Kitchen Garden Forum

Watched the programme on the decline of Bee's last night, quite worrying, liked the suggestion from one beekeeper that local allotments contact a beekeeper, to site one of the hives on the allotment site, we got one last year, hope they survive the winter.

It was a very worrying programme. Just shows how we're messing up the natural cycle of everything.

I've just done exactly what you suggest and let a friend who has hives put two in my garden. I get a jar or two of honey and the fruit and flowers pollinated and he has well fed bees, hopefully more productive than their original home.

It must be devastating when they all die or disappear completely, and despite all the theories and tackling the varroa mite, they don't know exactly what is causing it.

There were lots of active bees when we had a bit of warm sunshine the other day. They didn't seem to be looking for food, more checking out their new surroundings. I'm hoping at least these two hives do OK.

I haven't seen any honey bees yet this year, but have had two bumble bees buzzing around our heather and the daphne blooms.

Last year I tried floating the idea of allowing all the nicely mown verges in front of houses in our locality being converted to wildflower verges to help bees and pollinating insects but it went down like a lead balloon. I suspect that everybody was calculating how many thousands of pounds would be taken off the value of their properties because it made the area look scruffy. However, possibly the government cutbacks may indirectly have a benefit for bees in that cutting of verges is being reduced and they're just being allowed to grow wild However I suspect that to be of any real value to wildlife they really need to be specifically sown with a wild flower mixture rather than just growing up au naturel.

Sheffield council for the past few years has sown different wild flower mixes on areas where housing has been cleared and other open spaces and they look absolutely breathtaking in late summer.

I think it might be to do with work done by someone from Sheffield University, and these seed mixes are now being sold commercially. I can't think off hand what they call themselves though.

Couldn't you sprinkle some about without saying anything on bits that don't get cut, Primrose?

I've bought a large packet of Phacelia tanacetifolia to grow around the garden and the bees absolutely love it. You can get larger packets if you buy it as a green manure, but it looks much too pretty to dig in. I also let the borage grow in clumps where it has seeded and there are lots of other bee and butterfly flowers that I've left in where they have self-seeded.

I do undertake a little bit of "guerilla gardening" in our locality, planting surplus self seeded primroses from our garden onto the edges of footpaths. I also collect all our foxglove seeds, and sprinkle them on bare patches of soil which I don't think are going to get mown down.

Hi Primrose and Plumpudding,
There is research in hand looking for the probable cause of hive collapse which is probably too late into the catastrophe and is certainly underfunded.
Sadly this is a case where the politicians failed miserably to listen to the grass roots.
There are certain factions that immediately point at pesticides as the cause but in the last part of the programme last night they moved to Australia where bees are thriving and they are exporting to the USA to keep bee keepers going until the problem is resolved.
Australian farmers use the same pesticides as those in UK and the USA so whereas I do not rule pesticides out the one thing that Australia doesn't have, as yet, is the Varroa Mite. These awful pests not only kill their host but spread viruses and diseases among the bee population. My research would begin with this pest.
I think the programme last night was untimely and we should await the outcome of the research before theoretical causes are bandied about by some so that if repeated often enough they will be accepted by the general public and perceived as fact. Which is exactly what happened to GM. This problem is far too important to to be used to score points on other matters.
JB.

The programme was fairly well balanced although it lurched toward the melodramatic at times. The 'big bee men' in the USA didn't convince me that they were overly concerned about their bees. The programme left me feeling very gloomy. The one thing that struck me was how throughout the entire transmission no one highlighted the fact that, like so many other things, honey bees have become yet another globally traded commodity, although the presenter did describe this as a "totally unsustainable way of propping up the planet's agricultural systems."

As to the role of pesticides, the programme made the following significant points:

- Maryann Frazier of Penn State University in the USA told of how they analysed bees for traces of imidacloprid (the active ingredient in many garden sprays used in the UK) but found traces of insecticide "in every class" as well a traces of fungicides and herbicides. In a single bee they found traces of 25 different agrochemicals and the challenge now is to try and find out what these synthetic substances are doing in combination - no one yet knows.

- A Norfolk beekeeper divided his hives into three groups. Those he moved to a lime woodland were fine, while those placed in intensively farmed areas perished (they died at the front of the hives). His conclusion was that chemical spraying and seed treatments must be connected to the collapsed hives.

- An urban beekeeper explained how his city-dwelling bees were thriving and that he had seen no increase in bee mortality. His conclusion was that cities and towns are good for bees because they're diverse ecosystems with a wide range of cleaner food sources (i.e. pollen and nectar) and there is none of the blanket spraying of pesticides which occurs in rural areas. He was spot on with "Bees act as a barometer for the general health of the planet."

There's clearly a trend here of some significance, although the programme did point out that there is as yet no smoking gun.

But I think it was Marla Spivak, professor of apiculture and the University of Minnesota, who sounded the most ominous note:

"Bees can't live in the environment that we're giving them and bees are out there sweeping the environment, it's what they do ... They are showing us, directly, what we're doing to the environment."

Incidentally, for anyone interested in a way of beekeeping that's a lot more earth-friendly, the biobees web site is well worth a look. The homepage of the web site describes it as being all about...

"... sustainable, low-impact, low-cost, chemical-free, small-scale, 'organic', natural beekeeping, using simple equipment that almost anyone can make at home. If you have not yet heard of 'top bar hives' or 'natural beekeeping', then this is a place to learn about them."

http://www.biobees.com/