"…there would be no whites, no yellows, blues, or reds. Colours would be gone, which we take for granted. Everybody thinks it's nice to see large green fields but within those green fields are flowers and different shrubs that bring colour. The hedges filled with blackthorn with tiny white flowers, they would all disappear. Colour would be gone It would be a very bland, sad state."
Alan Hart grew up on a fruit farm with his father, since the age of 12 Alan was building beehives, frames and other hive parts for the bees in his father's farm. After leaving school at 16, Alan struggled to find a job and was finally offered a job to maintain bees on a bee farm. Now, 54, Alan works with The Bee Farmers’ Association as their Pollination Secretary, managing bee pollination.
According to Alan, the world wouldn’t just lose its colour, it would lose its crops, plants, birds and mammals too.
Bees help pollinate crop, and honeybees are one of the main pollinators, however, there are said to be many factors that are increasing the declination of bees such as extreme weather, pesticides and parasites.
As pollination secretary, Alan manages and control the pollination of crops by moving honey bees by mass to target particular crop which improves the quality of the crop and plants and also helps maximise production.
What do bees do?
According to the Bee Farmer's Association, one-third of our food is pollination-dependent on bees. When bees collect pollen and nectar from a flower, some of the pollen sticks to the hair of the bees. When the bee visits another flower the pollen then rubs onto the stigma of the flower, which then fertilises the flower and allows it to produce fruit.
According to the Government's Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) crops, trees, plants and honey bees provide a large value to the economy. Wild bees, honey bees and flies are the key pollinators that provide a large sum of pollination service provision to crops in the UK. However, the report states that the number of managed honey bee colonies has fallen due to environmental pressures.
Below show some of the different crop dependencies on pollinators (honey bees, solitary bees and bumble bees) and the annual value of pollination in 2010.
"Bumblebees and solitary bees, all play an important role, but honey bees are the most important for pollination, we can move them around to target certain crop." Alan continued
“Honeybees come out of the winter as a colony with 30-40,000 bees ready to go out. Bumblebees and solitary bees come out in the winter as one single queen looking for a nest unlike honey bees as a colony. I would be pollinating the plum, pears, cherries and apples and when they finished flowering I would then go on to the field beans.
“A lot of our diet relies on the crop being pollinated properly, and by the managing of pollination it helps produce good quality fruit.”
“Other crops dependent on bee pollination include beans, cabbage, cauliflower, chives, eggplant, garlic, lettuce, onions, turnip, sweet potato and radishes.”
Controlling Bee Pollination
The Bee Farmers Association represents 450 bee farming business around the United Kingdom. It's two main aims are to increase UK honey production and to increase the productivity of the bee farming business – one way of doing this is by providing managing pollination services.
According to The Bee Farmers' Association, the bee farming industry through managing and targeting pollination services help improve the production and quality of certain crops. This is done by specifically moving honey bees to particular orchards – the most effective method of crop pollination. Alan explains how honeybees help pollinate a wide range of crops including, top fruits, soft fruits, oilseed rape, field beans, borage.
"Most countries have monocultures, which are areas where there are big fields of barley, field beans and borage. All these crops need insect pollination and with the decline of wild pollinators, honey bees are more important than ever." Alan said.
“My job includes moving the bees hives into the orchards, I am able to manage the correct number of honey bee colonies into the crops, which guarantees pollination. This makes the crop increase and not only that, but it improves the quality of the crop.”
What's causing the bee decline?
According to the environmental group, Friends of The Earth, in the UK, 13 species of bees are lost and another 35 are currently under the threat of extinction.
"Just after the war, we estimated there were about a million hives left in the country, but this number has significantly dropped. You would be lucky to find 200,000 hives. We have certainly welled down in beekeepers in this country by a good 55% since the war." Alan said.
Pesticides
Neonicotinoids are pesticides that are used on crops and plants, and are damaging to bee's nervous system and motor function.
"Most farmers are very aware of pollination insects and are very careful of what time they spray. Most of the pollinating insects are out of the crops before the pesticide is sprayed. If they did spray during midday, they would lose so many pollination insects. The knock-on effect would be if the bee took the pesticide back to the hive, it would kill the whole hive. Likewise, if a bumble bee goes back to his colony to clean it that colony would die out as well, but farmers are very aware of when to spray."
Weather
Alan explained how climate change has a big effect on bee pollination. Not only does the extreme weather changes affect the crops itself, it slows down the pollination process for bees. “The weather is the most crucial because if it’s too cold the bees won’t go out and do their work. This year has been an exceptional year as it has been so cold for so long. This time last year all my hives were in the orchards by the 2nd April because it was so warm. This year on the 18th April I moved the bees into the orchards for the first time, almost a three-year gap since last year.
“If it’s more than 12 degrees then you’re starting to look at ideal pollination temperature, anything below that, you don’t get many insects out, Bumblebee as an exception but that’s not to say that the flowers will be receptive to the reproduction at that temperature - although they’d be collecting pollen it may not necessarily actually trigger the actual pollination system in the flower, the weather is the most crucial.”
Parasites
“I was running about 500 hives, then Varroa hit in 1992. Varroa are tiny mites that have come in from Asia and decimated the honey bees in this country. It has been the biggest threat to honey bee survival. It originally came from the Asian honey bees which are slightly bigger than our honey bees. When varroa passed from the Asian honey bee to the European, our honey bees have never come across this and don’t groom each other and don’t know how to groom each other so the mites have been a terrible problem for the honey bee population we have lost over 54% of honey bee in this country and a lot more since 1992.”
“We’re treating varroa all the time. We are using different ways to try and combat it. I use thymol, which is a natural oil from the thyme plant, but all we can do is reduce the number of mites in the hives, we haven’t found a way to actually get rid of it. But we must use soft chemicals to control the number of mites in the hives.”
What will happen if bees died out?
So what would happen if bees died out? The first thing Alan says is that there would be a significant drop in food production
"1/3 of our food comes from pollination, so if all bees disappeared there would be a major decline in food, fruit, and vegetables. Carrots, parsnips, brussels sprouts, they all grown from seed so at some point they've been a flower which would have had to be pollinated by an insect and probably a bee of some description."
“The only way to combat that is, man would have to pollinate it by hand using small paint brushes and this is done in China where they’ve lost so many honey bees.
“The wildlife would also suffer, lots of birds, mammals which depend on fruit and berries in the winter would disappear, the ecosystem is very delicate.”
“I think humans would struggle without bees, but I think we would somehow, with the wheat and the barley and the oats, would survive more on those sorts of crops. But we would certainly need different vitamins and proteins from different sources of foods which the fruit and vegetables would provide.”
