Wild bee declines linked to banned pesticide
A SOUTH Wales hospital’s encounter with more than 100,000 bees may have had a happy ending for all concerned – but across the UK, wild bees are in sad decline.
Last week, WalesOnline reported how vast numbers of the insects were found at Cardiff’s Rookwood Hospital.
It is thought the bees may have been there for up to five years and were only noticed after warm weather melted their wax and honey dripped down from a roof.
Teams from the Lancashire-based Tree Bee Society were called out to remove the large hive which was above the hospital’s elderly care assessment unit
Thanks to the charity’s efforts, the insects will have a new life when the hive is transported to Lancashire.
But elsewhere in the UK, the outlook for wild bees in general is causing concern among scientists who say a decline in numbers is linked to the use of controversial pesticides.
Species of wild bees in England exposed to oilseed rape crops treated with neonicotinoids suffered popu- lation decline of up to 30% between 2002 and 2011, the research led by the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology found.
The pesticide is the subject of an EU-wide two-year ban amid concerns over its harmful impact on bees, such as damaging their ability to forage and navigate, and colony growth.
The research looked at changes in occurrence of 62 species with oil- seed rape cropping patterns between 1994 and 2011, examining data from 31,818 surveys across more than 4,000 square kilometres of land.
It found an average population decline across all species of 13%, of which more than half –7% – was attributable to the use of neonicotinoids between 2002 and 2011, after the pesticide came into wide-scale commercial use.
Species which forage on oilseed rape were three times more seriously affected on average than those which did not.
Dr Nick Isaac, who co-authored the paper, said the damaging effects of the pesticide reported in small-scale studies had been replicated.
“The negative effects that have been reported previously, they do scale up,” he said. “They scale up to long-term, large-scale, multi-species impacts that are harmful.”
Bees play an important role in agriculture, with their pollinating services worth around £600m a year in the UK in boosting yields and the quality of seeds and fruits.
The research is the strongest evidence yet of harm caused by neonicotinoids, Friends of the Earth’s nature campaigner Paul de Zylva said, as he urged the Government to continue the pesticide ban after Britain leaves the EU.