Honey Bee Health

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention; if he will preserve his soul in patience for just a little longer I will come on to the point, but if I do not cover it in sufficient detail perhaps he will round it out later. To come back to the point I was making about whether the research that is supported will be pure or applied research, it is important to understand what mixture is likely. Since we have a pressing practical problem in this country of British honey bee colonies collapsing for one reason or another, it is important to understand why that is happening happens and to prioritise research that may help in understanding it. I recommend to the Minister a document entitled "Honey Bee Health Research Concepts", issued by the British Beekeepers Association, as a good starting point to show some of the questions to which we need answers. It might be helpful if the Minister would reassure hon. Members that a response is in the works, from her Department or the National Bee Unit, to the paper from the BBKA, which is one of the leading authorities. I understand that the BBKA presented the paper to the NBU a while ago and that a response has not so far been forthcoming; it would be right and proper to provide one. That brings me to my final point, which has been raised in interventions by the hon. Members for Wolverhampton, South-West and for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor)—the question of the £2.3 million or £2.4 million of additional money over two years for the National Bee Unit. There is a lack of clarity among the general public about how that money will be spent, and it would be helpful if the Minister were to put much more flesh on the bones. In the absence of detailed information, theories are going the rounds. The most current one, which may be behind the two interventions, is that the money will be spent on an increase in the number of bee inspectors, funded by the NBU, and that those inspectors will spend much of their time ferreting out unregistered beekeepers and inspecting their hives—there is nothing necessarily wrong with that—to get them registered on BeeBase, the Government's all-singing, all-dancing database of beekeepers. The reason why it is important for the Minister to clarify what is happening is that that analysis of how the money will be spent is creating a fair degree of concern among the beekeeping fraternity and, I think, more widely. I should own up at this point and say that I am a beekeeper. I am one of the small hobbyist beekeepers, so there is no financial interest to declare, or anything of that kind, but I have been a beekeeper for a great many years and may therefore be affected by what happens. I understand that historically the main purpose of bee inspection was, rightly, to find and deal with cases of notifiable diseases, such as American foul brood and European foul brood. That is clearly a sensible use of public funds and has been happening for many years—I think that the process was set up soon after the second world war. Increasing the number of bee inspectors will not necessarily help us in getting a large marginal improvement in the incidence of notifiable diseases; if it will help, perhaps the Minister will give us some figures. My reason for saying so is that the total annual number of cases of European and American foul brood combined is usually fewer than 500. If we spend £2.3 million to £2.4 million on reducing that number by, say, 10 per cent., that is a very high figure for cutting notifiable disease cases in Britain as a whole. We have a low-level background problem with foul brood, but it is not the burning issue, which is clearly the number of colonies that are dying. Most of the scientific research points the finger not at those two notifiable diseases, but at things such as varroa, which is not notifiable because it is pretty much endemic in this country now and which may play a much larger part. Why increase the number of bee inspectors, if not to deal with notifiable diseases? The suspicion is that it is to find beekeepers who are not registered on BeeBase and get them to register. If that is so, it seems an exceptionally expensive way of creating a mailing list, and, if that is the Government's intention, there must be better ways to do it. What was the Government's intention in creating and maintaining BeeBase in the first place? I hope that the Minister will forgive the degree of justifiable cynicism on both sides of the House about any project that involves a Minister saying, "I have got this great plan for a big database funded by the Government, which is going to be cheap and quick to organise." The history of most Government database projects is not that great. We need to understand the purpose of BeeBase. If we are trying to improve the state of honey bee health, we must first understand what is causing its collapse. If it is something to do with a combination of agricultural practice and climate change, for example, having a database and a mailing list of beekeepers will not make a blind bit of difference. In all probability, it is not just about those two factors, and there are things that beekeepers could and should be doing to improve standards of insect husbandry. If that is what we wish to achieve, having a socking great database of beekeepers is not necessarily an intelligent first step.