Member News
Conservative MP John Penrose writes for ePolitix.com about the issues being raised in his Westminster Hall debate on honey bee health.
Honey bees play a vital role in our environment and food chain. By pollinating farmers' crops they're responsible for about a third of the food we eat so without them we could be in serious trouble. Albert Einstein famously said that without bees mankind could not survive for longer than four years.
As a beekeeper myself, I'm worried we're closer than ever to finding out whether he was right.
The number of wild bees in the UK is lower now than ever before and there's a mysterious and unprecedented decline in bee populations across the globe.
Colony Collapse Disorder has seen the bee population in America rapidly drop and there's serious concern that it could happen in the UK too.
That's why I've been working with the British Bee Keeper's Association (BBKA) and other MPs in Parliament to make sure the government funds research into bee health.
The government has begun to listen and have increased funding to £10m, but they don't seem to have grasped all the facts.
The money is earmarked for studying the health of all pollinators, including bumble bees, butterflies and moths. But there's no detail on how much will be used to study honey bees, even though they're by far the most important and numerous pollinator.
They also want to spend money on a national database of bee keepers; given the awful track record of delays, cost over-runs and failures of government-sponsored database projects, you might have thought they'd think twice about another one.
But even if, amazingly, it works, it's an unnecessary and bureaucratic waste of money. Most bee keepers are already members of the BBKA, who contact them regularly about bee health issues.
The government will simply duplicate what already exists and are more likely to put people off from keeping bees rather than raising health standards. This could have disastrous consequences for the bee population as any reduction of beekeepers will mean fewer hives.
So while the government have begun to listen and have increased funding, there's still a long way to go.
I'm going to keep working with the BBKA and other MPs in Parliament to make we get there.
Dods Parliamentary Communications Ltd