Honey bee crisis threatens English fruit farmers

By Nigel Hunt

LONDON (Reuters) - Where in the United States, fruit farmers pay to have bees trucked thousands of miles to pollinate their crops and in parts of China, humans with feather dusters have taken on the task, in Britain most bees go nature's way.

Britons have a deep nostalgia for home-grown honey and its associations with an ordered rural lifestyle. But here, too, the honey bee population is dwindling, and with winter under way faces a tough fight for survival.

Besides warnings the country will run out of English honey by Christmas, there is a threat to growers of fruits such as apples and pears.

A wet summer on top of changed sowings and increasingly intensive agriculture have limited opportunities to forage for nectar, risking starvation for bees. Most colonies are also infested with a dangerous parasitic mite.

"We are extremely aware of the enormous threat there is to honey bees and the huge reduction in population," said Adrian Barlow, chief executive of trade group English Apples and Pears. "It is something we are very concerned about."

To collect a pound of honey, a bee might have to fly a distance equivalent to twice around the world. This is likely to involve 10,000 flower visits or perhaps 500 foraging trips, according to the British Beekeepers' Association (BBKA).

Honey bees pollinate about 90 percent of apples in Britain and also have an important role for many other crops including runner beans, pears and raspberries.

Britain has about 250,000 hives, about 80 percent of them looked after by small-scale beekeepers who sell most of their honey to friends, colleagues and at farm shops.

The other 20 percent are kept by larger bee farmers who produce honey on a more commercial scale.

Richard Steel in the Cambridgeshire countryside has been keeping bees for 27 years. He had about three dozen colonies but lost about two thirds of them, blaming heavy rains during the spring/summer mating season as a key factor.

"What was happening ... with a lot of the colonies that failed was that the queens were running out of sperm and not being able to lay fertile eggs," he told Reuters by telephone.

"I put this down to the fact that they possibly mated with fewer drones (due to the wet weather)."

The United States, France, Greece and many other countries have also suffered heavy losses in the bee population and researchers are still searching for answers.

British beekeepers have been demanding the annual state budget for bee health research be raised to 1.6 million pounds ($2.37 million) from 200,000 pounds now. Hundreds of them delivered a petition to the prime minister in London earlier this month calling for more research spending.

"The increased funding we are asking for is a drop in the ocean compared to the billions of pounds the government has found for bank bail-outs," BBKA President Tim Lovett said, referring to moves prompted by the global financial crisis.