Honey Bee Health

I am grateful to be speaking under your chairmanship, Mr. Benton. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) on securing this important debate. I thank the hon. Members for Castle Point (Bob Spink) and for Dunfermline and West Fife (Willie Rennie) for avoiding the temptation to drone on and for giving me the chance to speak on this important issue. I think that we are all united in wanting a return to boom and buzz. Surely my hon. Friend will agree that that pun is so bad that it should keep the British Beekeepers Association in funds for the foreseeable future. Even studying Virgil—the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife gave a good Virgilian translation about the industry and work load of bees—did not give me a love of bees. I did not learn to love the bee until I became the hon. Member for Wantage—well, the Member for Wantage; I must not get above myself—and discovered that Rowse Honey was located in Wallingford in my constituency. All hon. Members will know about Rowse Honey, even if they do not realise it, because it produces a third of the honey found on supermarket shelves. It imports honey from all over the world and blends it. Rowse invented the plastic honey pot that can be squeezed. It now employs 170 people and is, incidentally, a fantastic company within the community, giving a great deal of money to local charity. I pay tribute to Richard Rowse, who recently left the company, and David Bondi, its new managing director. Rowse has put its money and profile where its honey jars are, as it were, by donating £100,000 to the research of Professor Ratnieks, which the hon. Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) ably summarised. It has also run a campaign to save the honey bee by making it prominent on all Rowse honey jars. I need not detain this knowledgeable House full of apiarists with facts about the importance of honey bees. Suffice it to say that an estimated one third of the food that we eat depends on pollination. That includes a range of important fruits such as apples, pears, peaches, strawberries and blackberries and vegetables such as carrots, broccoli and onions. Some £165 million of the food market—I suspect that that is an underestimate—consists of produce that depends on honey bees for pollination. Almonds have been mentioned. Eighty per cent. of our almonds come from the United States. Every year, bees are trucked from Florida to California to pollinate those almonds. Without bees, we would have no almonds. Bees also produce 1.4 million tonnes of honey, of which we in Britain consume 6,000 to 7,000 tonnes. There has been a steep decline in beekeeping. If we were debating this subject in 1909 instead of 2009, we would be able to refer to 1 million hives in this country; if we were debating it in the 1950s, we would be able to refer to 400,000. Today we can refer to only 274,000. The decline is precipitate. In the winter of 2007-08, it is estimated that the collapse in hives was around 25 per cent. We would normally expect a 4 per cent. decline during the winter and a 10 per cent. decline during a very bad winter. I think that I am right in saying that 25 per cent. is unprecedented. In some areas of the United States, the collapse has been as much as 36 per cent. The decline in hives has led to a new crime of which hon. Members may be aware: bee rustling. A hive now costs about £250, so it is more common than ever for hives to be stolen. In a recent case in Shropshire, 18 hives were stolen, to the value of £5,000. We are discussing, of course, the phenomenon of colony collapse disorder. The hon. Member for Norwich, North mentioned the varroa mite, a well understood parasite that attaches itself to bees and infects them. He rightly referred to Professor Ratnieks' research into breeding hygienic bees that clear up after themselves and remove dead bees from their hives, making it harder for the varroa mite to breed, but there is also a concern about the possible effect of pesticides on bees. One of the features of colony collapse disorder is that one does not come to the hive and find a lot of dead bees; one comes to the hive and finds no bees. They have not necessarily been killed by the varroa mite. There is a theory that pesticides destroy bees' brains, making it harder for them to find their way home. It is interesting that urban bees are doing better than rural bees. Some people posit the theory that that is because there are fewer pesticides in an urban environment. There is also the stress of travel. It is not just the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife who finds it stressful to travel with bees—bees themselves, as he mentioned, find travel stressful. Bees are moved around a great deal, particularly in the United States. There is also, of course, the phenomenon of climate change. Research is essential. I welcome the Government's increase in funding. I note that when I posted my concerns about funding levels on my blog, it took the Government two days to increase funding. I am hoping that after this speech, funding will have doubled again by the end of the week; I know that cause and effect are present. As so many substantial points have been made throughout this debate, I want to make only one. It concerns the pace at which funding can be applied. I understand the need for peer review and the need to ensure that projects funded by the Government are properly assessed, but I refer once more to Professor Ratnieks, the man of the moment, our first professor of apiary. As I understand it, he needs about £650,000. He is running four projects, collectively called the Sussex plan, that are designed to provide stop-gap measures for beekeepers, to find the reasons behind colony collapse disorder and perhaps even to find a cure. His fourth project has been planned out, but it desperately needs funding. The delay engendered by peer review means that the projects funded by Government money will not be under way until autumn 2011. I am happy for the Minister to correct me, but that is what I have been told. Given the urgency of the research needed, my plea to her—the one point that I can add to the excellent points made by hon. Members throughout this debate—is to ensure that the funding comes on stream as soon as possible, so that that urgent research can be undertaken as quickly as possible.