It looks like the EU has finally taken note of some of the less powerful groups in society; bees. Though bees are small in size, their impact on plant life both in Europe and other continents is the opposite. Around 84% of crops in the European Union are pollinated by insects and around 70% of these are by bees. Despite this, declines in bee colonies have been recorded since the 1960s in Europe and in the past decade heavy declines have been noted in North America and more recently in Africa and Asia.
It seems like the EU is finally taking steps towards preventing this worrying decline. At the moment the EU regulation on pesticides includes a specific risk assessment for areas where the honeybees may be exposed to harmful pesticides and with any luck they will be introducing a ban on the harmful insecticides used in the EU as early as July. The ban would be on certain crops, deemed important to bee populations such as corn, oil rape seed and sunflowers for the next two years, with the hope that bee populations would recover. Environmentalists have deemed this a huge step forward in the protection of bees, despite the UK and Germany standing as the biggest opponents to this proposed policy which will the enter EU law on the 25th February.
Since March 2012 there has been a series of research which has shown that insecticides are one of the biggest causes of harm to bee populations; for examples one of the reports showed that bees consuming neonicotinoids experienced an 85% loss of the number of queens in their nest. The European Food Safety Authority named three neonicotinoids to be an “unacceptable danger to bees” and stated that these new findings threw the EU regulations on insecticides into a question of integrity.
One important issue surrounding insecticides which needs to be addressed is the lack of education for the farmers using the insecticides and the continuing misuse of the chemicals. A lot of the time, if the insecticides were being used responsibly the harm to bees would be significantly lessened. Therefore part of the policy which needs to be considered is regarding beekeeping practices themselves. The question remains how this sort of education and support will be given to beekeepers in Europe to ensure that the new regulations are kept to.
Insecticides are not the only cause for the diminishing bee populations. Many issues such as the decline in flowering plants and air pollution point to wider environmental problems as a contributing factor. The rapid decline of rural areas has led to a general downfall of wildlife populations and agriculture has impacted on the species of plants which now exist in the countryside, harming the wildlife which relied on the previously native plant life. Another, more creepy culprit for the decline in bee populations is the varroa mite which has been found to kill high numbers of bee populations. Again, the bees’ inability to fight the varroa mite could be linked to a depleted immune system caused by malnutrition or the intake of insecticides.
Could bees be the cause for the breakdown of society and an impending war for resources? No zombie apocalypse, no meteor, no nuclear war…. but the diminishing bee population. Let’s hope that the EU sticks to its proposals and maybe we won’t have to wait and see.
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