Honey Bee Health

I knew that I should not have given way. To finish my point, I propose that we have an informal version of a parliamentary swear box, and anybody who makes a pun will have to put a pound in it. I suggest that we put the proceeds in the capable hands of the British Beekeepers Association, whose representatives are in the Public Gallery watching us. At the end of the debate, they can put the proceeds towards bee research, so we will not have suffered in vain and will know that the money has gone to a good cause. As I have said, important progress has been made since our last debate, which is why I want to hold this debate. There is something to celebrate: put simply, a cross-party consensus has emerged that bee research is important, that it needs to be looked at more closely and that it needs better funding. It is worth stopping to congratulate everybody involved on the campaign. We should also congratulate the Minister on bringing home the bacon—hon. Members will notice that I did not use any honey puns there. As I have said, we have something to celebrate. We have £10 million of research funding from a variety of sources, including two different research councils and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. We also have an additional £2.4 million over two years, which will go to the National Bee Unit. Those are real achievements, and everybody should be grateful to the Government for having listened to the points that were made and a little proud of the fact that the campaign was launched and has been successful. But—this is a big but—the topic is too important for us to leave it at that. In our last debate, points were rightly made on both sides of the political divide about the importance of honey bee activity to our national economy—particularly our agricultural economy—and to our national environment and ecology. It is worth repeating that honey bees are probably the single most important source of insect pollination in the British isles, although there are other pollinators. We all understand that moths, butterflies, hoverflies and bumblebees play a part, but honey bees are crucial, particularly in the early season; indeed, they still play a large part even in mid and later summer. The reason for that is straightforward: they are more active in the early season, when the weather is cooler, and there are an awful lot more of them. A typical honey bee hive will have several bees in it over the winter, and that means that it will start from a stronger position than a bumblebee nest, which will start with a solitary queen and certainly no more than one or two bees. By the middle of the summer, a honey bee hive can easily have 40,000 bees in it, and a strong colony may have even more. At the height of its powers, a bumblebee nest will have a couple of hundred bumblebees in it. Although other pollinators are important, honey bees are the main event and are the most important. What led us to debate this issue last time, and what led me to seek this debate, is not only an economic imperative, but an ecological imperative. Honey bees pollinate not only economically important crops, but an awful lot of the wildflowers and trees that we take for granted as part of the British countryside and which contribute enormously to the landscape that we all know and love. Clearly, therefore, honey bees are important, but their health has been suffering. It must be said that it has not suffered as badly as it has in some other countries around the world. There are horrifying stories from America of commercial beekeepers suffering the near complete loss of hundreds of colonies in the space of a few weeks. Losses have not happened on quite the same scale here, thank goodness, but they have still been significant. Last year, the losses were something like triple the normal seasonal average, and it is important to understand why. It is important that we do not rely only on research into honey bee health conducted in other countries. Although some of the factors highlighted in research that is done in, say, the American environment apply to Britain, there are important differences. Our climate is obviously different from that in many other countries, because our island is comparatively wet and chilly. Our agricultural practices are also different, so there may not be direct comparisons. Equally importantly, our indigenous honey bees—albeit that they have been quite heavily mongrelised by successive waves of imported bees—have evolved to suit the local environment and may therefore not be identical to, or may indeed differ significantly from, indigenous honey bees in other countries. It is therefore important for us to have our own research so that we can understand the particular combination of factors affecting honey bee health in this country. Although there is not as yet any cold scientific certainty about what is causing colony losses, there is an emerging hypothesis, and it seems likely that we are dealing with a combination of several factors. Those factors may include agricultural practices, diseases and parasites such as varroa and even climate change and the weather—all sorts of factors could be involved. There is no certainty, only an emerging consensus, and that consensus is still very much open to challenge, which is why work on the issue is so necessary.