The Bees' Knees

Last night, at the Annual General Meeting of the wonderful Local Nature Reserve, we got to hear all about Bees. Bees are in: the very thought that they might all disappear has got everyone, well, buzzing.

It turns out that the centre of our nation's bee-research is just down the road from here, at the enigmatic FERA which, to avoid complication, was known as the CSL until, ooh, probably last month sometime. FERA run a set of hives for research, will pay to borrow other beekeepers' hives to collect information, keep a map of all beekeepers willing to register on it and run an Agony Aunt service for people whose bees appear to be in distress. They're the people to ring up if your bees develop anything notifiable, and what's more they allegedly have 5 tonnes of honey in buckets round the back that they don't quite know what to do with.

Life, it seems, is pretty damn tough if you're a bee. Spending all day collecting nectar that ends up being eaten by someone else, except when it's raining in which case you're probably spending all day wishing you were out-and-about in the fresh air but don't dare to because there are water-bombs the size of your torso hurtling down fit to flatten you. Summers with too many rainy days will result in either outright starvation, or in some blight that'll hit you while you're down.

The one that most people have heard of is Varroa, which is a type of mite. Except that on a bee it's a bit like being stuck with a 10 kilo leech all day (and still having to work). Incredibly, bees seem to be able to learn to clean up their hives to get rid of it. Then there's the delightfully-named "American Foul Brood", which is not a bunch of loudmouthed spoiled brats in baseball caps but some kind of bacterium, whose presence in the UK is declining because any hives in which it is found have to be destroyed. In case you think Lunchista is displaying a spot of Usophobia here, I'll add that there is also European Foul Brood.

What with all these blights on the loose, there appear to be no honey-bees left in the wild: in days of yore if you fancied a spot of beekeeping you simply put up frames in your garden and waited for a bunch to move in. Nowadays you have to troll off and buy them. Lunchista would find this very sad, but for an interesting thought.

As I went to thank the Sydney Morning Herald for the picture I used for this post, I read the article from which it was lifted. Bees, it would appear, are a bit more brainy than we have previously given them credit for. Most of the transmission of bee diseases is the result of careless handling by humans: infected imported Queens (not the sort that were singing earlier on) contaminated kit and the like. Given the choice of having, or not having, to give up a large proportion of their lunch, and having, or not having, the attendent risk of all the above-mentioned blights, any bees still remaining in the wild may simply be keeping a low profile.

You could call it the sting in the tail.