Horizon: What's Killing Our Bees?

This documentary aired last night on BBC2 and was presented by Bill Turnbull who has been keeping bees for 12 years. It was excellent, a well balanced and thought provoking documentary concerning the plight of our bees. Bill said that for many beekeepers the main challenge over the past few years hasn't been harvesting honey, but simply keeping their colonies alive.

Honeybees are the only insects that produce food for us in the form of honey and the work they do in pollinating our crops is vital. One mouthful in every three that we eat we owe to the work of bees, but their numbers have been falling for decades.

The list of suspects that has contributed to this alarming decline is several:

• the weather. This year's cold spring could have been fatal for many colonies weakened by the wet summer of 2012.
• the varroa mite, a pernicious little pest that sucks the bee's bodily fluids and in return injects it with fatal viruses. The varroa mite can wipe out a colony in a matter of weeks.
• the most controversial suspects are the modern systemic pesticides known as neonicotinoids. The EU has imposed a two-year ban on the use of three of them.
• the effect of modern agriculture on habitat. Scientists have started to show a link between the decline in bee numbers and the practice of using vast fields to grow single crops. And here is the environmental Catch-22: by boosting agricultural production to feed our growing world population we are threatening the bees on which we rely to produce those same crops.

Simple things can be done however to help turn things around and as was well illustrated in the programme. Farmers can sow wildflower strips on the edge of fields, which would give bees somewhere to feed all through the summer. And we can all do our best to plant bee-friendly flowers in our gardens - or even just in window boxes. 

It is up to us to make the changes that can save bees.