Honey Bee Health

It is a pleasure to serve under your able chairmanship, Mr. Benton. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) for his persistence on the issue and his incredibly well informed and fluent speech. Other Members' contributions have been well informed as well. We have mentioned puns, jokes and so on. One problem that we have come up against in the campaign is that the issue is simply not taken seriously. It is important to say that we have much to celebrate in terms of the additional funding provided, but the campaign had to succeed against a sense that the issue was trivial. The hon. Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) poured scorn on my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) when he raised this issue. However, my hon. Friend was right on the bees and on the banks, although he was not taken seriously when he first spoke about the bees. I remember meeting Lord Rooker a few years ago. I should say that I have a tremendous amount of time for Lord Rooker, but when I spoke to him and his civil servants about this issue, I got the sense that they were listening semi-sympathetically but actually thought it was all a bit silly really. So I am very pleased that we have got to this situation, and great credit must be paid to the Minister and others involved in her Department that the issue has now rightly been taken seriously. It is important to state how vital a role the national association, the British Beekeepers Association, has played, but local organisations have also played a key role. My hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Willie Rennie) referred to his local beekeepers association. In my area, the Furness and District Beekeepers Association has been my main source of information. Without local beekeeping associations, many of us here would not have half of our information on this vital subject. None the less, the plight of the honey bee has been trivialised and overlooked, to the extent that vital action to protect British bee colonies has been delayed. Only time will tell whether the action that will be taken will be sufficient to prevent disaster. The threat to our honey bees comes from an alarming range and combination of sources. We have already heard about many of them, such as the parasitic varroa destructor mite, the aethina tumida larvae, which infests bee colonies and preys upon bee larvae, viral diseases and, of course, the devastating colony collapse disorder, which is frankly a mystery. CCD has not yet been traced in this country, as far as we can tell, but nevertheless it is absolutely terrifying, and it has had a devastating impact in the United States, of course. The result of those diseases has been the loss of virtually all Britain's wild honey bee population and about a third of the overall bee population. In certain areas, the loss has been particularly devastating. In London in the winter of 2007, two thirds of the city's bee colonies were wiped out, and the 2008 UK honey harvest was down by about 50 per cent. That is clear and tangible evidence of the consequence of the staggering drop in bee numbers. To refer to Lord Rooker again, in November 2007 he concluded that if things did not change, the British honey bee would be extinct within 10 years. Bees play a vital role in our ecology. Experts describe the impact of the loss of bee populations as the key trigger in what they call an "extinction vortex", which would lead to the loss of plant life and consequently impact on other aspects of the food chain. The commercial value of the British bee population is estimated to be in the region of £200 million a year, due to the role of bees in enabling the cross-pollination of crops. However, if we add the supermarket mark-up, the figure for the financial value of the bee industry is nearer £1 billion; perhaps that is an issue for the supermarket regulator to deal with. We have heard from many sources today. Different sources give different figures, but it is estimated that about 35 per cent. of our diet is dependent on bees, because they are the principal pollinator of farms and gardens. All that evidence means that we must ensure that the investment that goes into saving our bees is commensurate with their enormous economic and ecological value. There is nothing esoteric or quaint about this issue. The hard realities of lost bee populations and their essential value to food production and farm productivity are demonstrated by the increasing numbers of farmers who are importing bees from southern and eastern Europe, at considerable cost to themselves. However, that cost is nothing compared with the huge cost resulting from the loss of bees and their contribution to crop growth. Among the difficulties that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs faces in tackling this crisis is that its ability to respond depends on its ability to deliver information to beekeepers and to provide inspection services. However, it is estimated that about 20,000 beekeepers in Britain are not known to DEFRA. Given that four out of every five cases of bee disease are diagnosed by inspectors, that is a huge blind spot. I agree with the majority of contributors to the debate today who say that we do not need and must not have a compulsory register of beekeepers. However, we must acknowledge that blind spot, and we need to think of sensitive and effective ways to deliver information.