The good news about bees: Why they're returning to British gardens
Not for nothing is the humble bee synonymous with being busy. Their most obvious benefits come to us in the form of honey, beeswax and honeycomb – but the role they play behind the scenes is even more significant.
Put bluntly, bees are the reason we can eat well – or at all. Bee pollination plays an essential role in the production of fruits – including apples, pears, cherries, peaches, plums and more – as well as nuts like almonds and macadamia, and seeds like sunflower or pumpkin. They’re involved in pollinating coffee and cocoa; spices like coriander, fennel and mustard, plants from parsnip to parsley. Without bees, our diets would be at best bland and at worse, collapse entirely, potentially rendering the human race extinct.
In reality, bees aren’t the only pollinators on which we all rely – flies (and especially hoverflies) do a lot of the pollination upon which we humans rely. But thanks to their provision of honey, their black-and-yellow stripes and their generally good PR, it’s bees that we notice.
As we’ve all gained “greater environmental awareness”, beekeeper Ian Campbell says, “honey bees have become something of a canary-in-the-coalmine species in the public’s mind”.
But, on the rare occasions we think about bees, we tend to worry about them – because around the world, bee populations have been under threat. New diseases threaten colonies; industrial agriculture decimates the wildflowers bees rely on to feed; new species – like so-called Asian murder hornets – threaten to predate on hives, and climate change accelerates all these things. Such is the level of concern about the welfare of bees that it was even a major plot point across a whole season of Doctor Who.
Statistics published this year, though, seem to suggest there might be some good news – for bees at least. The prevalence of wild bees in the UK appears to be improving slowly but steadily, and there are more honey bees being kept in the UK, too. There’s still plenty of reason to be cautious, but thanks to a combination of efforts by beekeepers, better farming practices and reduced pesticide use, it appears Britain may be having something of a bee renaissance.
The evidence is contained in a report on pollinators compiled for the government by the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, which tracks the distribution of 158 different species of the 270 species of wild bees across the UK, looking at how many of these species are seen in different areas. If a particular bee species is seen in more areas than before that’s good news – if it’s fewer, then it’s bad.
Between 1980 to 2012 or so, the distribution of these species had at best held steady or fallen slightly, but over the last decade far more bee species seem to be getting more widespread than those that are dwindling. Admittedly the figures are a little difficult to unpick, because it’s not as if researchers can simply count up the number of bees there are in the UK, or even reliably sample this number, but in the past five years, ‘occurrence records’ – or what species were seen where and when – show that 56 per cent of the tracked bees have become more widespread; over the longer term (since 1980), 31 per cent of bees are more prevalent.
Of the various species thriving, the buff-tailed bumblebee – the larger, fluffy bee that many of us confuse with honey bees (which are smaller and not fluffy) – is doing well because it feeds on a wide range of flowers and copes well with the cold, meaning its now even being spotted in the winter as the British climate warms.
By contrast the tormentil mining bee, which feeds on Tormentil flowers that grow on heathland is struggling in southern England as the climate changes – although it’s more widely spotted in the north.
“Bees and other pollinators are well known to be highly responsive to short-term weather patterns, as well as being influenced by the longer-term changes in climate,” explains Dr Claire Carvell, an expert on pollinator ecology at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. “We are only just approaching the timespan of data required to start talking about these longer-term trends with accuracy.”
It’s not just climate change helping the bees, however. As Dr Carvell explains, attention to the plight of bees has resulted in “changes in farmland management to create bee-friendly habitats as well as an increase in wildlife-friendly gardening. This could partly explain why they are doing comparatively better than other groups, such as the hoverflies, [which are] often referred to as the ‘forgotten pollinators’.”
Government subsidies for farms post-Brexit have encouraged the planting of wildflowers and practices such as leaving hedges and the edges of fields to go wild, which may be helping bees, alongside efforts from people at home to make their gardens bee-friendly. People like bees – and their work to help them seems to be paying off, in other words.
This is particularly true for honey bees, which in the UK are overwhelmingly kept by hobbyist beekeepers, rather than large-scale commercial operations. And beekeeping in the UK is, according to the British Beekeepers Association, enjoying something of a resurgence.
By the turn of the millennium, the number of UK beekeepers had dropped to around 10,000, after the spread of several diseases that caused the collapse of colonies and meant keepers had to learn new ways of managing their hives – but things have got better, according to the BBKA’s Ian Campbell.
“By 2010 it was all recovering strongly. And now it’s back up to about 30,000 sort of members of the British Beekeepers Association,” he says. The National Bee Unit reckon there’s about a quarter of a million, give or take, colonies across England and Wales.”
Campbell gives his colleagues at the BBKA some credit for this, for encouraging more people into beekeeping, but says the pandemic was definitely a factor. “Covid saw an increase in interest as folks had a little more time available and reconnected with nature,” he says. “Beekeepers were allowed to tend to livestock over the Covid lockdowns.”
Ultimately, he says, beekeeping is deeply rewarding – and bees prove to be charming to their keepers. “Working with bees and studying them has become a bit of a way of life for me now,” he says. “There are so many different disciplines involved. The practical handling and management is a big aspect, the huge amount of scientific research; honey bees’ value as pollinators; biology; behaviour; historical developments.”
All of that, and one more bonus, too: “Honey bees are a fascinating species and providing a lovely foodstuff is something that attracts quite a few.”
That doesn’t mean 2024 has been an easy year for beekeeping – bees struggle when spring weather is wet because they have little time to go out and forage for food. They also have problems when fields are planted with wild flowers one year and then used for crops the next – because hives remember where food was last year and assume it’ll be in the same place next time. Beekeepers are also watching the spread of Asian hornets across Europe, fearing it’s a matter of time before they establish themselves here.
But Campbell, who keeps 25 hives of his own since taking up the hobby in 2009, says the surge of interest is promising. “Beekeeping has become hugely more diverse,” he says. “When I first started, there was an emphasis towards slightly grey haired, bearded, older gentlemen.
“Now it’s at least 50% – if not more – women, and the age and racial sort of diversity of [beekeeping] has increased significantly. So it’s much wider than it used to be. The older generation has moved on a bit, there is a new uptake of people coming into it.
Beekeeping, he adds, “is also a great leveller. In an apiary you could be a professional, retired, a student, tradesperson, any age, race and gender and still chat happily about bees and beekeeping.”
Such is the success of kept honey bees that some people have been concerned that the greater numbers of honey bees could be a threat to wild bees – because they’d eat all the food in an area. But both Campbell and Carvell agreed this should be low down on people’s list of concerns.
“Having both managed and wild species living and competing for resources within the same ecosystem can potentially create issues, both around food supply and the spread of diseases, and bees are no different in this context,” explains Carvell.
“But relative to the other threats facing wild bees, such as habitat loss and intensive agriculture, honeybees pose less of an issue.”
Overall, though, anyone wanting to help bees – whether wild bees or honey bees – could do so, even if they lived in cities, she said. It all comes down to planting some flowers.
“Overall, we need to ensure there are a wide range of flowers, nesting and larval feeding habitats to support our rich diversity of pollinators and other insects in both urban and rural areas,” she said.
Not a bad tip for anyone looking for a stocking filler or two – a pack of seeds could be a gift to a relative, and to the UK’s bees.
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