Honey Bee Health

Like others, I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) for securing the debate and for showing such a knowledgeable understanding of the problems facing beekeepers and honey bee populations in this country. I particularly welcome the fact that he is setting up an all-party group, which I will certainly follow closely. I hope that the group will track the welcome new funding and that it will be effective. I also pay tribute to the hon. Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) for supporting last year's effective lobby and for his unswerving support for beekeepers across the country. Honey bee health is arguably one of the most pressing environmental issues of our time, and the population of honey bees contributes around £200 million to the UK's agricultural economy. Our bee population is declining at such an alarming rate that the relevant graph shows that it could be effectively wiped out within 10 years. It has never been more urgent that we address the problems facing honey bees in an effective and timely manner. We have heard eloquent descriptions today of the plethora of threats from diseases such as the varroa mite, foul brood and colony collapse disorder, which is the collective term given to the disappearance of bees. As has been pointed out, bees also face the effects of climate change, habitat loss, intensive farming and insecticides. It is worth contemplating the point made by the hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew). Speaking as a farmer, I shudder when I think back to the sort of things we were persuaded to use by agronomists in the early 1990s and 1980s to cope with problems such as the orange blossom midge. The insecticide situation is much better now and farmers understand the need to be extremely cautious. In that respect, best practice and regulation have worked, but more needs to be done. I hope that some research will be done into whether systemic pesticides are part of the problem and whether other forms of pesticides, in relation to which the situation is so much better, are a diminishing problem. A great deal of work needs to be done on that. Like other hon. Members, I pay tribute to the British Beekeepers Association. It was a great pleasure for me to attend its spring convention at Stoneleigh recently and to see so many thousands of enthusiastic people, who were determined to tackle the problems faced by honey bee populations. It was a pleasure to meet Norman Carreck, who works with Professor Ratnieks in Brighton at Sussex university. I look forward to going down there to see first hand the wonderful work that they are doing. I also pay tribute to the west Berkshire branch of the BBKA. It is a wonderful local organisation and it has guided me in an important part of my brief. The lobby that took place last year was one of the most effective lobbies of Parliament that I have seen in my short time here, and it was a great tribute to all those involved. I could be churlish and complain and whinge about the lack of funding in the past but, in the spirit of the debate, I pay tribute to those who have campaigned effectively and to those who have listened and enabled increased funding to be secured. It is important to consider the detail of where the funding could go. There are considerable concerns, and I hope that the Minister will tackle those in the time that she has. Let us consider the funding element. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has marketed new funding for research into bee health, but it is not clear how much will be spent specifically on research into honey bee health. Although up to £10 million of extra funding has been pledged, that money will be spread around research into all pollinators, as we have heard. The figure that I have in my head—although that figure has been slightly varied by today's contributions—is that 80 per cent. of the pollination that we require to sustain our ecology and agricultural crops comes from the honey bee population. Whatever the statistic is, honey bees are by far the most important pollinators, and they are the pollinators that we can most affect by good research. It is vital that the vast majority of the research is directed towards honey bees rather than other types of pollinators. Moths, butterflies, hoverflies and bumblebees are important, but they are a mere sideline when compared with the importance of the honey bee population. Money could effectively be wasted on albeit well intentioned research into pollinators that could turn out to be far less relevant to crop pollination. When the new funding for research projects is allocated, I hope that the Minister will reassure us that honey bees will be given priority. The Government's much anticipated "Healthy Bees" strategy, which was published in March this year, outlined the Government's aim""to achieve a sustainable and healthy population of honey bees for pollination and honey production in England and Wales via strengthened partnerships working between Government and other stakeholders."" I wholeheartedly agree that that should be our aim, but, of course, actions speak louder than words. Despite the Government's claims that they aim to strengthen partnerships between themselves and other stakeholders, the "Healthy Bees" document, which was drastically reduced in size from 45 pages to just 12, was only released for the consideration of stakeholders on the Friday before its Monday launch. That is not a great start. I ask the Minister to take those points on board. The National Bee Unit will play a key role in the Government's "Healthy Bees" strategy and will receive a significant chunk of the new funding. The unit has been criticised for its failure to share information with stakeholders, and the National Audit Office report on "The Health of Livestock and Honey Bees in England" states that the NBU had""not given sufficient emphasis to sharing the findings of its research more widely"." The report further recommends that the NBU""share information with the relevant associations"." A lack of consultation with such key people as our beekeepers at that level does not bode well. As we have heard in the debate, a large proportion of the funding going to the NBU will be spent on BeeBase, which is a database of beekeepers in the UK. According to the NBU, that database is currently seriously undersubscribed. Knowing where our beekeepers and therefore our honey bee colonies are is, of course, important, particularly for the purposes of disease identification. However, ploughing money into a database seems a somewhat abstract way of tackling honey bee health, particularly when the BBKA already has an impressive database of members with whom they are in regular contact. It is important that the NBU takes steps to try to work with the BBKA and that it pools its resources. According to the BBKA, that has not been happening so far. If there are beekeepers who have not joined the BBKA as members, what would make them join a central database? It needs to be made clear how the NBU plan to incentivise BeeBase to encourage the remaining few beekeepers to join. I would like to tackle the point about compulsion. I entirely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare: compulsion would not be a good move forward. Surely, a far more effective method of making a real difference to honey bee health is to work in partnership with organisations such as the BBKA to reach more beekeepers, harness their knowledge and expertise, and provide better education and training at a local level. Although the Government and the NBU claim that that is their aim, we need to see more action to establish exactly how that will work. What is next for our bees? Increased standards of bee husbandry are key to tackling the decline in the honey bee population. Research absolutely must be fed down to beekeepers quickly and efficiently for it to make a real difference to honey bee health. Through improving access to education and training on issues such as hive health, feeding and management, we can ensure that bees are given the optimum nutrients and environment that they need to survive. In the last few minutes of my speech, I shall make an important point about habitat loss. In my part of southern England, agriculture practices have changed in a way that means the Berkshire downs are almost entirely arable. When I was a child, there were almost entirely mixed farming enterprises, which meant that bee colonies did not have to travel as far to find pollen. Periods of pollination are extremely short, so that could well be contributing to the stress from which bee colonies are suffering, and hon. Members have already talked about that. We need to consider how we support and incentivise farmers in terms of biodiversity. The loss of set aside will have had a major effect. We should encourage farmers to plant crops such as phacelia—I plant it at home—which is a popular plant for bees and other pollinators. Those are the sort of things that can help to reduce stress, increase the amount of pollinators available and help bee colonies in a major way. We also want better summers—I know that that is not in the gift of the Minister, but I am sure that she can have a word with someone about it. I finish by paying tribute to Martha Kearney, who produced a very good documentary on the subject for the BBC. She made one vital point, which is a good one on which to finish: honey bees are the environment's canary in the mine, and their decline should be regarded as a potential warning that massive change is taking place within our environment, change that will affect us all.