Consumers stung by slump in bee population

If there is any honey left for tea, the chances are that it will be much more expensive in the days and weeks to come.

There are many causes including the impact of pesticides used in industrial farming, the longer-term impact of climate change, fungal infections, parasites and a shift genetically modified crops. But there is no denying a potentially calamitous decline in the size of the UK and European bee population.

This BBC report claims that the British bee-keeping fraternity are warning that there could be no domestically-produced honey left on supermarket shelves by Christmas. A mite infestation that has killed off a quarter of the UK’s honey bees this year and bee-keepers have been lobbying government for financial help to prevent the problems becoming a rout of the bee population. As market supply falls, the price of honey increases. But the effects are much broader than this. Bees pollinate many of the plants and vegetation which we then go on to consume so we can expect higher prices for our morning coffee or orange juice and also milk. Here we have a graphic example of inter-related markets.

A blog on the Guardian web site makes this point forcibly:

“Some 250,000 species of flowering plants depend on bees for pollination. Many of these are crucial to world agriculture. Bees increase the yields of around 90 crops, such as apples, blueberries and cucumbers by up to 30%, so many fruits and vegetables would become scarce and prohibitively expensive.”

One immediate response has come from the European Union which has agreed to set up recovery zones for bee hives - namely patches of farmland planted with pollen and nectar-rich plants. The fear is that this is too little too late, and the wider externalities from the demise of the bee population will prove to be very expensive for all of us.