Westminster Hall
Wednesday 29 April 2009
[Mr. Joe Benton in the Chair]
Honey Bee Health
Motion made, and Question proposed, That the sitting be now adjourned.—(Chris Mole.)
9.30 am
John Penrose (Weston-super-Mare) (Con): It is extremely good to see a respectable sprinkling of MPs who want to talk about honey bee health at 9.30 on a Wednesday morning. It is several months since we last met to discuss this topic in a debate organised by the hon. Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson), and we were all pleased that he managed to do that. A lot has happened since then, and it is important to record what has happened and to start discussing what needs to happen next.
Before I proceed, however, let me say just one thing. During that debate, a fair number of my parliamentary colleagues—marvellous though they all are—showed an unfortunate weakness for what I can only call weepingly awful bee puns. [Interruption.] They are coming already. I simply say this to colleagues on both sides of the Chamber: “If you feel the urge coming on, don’t do it. Have a sip of water, stiffen your backbone and hold back on the instinct if you possible can.”
David Taylor (North-West Leicestershire) (Lab/Co-op): Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
John Penrose: With trepidation, I give way to the hon. Gentleman.
David Taylor: I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. I saw the previous debate. I reassure him that this is a serious issue and I hope that this debate will not be sprinkled with puns—in fact, what we need, in contrast to last time, is a plan B.
John Penrose: I knew that I should not have given way.
To finish my point, I propose that we have an informal version of a parliamentary swear box, and anybody who makes a pun will have to put a pound in it. I suggest that we put the proceeds in the capable hands of the British Beekeepers Association, whose representatives are in the Public Gallery watching us. At the end of the debate, they can put the proceeds towards bee research, so we will not have suffered in vain and will know that the money has gone to a good cause.
As I have said, important progress has been made since our last debate, which is why I want to hold this debate. There is something to celebrate: put simply, a cross-party consensus has emerged that bee research is important, that it needs to be looked at more closely and that it needs better funding. It is worth stopping to congratulate everybody involved on the campaign. We
should also congratulate the Minister on bringing home the bacon—hon. Members will notice that I did not use any honey puns there.
As I have said, we have something to celebrate. We have £10 million of research funding from a variety of sources, including two different research councils and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. We also have an additional £2.4 million over two years, which will go to the National Bee Unit. Those are real achievements, and everybody should be grateful to the Government for having listened to the points that were made and a little proud of the fact that the campaign was launched and has been successful. But—this is a big but—the topic is too important for us to leave it at that.
In our last debate, points were rightly made on both sides of the political divide about the importance of honey bee activity to our national economy—particularly our agricultural economy—and to our national environment and ecology. It is worth repeating that honey bees are probably the single most important source of insect pollination in the British isles, although there are other pollinators. We all understand that moths, butterflies, hoverflies and bumblebees play a part, but honey bees are crucial, particularly in the early season; indeed, they still play a large part even in mid and later summer. The reason for that is straightforward: they are more active in the early season, when the weather is cooler, and there are an awful lot more of them. A typical honey bee hive will have several bees in it over the winter, and that means that it will start from a stronger position than a bumblebee nest, which will start with a solitary queen and certainly no more than one or two bees. By the middle of the summer, a honey bee hive can easily have 40,000 bees in it, and a strong colony may have even more. At the height of its powers, a bumblebee nest will have a couple of hundred bumblebees in it. Although other pollinators are important, honey bees are the main event and are the most important.
What led us to debate this issue last time, and what led me to seek this debate, is not only an economic imperative, but an ecological imperative. Honey bees pollinate not only economically important crops, but an awful lot of the wildflowers and trees that we take for granted as part of the British countryside and which contribute enormously to the landscape that we all know and love.
Clearly, therefore, honey bees are important, but their health has been suffering. It must be said that it has not suffered as badly as it has in some other countries around the world. There are horrifying stories from America of commercial beekeepers suffering the near complete loss of hundreds of colonies in the space of a few weeks. Losses have not happened on quite the same scale here, thank goodness, but they have still been significant. Last year, the losses were something like triple the normal seasonal average, and it is important to understand why.
It is important that we do not rely only on research into honey bee health conducted in other countries. Although some of the factors highlighted in research that is done in, say, the American environment apply to Britain, there are important differences. Our climate is obviously different from that in many other countries, because our island is comparatively wet and chilly. Our agricultural practices are also different, so there may not be direct comparisons. Equally importantly, our
indigenous honey bees—albeit that they have been quite heavily mongrelised by successive waves of imported bees—have evolved to suit the local environment and may therefore not be identical to, or may indeed differ significantly from, indigenous honey bees in other countries.
It is therefore important for us to have our own research so that we can understand the particular combination of factors affecting honey bee health in this country. Although there is not as yet any cold scientific certainty about what is causing colony losses, there is an emerging hypothesis, and it seems likely that we are dealing with a combination of several factors. Those factors may include agricultural practices, diseases and parasites such as varroa and even climate change and the weather—all sorts of factors could be involved. There is no certainty, only an emerging consensus, and that consensus is still very much open to challenge, which is why work on the issue is so necessary.
Rob Marris (Wolverhampton, South-West) (Lab): I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate and on persevering with the issue. Does he agree that although we welcome the vastly increased research funding from various sources, including the Government, there is a risk that too much of the money will be sucked into a registration scheme, rather than being used for research, and will be used to focus much more broadly than some of us would wish on pollinators, rather than honey bees?
John Penrose: I completely agree. In fact, that issue will make up a substantial part of the second section of my contribution, so perhaps the hon. Gentleman will bear with me and hold that thought. If I do not cover any of his points in quite the way that he would like, perhaps he can top up my contribution later.
We have had the welcome announcement of £10 million for pollinator research, plus the extra £2.4 million over two years for the National Bee Unit. We therefore need to move from campaigning to setting up a programme to ensure that the money is spent productively and in a way that hits the various bases that need to be hit to ensure that we genuinely understand the problems of honey bee health. I therefore suggest that we consider setting up an all-party parliamentary group to track progress and make sure that the money continues to be spent in a way that meets the objectives that we and the British Beekeepers Association have laid out, and that that happens with a greater degree of public accountability. Perhaps any hon. Member who is interested in setting up such an all-party group will contact me in my office later; or I could give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr. Vaizey) who may want to suggest something. Does my hon. Friend want to make an intervention or is he signalling that he would like to be involved in the group?
Mr. Edward Vaizey (Wantage) (Con): I was simply indicating that I would like to be involved.
John Penrose: There we are; our numbers have doubled at a stroke.
There are things that need to be clarified, and we should understand the detail of how the money will be spent, so I have some questions of detail for the Minister. Everyone here is onside with the principle and
is congratulating themselves and her on the progress so far, but we need to go into the detail now, so perhaps I can press her on a couple of important issues.
My first point is the one made in the intervention by the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris), which is that the Government’s support is labelled as being for research on not only honey bees but pollinators. I am sure that all hon. Members present agree that other pollinators may need some research, too. Bumblebees, for example, are undoubtedly under pressure, and some species are dwindling rapidly in the UK. I have been told that the same thing is happening to some species of butterfly and moth as well. I do not think that anyone is saying that all Government money must go on honey bee research or the world will end, but the right balance is important. I hope that the Minister’s response will reflect the fact that, as I have said, honey bees are the main event for pollination in this country and therefore, from an ecological and economic point of view, it is sensible to give them the lion’s share, while not trying to close off research on other worthy causes. Perhaps the Minister will suggest, as far as she can at this stage, what the proportions of the spend will be.
It is important to ask what kind of research will be involved. It is possible that robust proposals that are scientifically extremely interesting will come before one of the research councils for funding from the pot of money that has been announced—I understand that the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council may well take many of the detailed allocation decisions on research grants—and that those proposals will advance the frontiers of human understanding of pollinator behaviour, or even honey bee behaviour, but that will not help with the problem that we are debating today of honey bee health and the reason why honey bee colonies in the UK are under pressure as never before. Therefore an element of the process must be to ensure that applied criteria, as well as pure science criteria, are involved. There may be a place for pure science, but applied criteria will be important, and it would be helpful to have the Minister’s reassurance about that.
David Taylor: Does the hon. Gentleman agree—my intervention is linked to what my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris) said a moment ago—that there will no doubt be a tendency as part of the research to reach for the compulsory registration of beekeepers, so that they can be required to supply information? Should that not be avoided, as my constituent, John Dickinson, who is a beekeeper, pointed out when there was a consultation on the strategy last year? We do not want to squeeze out of existence the small hobby beekeepers, because they have a part to play in finding a solution to some of the problems. We must not make it more difficult for them.
John Penrose: I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention; if he will preserve his soul in patience for just a little longer I will come on to the point, but if I do not cover it in sufficient detail perhaps he will round it out later.
To come back to the point I was making about whether the research that is supported will be pure or applied research, it is important to understand what mixture is likely. Since we have a pressing practical
problem in this country of British honey bee colonies collapsing for one reason or another, it is important to understand why that is happening happens and to prioritise research that may help in understanding it. I recommend to the Minister a document entitled “Honey Bee Health Research Concepts”, issued by the British Beekeepers Association, as a good starting point to show some of the questions to which we need answers. It might be helpful if the Minister would reassure hon. Members that a response is in the works, from her Department or the National Bee Unit, to the paper from the BBKA, which is one of the leading authorities. I understand that the BBKA presented the paper to the NBU a while ago and that a response has not so far been forthcoming; it would be right and proper to provide one.
That brings me to my final point, which has been raised in interventions by the hon. Members for Wolverhampton, South-West and for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor)—the question of the £2.3 million or £2.4 million of additional money over two years for the National Bee Unit. There is a lack of clarity among the general public about how that money will be spent, and it would be helpful if the Minister were to put much more flesh on the bones. In the absence of detailed information, theories are going the rounds. The most current one, which may be behind the two interventions, is that the money will be spent on an increase in the number of bee inspectors, funded by the NBU, and that those inspectors will spend much of their time ferreting out unregistered beekeepers and inspecting their hives—there is nothing necessarily wrong with that—to get them registered on BeeBase, the Government’s all-singing, all-dancing database of beekeepers.
The reason why it is important for the Minister to clarify what is happening is that that analysis of how the money will be spent is creating a fair degree of concern among the beekeeping fraternity and, I think, more widely. I should own up at this point and say that I am a beekeeper. I am one of the small hobbyist beekeepers, so there is no financial interest to declare, or anything of that kind, but I have been a beekeeper for a great many years and may therefore be affected by what happens. I understand that historically the main purpose of bee inspection was, rightly, to find and deal with cases of notifiable diseases, such as American foul brood and European foul brood. That is clearly a sensible use of public funds and has been happening for many years—I think that the process was set up soon after the second world war.
Increasing the number of bee inspectors will not necessarily help us in getting a large marginal improvement in the incidence of notifiable diseases; if it will help, perhaps the Minister will give us some figures. My reason for saying so is that the total annual number of cases of European and American foul brood combined is usually fewer than 500. If we spend £2.3 million to £2.4 million on reducing that number by, say, 10 per cent., that is a very high figure for cutting notifiable disease cases in Britain as a whole. We have a low-level background problem with foul brood, but it is not the burning issue, which is clearly the number of colonies that are dying. Most of the scientific research points the finger not at those two notifiable diseases, but at things such as varroa, which is not notifiable because it is pretty much endemic in this country now and which may play a much larger part.
Why increase the number of bee inspectors, if not to deal with notifiable diseases? The suspicion is that it is to find beekeepers who are not registered on BeeBase and get them to register. If that is so, it seems an exceptionally expensive way of creating a mailing list, and, if that is the Government’s intention, there must be better ways to do it. What was the Government’s intention in creating and maintaining BeeBase in the first place? I hope that the Minister will forgive the degree of justifiable cynicism on both sides of the House about any project that involves a Minister saying, “I have got this great plan for a big database funded by the Government, which is going to be cheap and quick to organise.” The history of most Government database projects is not that great.
We need to understand the purpose of BeeBase. If we are trying to improve the state of honey bee health, we must first understand what is causing its collapse. If it is something to do with a combination of agricultural practice and climate change, for example, having a database and a mailing list of beekeepers will not make a blind bit of difference. In all probability, it is not just about those two factors, and there are things that beekeepers could and should be doing to improve standards of insect husbandry. If that is what we wish to achieve, having a socking great database of beekeepers is not necessarily an intelligent first step.
Mr. David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op): I agree entirely with the hon. Gentleman. Surely one of the ways in which we can improve knowledge is to be more transparent about which pesticides are used, who uses them and how much they are used, as that affects humans as well as bees. The Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and the Environment, and the advisory panel on pesticides are still far too covert in the way in which they operate. It is time that we had decent information, which would no doubt provide us with interesting facts about the impact of pesticides on bees as well as human beings.
John Penrose: I take the hon. Gentleman’s point. Many in the farming community would point out that over the past 20 years or more, the incidence of honey bee hive death has been dramatically reduced because of changes in agricultural practice. However, it may be that additional changes since then have created some kind of cumulative effect or combined with other factors, which we need to understand. That is why it is essential for this research to take place.
If there is an unintended new side effect from some kind of agricultural practice—I am sure we all hope that that is not true—we must ensure that we shine a light on it. Farmers will be the first to say that they have an interest in ensuring honey bee health, since many of their crops depend on it. They will want to understand this matter and modify their behaviour, if necessary. However, it is important not to victimise farmers and accuse them of anything unless and until we have cold, hard, scientific facts about the contributing factors. If pesticides are a factor, I am sure that farmers will want to adjust what they do.
It is important for the Minister to explain what the money is to be spent on, and what the Government’s intention is behind the building of BeeBase. This will not be a one-off job. Figures from the BBKA indicate that roughly 10 per cent. of the beekeeping population
start or stop keeping bees in any one year, so there is a high rate of churn. The Government cannot build BeeBase as a one-off operation, as it will not be accurate. They must maintain the database, for whatever purpose it is intended, and that will not be cheap.
The concern is that there might be an element of Big Brother on the horizon. At the back of the mind of someone in the Department, there might be the intention that once most beekeepers are enrolled, enrolment could become compulsory. Once it is compulsory, why should we not start charging beekeepers to register on BeeBase? That would be dangerous, because the British beekeeping population is different from that of other countries. It is not the same as in Australia, for example, where there is a smaller number of very large, industrial-scale commercial beekeeping operations. The vast majority of British bee hives are kept by small, hobbyist beekeepers, such as myself, who have two or three hives.
If compulsory registration is introduced, perhaps attached to a compulsory cost, the likelihood is that the number of beekeepers and hives in this country will fall dramatically. That is important, because given the impact on bee health, honey bees in the wild are far less numerous than they used to be. A typical wild colony set up by a swarm from a beekeeper’s hive will last a couple of years before it becomes vulnerable to collapse for some reason, typically varroa or a combination of parasites and infections.
The number of colonies in the wild is dramatically lower than it used to be. A reduction in the number of beekeepers will have a direct and significant effect on the total number of bees kept in the British isles. It is therefore essential that the Minister provides us with more details about how the money will be spent over the next two years and tells us about the Government’s ultimate intentions regarding BeeBase and registration. I know that there are others who wish to speak, so I will draw my remarks to a close. I look forward to the Minister’s response to the questions that I have raised.
Mr. Joe Benton (in the Chair): Before I call the next speaker, let me point out that I propose to commence the winding-up speeches at 10.30 am.
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