Beemergency! A mystery plague threatens Britain's bees and the result could be worse than foot and mouth

Nothing better illustrates the folly of this Government than the clumsy and ignorant way it has casually slashed the tiny budget supporting research into one of Nature’s most useful creatures: the bee.

The news is currently dominated by the bigger issues of oil prices and house prices.



But it is often in the apparently obscure detail of Government policy that we can best see where its values and priorities lie.

A mystery plague is threatening Britain's bees, and the result could be worse than foot and mouth

Bees matter. And not just for honey. When they are collecting nectar to make honey they spread pollen, which fertilises many of our garden flowers and useful fruits.



Apples, pears, cherries, raspberries, strawberries, blackcurrants, broad and runner beans depend on them. They are the unpaid workers whose labour supports many an orchard or garden.



On the narrowest calculation, they help produce £165million a year of marketed products.



Yet unthinking human activity is doing considerable harm. Britain’s bumblebee population has been drastically reduced.



One factor is the use of dangerous insecticides in agriculture. These break down the bees’ orientation and communication skills and impair their memory.



Bees travel many miles for nectar and use a complex language of dances to point to the location of flowers. Without their inbuilt navigation they can’t find their way back to the hive.



Honey bees are also in a battle for survival with parasites. Professional beekeepers transport their hives across country – which contributes to the spread of

parasites such as varroa.



This leeching mite has virtually destroyed the wild honey bee population. It activates lethal viruses which it carries from bee to bee as it feeds on their blood.



It is like a dirty syringe spreading HIV and is probably causing more damage than foot-and-mouth disease.



But bees, unlike livestock, do not have powerful commercial interests to support them.

As a result, a vital link in the natural chain that makes these islands what they are could vanish.



Three native bumblebee species have already disappeared and seven more are at serious risk.



Our crops are under threat and any further decline would seriously damage the rural economy.



Clovers and vetches – which play a key role in keeping soil fertile – and some rare plants may disappear and, according to some experts, are doing so already. The result would be catastrophic for the future of farming itself.



Britain’s 44,000 beekeepers are not very commercially minded. Like the bees, they work largely for free. I came to understand what was happening only when I visited an apiary tucked away in a quiet corner of my Twickenham constituency.



Volunteers tend the hives and manage the swarms because they love their hobby.

Simple common sense and national self-interest suggest that the Government should support some research into bees and their diseases.



Before recent cuts, it spent £1.25million on bee health, of which less than a fifth was for research. The Government thus spends less than one per cent, at most, of bees’ value to the economy.



And it is swamped by the massive £3.2billion budget of the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, DEFRA.



Yet a succession of Labour Ministers, from the invisible Mrs Beckett to the voluble Mr Benn via the ambitious Mr Miliband, have devoted their considerable energies to finding cuts in the tiny bee-health programme, axing 20 per cent – £250,000.



Researchers are being laid off. Ministers have sacked half of the bee inspectors whose job it was to identify and treat European Foul Brood, one of the worse parasite infections affecting hives.



Many people will be puzzled that a Government struggles with minuscule spending commitments when it can whistle up £25billion to rescue a failing bank and will find something approaching that to support a three-week festival of running and spear-throwing in 2012.



It has already devoted £6billion to the Iraq War.



This Government is penny-pinching and pound profligate. It squanders vast sums of taxpayers’ money on prestige projects or mega disasters, then tries to balance the books by petty cuts it hopes no one will notice.

In the bureaucratic infighting around the Government’s budget, tens of thousands of NHS staff, scientists, people in the arts world and local community projects are discovering that – like the bees – they may be doing invaluable, irreplaceable work but Ministers regard them as dispensable.



The battle over the DEFRA budget tells us much about this Government and its priorities.



Several years ago, the totally mad EU Common Agricultural Policy was reformed to be less mad but more complicated. DEFRA made a complete mess of the changeover to Single Farm Payments, overspending by hundreds of millions of pounds.



The money could not be retrieved from the farmers, so Gordon Brown’s Treasury decided to cut the excess from the rest of the DEFRA budget. Essential flood defence work was stopped. Funding was cut for environmental work.



Elderly people lost access to grants to insulate their homes. The bees were at the end of a long line of casualties.



When I first threw my modest weight behind the bee four years ago, I was singled out for criticism by Tony Blair in Prime Minister’s Questions.



He was echoed a few weeks later by Gordon Brown, attacking my irresponsible approach to public spending. I thought at the time that I might have hit a raw nerve. I now realise their ridicule was based on incomprehension.



Stewardship of Nature – protection of the natural environment – is a concept the two most powerful men in the country simply do not understand. They are ignorant, and proud of it.



So far, the public has not noticed the cuts. Perhaps it never will. The price of honey is unlikely to have the same impact as the price of oil. And bees do not elicit the love we bestow on cuddlier creatures.



Indeed, they pack a vicious sting; my wife is one of many who could suffer a fatal anaphylactic shock unless treated immediately.



By contrast, had ponies, cats, dogs, badgers or foxes been put at risk, there would have been a national outcry to save them.



Perhaps, if sentiment cannot save the bee programme, sound economics will. Most early civilisations valued bees; the Greeks and Romans in particular.



Many developing countries are introducing hives and beekeeping techniques to boost the income of peasant farmers.



Other developed countries are investing in research, while we retrench. Without proper research, it is difficult to quantify the scale of bees’ decline absolutely.



But what is known is troubling. There are 270,000 hives in Britain. Last winter one in five colonies perished. Half of Italy’s 50billion honey bees died last year. The picture is similarly bleak across France, Germany, Brazil and Australia.

And nobody quite knows why. American fruit growers have lost billions due to a phenomenon dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder, first reported in 2006.



CCD has wiped out close to two million colonies across America and billions of bees worldwide.



We need bees. Einstein was said to have calculated: ‘If bees disappeared off the surface of the globe then Man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more life.’



One of the earliest economics texts ever written was Mandeville’s Fable Of The Bees, a satire on greed. The author had noticed that, in nature, not every creature is programmed simply to fight for survival.



Some, notably bees, also unselfishly perform a public service from which others benefit.



The Fable has been used to justify raising taxes so governments can perform useful tasks we could not perform as individuals.



Many taxpayers believe this Government has brought the civilised arguments for taxation into disrepute; and nowhere more obviously than in the way it has shouldered aside the tiny but invaluable bee health programme to help pay for its grander follies.





