Perspective - the bee's needs

Some of you will know that I used to keep bees (the honey variety). I say "used to" as I lost my hive a year or so ago following a particularly bad winter, and have not yet replaced them. I not only find them endlessly fascinating as a social system but I have total respect for the benefits they bring from their pollination efforts.

Its been mostly bad news for honey bees over recent years, but Sandy Jayaraj, in a blog for The Sustainable Investor, looked at?some possible good news in a recent decision by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to grant a conditional license to US biotech company Dalan Animal Health (Dalan) for a vaccine for honeybees against American foulbrood disease (AFB). AFB which has spread worldwide and has decimated colonies that provide food pollination, is caused by the bacterium Paenibacillus larvae and can be fatal to hives. It is currently found in 25% of US hives and there is currently no cure.?While the damage that it causes to honey bee hives is not as bad as varroa, its still a major contributor to bee colony collapse.

American Foulbrood is a particularly troublesome disease. Although the spore-forming bacteria that cause the disease,?Paenibacillus larvae, are gram-positive (and so in theory easier to kill than gram-negative ones), those spores can last for decades in the environment and so pose a continuous threat to honey bee colonies.

It can be easy to under estimate just how important bees are to our bio diversity and food production systems. It has been estimated that flying insects, in particular,?bees and flies are responsible for as much as US$557 billion worth of global food production per annum. Research from a broad team including the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health estimates that the?loss of pollinators is causing 427,000 excess deaths each year worldwide,?due to the reduction in the availability of nutritious foods ranging from fruit and vegetables to nuts.

Bee numbers are falling across the world. Some of this is due to threats such as AFB and varroa, but they are also under pressure from pesticides (especially neonicotinoids) and a loss of habit. Unlike many sustainability themes, the solutions to this are fairly easy to understand, but they seem hard to implement. Sandy digs some more into this in his recent blog - well worth a read if you care about agriculture, the food we eat and bio-diversity.