Bees

My Lords, I am full of agreement with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Cameron of Lochbroom, about the need to look into this important issue across the whole of the United Kingdom in an integrated way. Indeed, I would go further and say that it needs a pan-European look, because this problem affects much of western Europe. That said, I am not a scientist and I have absolutely no interest to declare in the issue except in the subject itself. That the problem exists but cannot be easily explained and then shared is self-evident. This is not one of those crises that is amenable to some magic new law or freshly minted set of regulations, let alone freshly minted government expenditure of a huge amount—although my noble friend Lord Moynihan was quite right about the way in which the £10 million should be spent. In other words, this is a problem to which all the usual public policy panaceas are not necessarily easily applied. There are sometimes extraordinary population explosions in the animal world, mirrored by equally extraordinary population declines. There can be sudden or, on occasions, long-drawn-out declines. There is an unpredictable asymmetry to these swings and roundabouts in nature, in which mankind is sometimes a damage-doing participant and sometimes a surprised and worried spectator, as are many of us in your Lordships' House this afternoon. The present honey-bee catastrophe made manifest in sudden or colony collapse disorder is not amenable to simple explanation. There are perhaps half a dozen possibilities which have been advanced. Some of them may be interconnected; it may not be just the mite, which I understand—I stress that I am no scientist—to be very much like a little spider. It may not be the varroa mite which is the cause of all evil, but the varroa mite related to other forms of practice. None the less, the population decline should be considered as urgent and, as I have just said, is of interest not only to the United Kingdom but to Europe as a whole. This may not be easy to grasp for the great majority of our population, not all of whom are up at 5.45 in the morning listening to "Farming Today". The majority of our population is urban, and many, alas, still regard some country or farming practices as alien, for we still have a strong sense of there being two nations—the urban nation and the rural nation—one of which is very large and overweening and the other small and threatened. The rural nation is sometimes not fully understood, but it is in the interests as much of urban-dwelling people as of rural-dwelling people to be concerned about this problem—the noble and learned Lord, Lord Cameron, mentioned the lady with her two hives in her back garden in Partick—because the impact of failure is not just in honey production but, much more significantly, in the whole annual pollination cycle in many crops and most trees. This is most definitely not a minority rural issue. I have been told by those who are more expert than me that up to one-third of our diet needs pollination. As my noble friend Lord Moynihan pointed out, while bees do not have an absolute monopoly on the activity—there are lots of other pollinators—they are probably the nation’s prime pollinators of ground fruits such as raspberries, of top fruits such as apples and pears and of legumes such as beans and peas. Any failure of pollination in those crops will therefore be manifested pretty quickly and in-year. For trees, it may be slightly different. Let us take one obvious example which I think we all know: the horse chestnut in the wild. Failure to pollinate that tree would equal no conkers. No conkers equals no later regeneration of that patch of woodland by that and other species of trees. So there may—I say only "may"—be a dendrological time bomb in woodlands whose effect would be generational rather than annual. It would not be noticeable for years, but it is an added dimension to the problem which my noble friend described so clearly. Overall, the impact on our rural productive economy of total failure in the pollination cycle has been estimated at many hundreds of millions of pounds. What can be done? I have sought advice from some experts. There seems to a consensus that solutions, whatever they are, must be broad brush and integrated—a thought that I owe to one expert beekeeper who is also a highly distinguished and very successful former chief executive officer of the Meteorological Office. I have four suggestions for what might be done. First, there is the need for integrated pest and hive management, which not only strives to find ways of dealing with the mite but also involves better treatment of gut diseases by antibiotics, close attention to hygiene and careful temperature control in the winter. This and much more is needed. The message of integration needs to be spread. Secondly, we need the promotion of cost-effective research, which my noble friend Lord Moynihan put his finger right on. The research effort must not be dissipated; it must be cost-effective. It should be across not just the United Kingdom but Europe as a whole. That would be a truly useful task for some of the less bureaucratic mechanisms of the European Union. Thirdly, I turn to bee inspectors. I have never seen a bee inspector, and I do not know whether they wear a uniform or what it might be like, but I am told that those important people, with their unfettered and police-like powers of entry, have been much reduced in numbers in recent years. Can the Minister give us up-to-date numbers for bee inspectors and explain whether there are plans to increase their capacity, at least temporarily, during the looming catastrophe which we face with the honey bee? Perhaps we could lure former inspectors out of retirement and back to hive patrolling for a period of years to fill the gap and help out until a solution is found, as we all hope. Fourthly, I say cautiously, because I am ideologically opposed to regulation, that the Government should consider for the period in which the problem is being tackled and resolved the need at least for temporary registration of all beekeepers—I do not say regulation but registration—to give an accurate geography of where the problems are and where the bees are being kept, be it in Hailsham in Sussex or a back garden in Partick, because people will need all the advice they can get. I say this with temerity, because I know how temporary registration schemes have a terrible habit of becoming permanent, but I speak of something which is strictly limited to allow solutions—if they are to be found—and good practice to be disseminated among all those who keep honey bees. Many other measures in addition to those four can be taken, most of which have been clearly pointed out by my noble friend Lord Moynihan. In the week of the Chelsea Flower Show, wildlife-friendly gardens are very fashionable. Planting with an eye to bees can make a useful contribution to bringing the urban and the rural nations together, although it has to be handled with care. My noble friend mentioned the importance of the planting of lime trees in increasing honey production in Leeds. I can think of one species of lime, Tilia petiolaris, which is very floriferous and wonderful to smell but has a terrible narcotic effect on the bumble bee, which after a short period falls drunken on the ground with its legs twitching. Happily, it generally recovers but almost immediately returns to the flower—I guess that that is a habit also of some humans, on returning to the scenes of their intoxication. So, beware Tilia petiolaris. The Minister, I hope, has found me uncharacteristically reasonable, muted and prepared not to blame the Government but make suggestions and work with them. I see him nodding assent—he has never seen me in this state in all the years in which we have known each other, both in another place and in this one—and I find myself caught rather by surprise. He need not fear, first, that I am going to blame the Government for the entire problem—I wish that I could, but I cannot—or, secondly, that I am going to call for massive new public expenditure or an enormous new bureaucracy, although I do think that the money needs to be spent in the way in which my noble friend Lord Moynihan pointed out. He certainly does not have to fear that I am going to call for the appointment of some bee supremo or bee tsar by the Prime Minister to look into all the problems. By the way, what did happen to all those tsars that were appointed in such blazes of publicity since 1997? What did they actually achieve, and what have they done since the first photocall was completed? That is something for future political historians like my noble friend from the University of Hull to look into. Neither am I going to suggest, the Minister will surely be relieved to hear, that there should be some sort of bee summit in No. 10, with the Prime Minister being forced to pose, looking interested, beside a hive introduced into the garden after the discussions are all over. No; we need a common sense-approach to this issue. I hope that the Minister will respond to my considered and modest suggestions, but respond much more clearly and in terms to the magnificent and highly important speech of my noble friend Lord Moynihan.