeding them nectar and pollen collected from a variety of flowers. The queens will have mated before being caught, and can lay enough eggs to produce a colony of hundreds of sterile worker bees. Details of the project are unveiled at the British Science Association festival in Guildford today.

Scientists hope some of the bumblebee colonies raised in captivity will grow large enough to produce a second generation of queen bees. These will be flown back to Britain during the hibernation season and could be released into their new habitat in Dungeness in Kent as early as next spring.

"It's going to be difficult, but this might be our last chance," said Ben Davill, director of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust.

The short-haired bumblebee is one of two species to be declared extinct in Britain in the past 70 years, the other being Cullum's bumblebee. The insects have been hit hard by changes in agriculture, which have seen crop farmers replace nitrogen-replacing clover leys with fertiliser and hay meadows with silage.

The majority of Britain's remaining 24 bumblebee species are able to feed on a wide range of flowers, but the short-haired bumblebee is a more fussy eater and only visits a few types of flower that produce high quality pollen.

Nikki Gammans, who is running the reintroduction project, has been working with local farmers, landowners and the public in Kent to restore the habitat in Dungeness by ensuring it has enough flowers to sustain the bees when they are released. "We are doing our best for this and all bumblebee species and hopefully they can do the rest," said Gammans.

While this initiative is welcomed by all who care about our ecology, it is not going to solve the bigger bee problem, as these are a specialist species that can only survive in a limited number of spaces. We are still awaiting the answer to the desperate honey-bee decline, and no solution is readily available.

Bee plight taken seriously at last

Einstein said that if bees vanish from the planet, then mankind will follow them in three years time. At long last, and after much campaigning, the UK Government is doing something about the desperate decline of the UK bee population.

On 21 April, the UK government announced that £10m will be spent on research for pollinators - bees, butterflies and other insects - to see if the decline in UK populations can be halted.

The government is contributing £2m with the rest coming from the Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council, the Natural Environment Research Council, the Wellcome Trust and the Scottish Government.

"Bees pollinate crops worth potentially hundreds of millions of pounds to British agriculture." said Tim Lovett, president of the British Beekeepers' Association.

"Take a meat pizza - without the bees, all you'd be left with is the bread base, as in many countries cows are fed on pollinated crops like alfafa."

And yet in recent years a series of diseases has affected bee populations in this country and elsewhere. In many cases we neither know the causes of these illnesses or the cures for them, but they are having a terrible effect on bee populations.

"We have moved bees across the world, changing their living conditions and spreading diseases," says Bob Maurer, a Reigate beekeeper, "and good bee management is now essential."

'Eleventh hour'

While beekeepers are glad that the government has recognized the scale of the problem, they say there has historically been a lack of funding for bee research. Vital staff have been lost, and their skills take time to replace.

Mr Lovett points out that the vast majority of hives are kept by amateur beekeepers, with just a few hives each; and if dying bee colonies become too widespread they will simply give up their hobby.

"This announcement has come at the 11th hour," says Mr Lovett. "We all just hope the research will come in time."

Pesticide link to honeybee deaths

The Soil Association has urged the government to ban pesticides linked to honeybee deaths around the world.

The chemicals are widely used in UK agriculture but have been banned as a precaution in four other European countries. Last week the Italian government issued an immediate suspension after it accepted that the pesticides were implicated in killing honeybees, joining France, Germany and Slovenia.

Peter Melchett, the Soil Association's policy director, said: "It is typical of the lax approach to pesticide regulation in the UK that we look like being one of the last of the major farming countries in the EU to wake up to the threat to our honeybees."

The pesticides, known as neonicotinoids, are approved to kill insects on a range of crops in the UK including oilseed rape, barley and sugar beet. Their use on oilseed rape is of particular concern to beekeepers as the crop's yellow flower is very attractive to honeybees.

Germany suspended sales of the pesticides in May after 700 beekeepers along the Rhine reported that two-thirds of their bees had died following the application of clothianidin. In France, imidacloprid has been banned on sunflowers since 1999 and as a sweetcorn treatment since 2003, after a third of honeybees were wiped out. The Soil Association is calling on the environment secretary, Hilary Benn, to ban the pesticides in a letter sent today.

Imidacloprid and clothianidin are produced by a division of the chemical manufacturer Bayer. Imidacloprid is its bestselling pesticide and is used in 120 countries. Bayer has always maintained that neonicotinoids are safe for bees if correctly applied. "Extensive internal and international scientific studies have confirmed that neonicotinoids do not present a hazard to bees," Utz Klages, a spokesman for Bayer CropScience, said recently.

The National Farmers' Union said it was opposed to any ban on pesticides. Paul Chambers, NFU plant health adviser, said: "Banning pesticides using the precautionary principle is not based on good science. Pests and disease are the problems facing honeybees in the UK. The government needs to put more money into researching honeybee health."

The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs also attributed the decline in honeybee populations to a variety of factors. A Defra spokesman said: "There are no plans to ban pesticides."

Beekeepers worldwide have reported catastrophic losses of from 30% to 90% of their honeybee colonies during the last two years. Two-thirds of all major crops rely on pollination, mainly by honeybees.

At Claines Canna we have been monitoring the pollinators feeding on the Canna collection, and in the vegetable plot, and we are of the opinion that the majority of pollinators this year have been bumble bees and wasps.

Fifth of bee colonies killed

British honey bees have been decimated by bad weather, stress and disease, with more than one in five colonies thought to have been killed off over the winter, according to the government and the British Beekeepers' Association.

Annual colony loss figures have doubled in the past four years, from just over 6% in 2003 to nearly 12% in 2007. With 10% of colonies inspected so far this year, losses are running at over 21%, approaching the decline in the US and parts of continental Europe last year.

Tim Lovett, chair of the beekeepers' association, said: "The rate of loss is important - if it climbs to 25%-30% then we are in serious trouble; if it were to go up to 60%, then we will be out of beekeeping in just a few years."

The food and farming minister, Lord Rooker, has said that without emergency measures the honey bee is likely to disappear from Britain, threatening the £165m-a-year fruit industry.

The UK has about 240,000 colonies, run by 44,000 mostly amateur keepers. Yesterday the government said the investigation of bee colony losses would get higher priority, and keepers with significant losses should contact a local inspector.

The National Bee Unit said the poor spring had extended the bees' confinement and the stress had probably let pathogens spread.

In the US, 36% of colonies died last year, largely due to "colony collapse disorder", thought to be linked to the varroa mite and other factors. CCD has spread to France, Germany and Italy but has not been confirmed by government in Britain.

Source: John Vidal
The Guardian,
Friday May 9 2008

Pollution threatening bees

Bees under threat as pollution means flowers are losing their natural scent. As Canna growers we rely on honey bees to pollinate most of our flowers.

They are a quintessential sign of summer - the scent of blossom on the wind and the buzzing of bees. But scientists claim that both are now under threat - as flowers lose their natural scent due to pollution.

A new study suggests that gases from car emission are dulling floral aromas and disrupting insect life.

Gases from car emission are dulling floral aromas and disrupting insect life, says study

Researchers claim pollution is dramatically cutting the distance travelled by the scent molecules of plants.

This is preventing flowers from attracting bees and other insects needed to pollinate them.

As a consequence, the numbers of insects are dramatically dwindling as they struggle to located the nectar off which they feed.

Professor Jose Fuentes, of the University of Virginia, which carried out the research, said: "Scent molecules produced by flowers in a less polluted environment could travel for roughly 1,000 to 1,2000 metres.

"But today they may only travel 200 to 300 metres. "This makes it increasingly difficult for bees and other insects to locate the flowers."

The study, funded by the US National Science Foundation, examined the smell given off by snapdragons.

They found that the scent molecules are volatile and quickly bond with pollutants, such as ozone and nitrate radicals - formed mainly from vehicle emissions. This chemically alters the molecules so that they no longer smell like flowers.

As a result, bees and other insects - which rely on the scent of flowers to locate them - fail to do so and do not get enough food.

The ability of the insects to attract mates and repel enemies is also impeded, scientists fear.

While the flowers, which rely on insects to pollinate them, also suffer. Scientists have found that bees, which pollinate most of the world's crops, are in unprecedented decline in Britain and across much of the globe.

At least a quarter of America's 2.5million honey bee colonies have been wiped out by colony collapse disorder (CCD) where hives are found to be suddenly deserted.

Although the mysterious phenomenon has yet to appear in the UK, insect numbers have been declining here too.

Agricultural minister Lord Rooker has warned that "the honey bee population could be wiped out in 10 years".

The scientists do not believe pollution is necessarily the cause of CCD but they claim it is making it harder for many insects to survive.

Research shows it is not just insects that are affected by the actions of humans. The number of birds visiting our gardens and parks has plunged by a fifth in four years, a survey has revealed.

The decline follows a succession of mild winters and the growing popularity of paving and decking, which robs gardens of valuable plants and insects.

Changes in farming techniques, a decline in hedgerows and increased used of pesticides may also have hit bird numbers.

Hornets hit France and could reach Britain

Swarms of giant hornets renowned for their vicious stings and skill at massacring honeybees have settled in France. And there are now so many of the insects that entomologists fear it will just be a matter of time before they cross to Britain.

Global warming has largely been blamed for the survival and spread of the Asian Hornet, Vespa velutina, which is thought to have arrived in France from the Far East in a consignment of Chinese pottery in late 2004. Thousands of football-shaped hornet nests are now dotted all over the forests of Aquitaine, the south-western region of France hugely popular with British tourists.

"Their spread across French territory has been like lightning," said Jean Haxaire, the entomologist who originally identified the new arrival. He said he had recently seen 85 nests in the 40-odd miles which separate the towns of Marmande and Podensac, in the Lot et Garonne department where the hornets were first spotted.

The hornets can grow to up to 1.8in and, with a wingspan of 3in, are renowned for inflicting a bite which has been compared to a hot nail entering the body. A handful can destroy a nest of 30,000 bees in just a couple of hours — a major concern among the beekeeping industry.

"The problems are not necessarily public health ones, but ecological ones. These hornets can cause immense damage to beehives," said Mr Haxaire. The hornets are renowned for feeding their young with the larvae of other social insects, including bees, whose nests they break into and ransack. The French beekeeping industry has already been decimated by pesticides and long, hot summers. Honey production from the 1.3 million hives run by 80,000 beekeepers has been decreasing annually — down by 60 per cent in south-western France during the past decade.

A spokesman for the French National Been Surveillance Unit said the bee death rate during winter was now up to six in ten. As a result France has to import some 25,000 tons of honey annually. "The arrival of these hornets has made the situation considerably worse," the spokesman added. "The future of our entire industry is at stake."

Yesterday, there was concern that it may not take long before the Asian hornet makes its way to Britain. "There's no doubt that these hornets are heading north and will probably find their way to Britain at some point," said Stuart Hine, manager of the Insect Information Service at London's Natural History Museum. "Climate change certainly means they can cope with European summers. However, they would still have difficulty coping with our winter frosts."

While some 40 people a year die from hornet stings — mainly because of allergic reactions — Claire Villement, of France's Natural History Museum, said there was no need for a "national panic about killer wasps".

Mrs Villement said: "The legend that three bites from a hornet can kill you are totally false. People can still enjoy their picnics in the countryside."

Honey bees in England are already under threat from colony-collapse disorder, and this latest threat is not at all welcome. We have noticed in the last few years that we now have more wasps than honey bees fertilising our Cannas. Wasps are unpleasant creatures, and I much prefer sharing our Cannas with the honey-bee than with them.

Haagen-Dazs saves the bees

If 40% of your products were dependent on berries, fruits and nuts, you'd fork over a cool quarter of a million dollars to make sure those things were still coming, too. Haagen-Dazs, whose ice creams are flavored with fruits, nuts and berries, has launched a campaign to raise $250,000 for research into the loss of honeybees, which are crucial for cross-pollination of fruit and nut trees. According to the USDA, diseases and pests have caused a 30% loss of the approximately 2.5 million managed colonies.

Brit apiarists want £8m to save honeybees

British apiarists are demanding the government stump £8m for a research project aimed at saving the nation's honeybees from extinction - something they say will happen within 10 years if cash is not found to investigate "new treatments and drugs" for ailing populations.

Tim Lovett, president of the British Beekeeping Association, explained: "Beekeeping is still reeling from the varroa mite, which carries a number of viruses and which devastated thousands of hives across the country when it reached Britain 10 years ago. Now there is a real danger that colony collapse disease - which has wiped out 80 per cent of bees in parts of the US - will appear in this country. Unless we develop effective protection, there could then be massive losses of bees across the country."

Colony collapse disease, aka Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), has manifested itself Stateside as colonies' older bees died, "leaving behind the queen and young workers not yet ready to forage for pollen and nectar and insufficient in number to maintain the colony".

The cause is unknown, and various theories point to harmful pesticides, increased solar radiation, falling queen fertility, unauthorised bee treatments, mobile phone mast radiation or the single-celled fungus Nosema ceranae.

Whatever the cause, the implications of CCD are serious. Honeybees "pollinate ingredients in about a third of the food consumed in the US", prompting ice cream manufacturer Häagen-Dazs to cough up a $250,000 research grant to university researchers in California and Pennsylvania to probe the problem. British ministers, however, have insisted they have no cash to fund a British bee-saving programme. According to the Guardian, there are roughly 250,000 honeybee hives in the UK and "a recent estimate by the Department for Farming, Environment and Rural Affairs revealed that bees contribute £165m a year to the economy through their pollination of fruit trees, field beans, and other crops". Although the farming minister, Lord Rooker, admitted to the House of Lords that without action "the honeybee population could be wiped out in 10 years", Lovett said the minister had written to the British Beekeeping Association "saying there was no money available for a research programme".

Lovett said: "The pollinating of farmers' crops carried out by our bees is provided free of charge. Over five years that work raises £800m for the nation. We are asking for an £8m research programme to save our bees to run for five years. That is one per cent of the money our bees generate."

The British Beekeeping Association now plans to lobby MPs, start a letter-writing campaign, and take its concerns directly to the House of Commons with a protest meeting.

Silence Of The Bees

The summer sound of buzzing bees is set to become rarer due to mystery plagues hitting hives around the world. The crisis threatens a disaster worse than global warming because bees are so vital to the food chain, experts warned yesterday.

Environment Minister Lord Rooker has already warned that, at present rates, honeybees could be extinct in Britain within a decade. Yet ministers are refusing to pump more money into research to find cures.

The looming disaster is detailed in Silence Of The Bees, a documentary due to be aired on the National Geographic TV channel next Tuesday. John Chapple, chairman of the London Beekeepers Association, believes the potential consequences could not be worse. He said: “Without bees, life as we know it will not exist.”

Scientists warned that the bees’ disappearance will hit a third of the world’s food crops, especially fruit and vegetables. Apples, soybeans, onions, cabbage and most berries and nuts are among 90 crops at risk if there are no honeybees to help pollinate them. Also threatened are plants used for cloth, such as cotton and flax, and those for animal feed, including oilseed rape and field beans.

Less feed for animals would affect meat and dairy products, pushing up prices and lowering availability. The impact would be felt up the food chain by birds which feed on fruit and by the predators which eat the birds.

Hives are being wiped out in America by Colony Collapse Disorder – and no one really knows what causes it. Tim Lovett, chairman of the British Beekeepers Association, said: “I hope we don’t have CCD here but, just like rock ’n’ roll and hamburgers, whatever affects America usually comes here. “In a month or two we will carry out a survey of our members to assess winter losses.”

Last winter a small number of beekeepers lost all their colonies, but losses overall were just above the norm. Mr Lovett said bees are under pressure from several sources – most notably the varroa mite, which is suspected of carrying a range of different viruses. These include the Aids-like Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus, believed to have wiped out huge numbers of bees.

In America up to 90 per cent of commercial bee colonies have been struck by CCD, or Mary Celeste Syndrome, over the past three years. Hundreds of colonies, up to 30,000 strong, began to die out with no explanation in 2005. One honey producer in Pennsylvania went from 1,000 colonies to fewer than eight in a matter of months.

CCD is so devastating that it has been compared with foot and mouth disease. It has spread in Europe to Spain, Portugal, Croatia, Greece, Germany and Poland, and also into South America. IAPV attacks the bees’ immune system and there is no cure, raising fears that it is only a matter of time before global crops are decimated, the scientists warned.

But Richard Ball, the Governent’s national bee inspector, denied the problems are as bad as claimed. He said: ”We do not think CCD is an issue in the UK yet.”

“Without bees, life as we know it will not exist.” Even if it is not as catastrophic as that quote implies, for those of us who rely on pollinators to produce next years new seedlings, this looks like it can have a bad effect. Maybe, we could all ensure with our general garden planting that there is a good supply of food available to the bee, through from early spring to late Autumn. This will improve the chances of survival for the unaffected hives.

In the meantime, the theories around what is the cause abound. Many people are putting it down to genetically modified crops, which abound in the USA. Others are attributing the cause to the widespread use of mobile phones.

Helping the pollinators

We have not had a good seed harvest this year, and we have automatically blamed the terrible summer we have endured. However, even if we have flowers in bloom we still need pollinators to assist when we are not there! Are we doing enough to ensure that we get enough bumblebees living by the collection? We have started planning ahead for next year to try and ensure we maximise natures natural pollinators.

Bees need flowers for sustenance, and our Cannas need bees for pollination. But it's important all the flowers we grow, not only cannas, provide the food that bees need. It's vital that we provide flowers throughout the bumblebee's life-cycle, straight through from March to September. Here in the temperate north, cannas start their flowering season in June, carrying on flowering until the frosts arrive, normally late October or early November, so that provides the goodies from early summer onwards. So, as canna growers, our gardens also need to provide flowers that will supply them with food from March through to June, when the Cannas kick-in.

The old Foliage Group varieties are particularly favoured by natures pollinators

So, the secret will be to try and keep continuous flowering, and it's also a good idea to have at least two nectar- or pollen-rich plants in flower at any one time during this spring period. The nectar feeds the adult bee, while the pollen is collected to feed the young. Of course, the more flowers you have, the more attractive your garden is to bees, so you can never have too many!

Most double flowers, especially modern roses, are of little use, because they're too elaborate. Some are bred without male and female parts, while others have so many petals bees can't get to the nectar and pollen to collect it. This is the main reason why Cannas are popular with many bees. So for spring we will have bluebell, daffodil, flowering cherry, forget-me-not, lavender, lily-of-the-valley, rhododendron, rosemary, viburnum, and thrift. For the early summer we have the early Cannas, fennel, lavender, passion flowers, thyme and vines, and then onwards there are always several hundred canna flowers open at once, so that should do the trick.

Let you know how we get on next year...