Honey I shrunk the bee population of the Western world

Bee victim

Of course, if you happened to watch this particular documentary too, you will appreciate how difficult it was to see all those scary American beekeepers having those quite simply psychotic reactions to some empty hives (one of them, in a very James-off-The-Apprentice-esque comment, compared it to the holocaust) and still take the information you were being given about the collapse of over a third of Americas bee colonies in 2008 seriously.

Even worse was the beekeeper from Norfolk who I was quite pleased to see at first because he represented the face of British sanity in comparison with his crazily hyperbolic American counterparts, right up until the point where he described his bees as his children. And not even in a 'I don't have any kids of my own so I'm going to treat my pets like my surrogate babies' way. He seemed to think the bees were actually his children.

Apart from being quite afraid of the crazy people, I did manage to understand that without the honeybee, Western agriculture would pretty much collapse, and that's never going to be a good thing. America are having such problems with their bees all buzzing off that they're having to fly bees in from Australia, pretty much the only developed country not to experience a decline in its bee population, thus providing students that should be working with an entire evening's worth of speculation about how good a spoof film Bees on a Plane would be (Vince Cable would play the hero and it would feature the scary bee rights woman off the documentary who would inevitable come to a sticky end, literally). How easy it would be to come up with punny taglines ('It may bee the best movie you see this year').

There are several theories as to what might be causing Colony Collapse Disorder (the thing that happens when all the bees die or disappear into thin air) in Europe and the US. It may be caused by a range of things, from pesticides and monocultures to disease to our old friend climate change, and whilst a lot of money has been put into research on this issue, no one really knows what to do about it - which was the rather depressing conclusion. Here at the Eco Blog, however, we like to give a spot of advice once we've spent several hundreds words droning on about something, or in this case, making odious bee puns, rather than just accept the fact that we're going to starve to death unless Spiderman turns up to bring his insect brothers back to life.

One thing that the programme did suggest was making sure that bees have more pesticide free places to collect pollen, as bee populations are much less likely to decrease in non agricultural, therefore more pesticide free areas (perhaps the reason why Australia, with its expanse of unfarmable land, has managed to escape the bee carnage). You do this simply by planting some flowers in your garden, which can also help with other serious problems like climate change, boring gardens and unhappiness.

You can also buy organic food where possible (see that former blog about veg boxes to see how organic veg can be cheaper than the supermarket stuff). Unfortunately, due to the non organic nature of most of Britain's agriculture, it's impossible to produce organic honey in Britain. So if you buy it, it will be imported and therefore include a few food miles. If you want honey, you should buy it from a local or independent source but never from large scale commercial producers as theirs will have a massive carbon footprint. It's not original, and it's not surprising, but my feeling is that if we just make sure that we're on our best environmental behaviour, the honeybees might come and play with us again.

Add Comment

You must log in to submit a comment.