PROTECTION RACKET

May is the month of swarms – the hopeful expansion of healthy honeybee colonies.

Many other bee species also make an appearance, emerging from hibernation, or hatching from their cocoons. As the flowers open they call the bees and our gardens are buzzing.

In April, I attended the ‘Learning from the Bees’ conference held at Sheepdrove organic farm in Berkshire. The event was preceded by a tour for some of us around the Blenheim estate with the beekeeper Filipe. A South African with a passion for climbing high up into trees and a natural talent for finding wild honeybee colonies, Blenheim was a perfect place for him to thrive. Four years ago he was approached by the Blenheim estate, as they were inspired by a talk he’d given at Oxford University about conserving wild honeybee species. Given the freedom of the protected and usually off-limits ancient woodland, Filipe found 17 wild colonies of bees living in the cavities of trees. He now has recorded 76. We were taken around to see some of the colonies. Initially, some were easily spotted along the main pathways open to the public. We were shown a wild colony living in the cavity formed by a broken branch. He’d placed some cork around the entrance as an experiment to see if wild bees would chew the cork in the way managed colonies offered cork do. They don't. Filipe concluded that the cork being heated to 450 degrees during manufacture enables bees to collect the resin to make their propolis. Wild woodland bees have an abundance of tree resins and therefore don’t need the cork ‘supplement’ .

Filipe is someone who constantly asks ‘why?’ –striving for new knowledge and deeper connection with the bees, and the trees they inhabit. He considers the results and behaviours he witnesses – using various scientific methods to measure the bees, from their flight distances, timings, size of the cavity, the colonies inside and their life expectancy. Using state-of-theart cameras, he records behaviours inside the hives, throughout the year, the wax, the propolis and the bees.

Once we were taken off the public paths, we walked into the land of giants – surrounded by oaks, the majority of which were well into their hundredth or even three hundredth year. The first buds were forming on the branches – the under-canopy with flashes of white blackthorn blossom, and the acid green of hawthorn buds, golds and yellows of willow and hazel catkins. The abundance of giant trees almost removed the awe of the true giants – the Queens and King of the Hyde Park woodland. Precisely aged at 1046 years, the grandest oak stood on a slight mound of moss and humus – vast spreading branches open out into the canopy. We weren’t allowed to touch anything. We’d undergone strict biosecurity to protect these rare examples of nature left to thrive.

Could we really believe that these ancient giants lived without seeing any disease in their lifetime? Would it be realistic to imagine that every year these giants lived, no disease was experienced around them? If other oaks were sick, were these the only oaks that survived? If they lived through sickness and disease, what made them different? Could it be that these woods were so left to their own devices, nature had to protect itself, without the interference of man? Just like the bees?

The 76 colonies show no effects of varroa mite or any other disease. The sheer existence of these bees challenges many conventional beekeepers. It shows that the past 30 years of chemical miticide use was not needed. The wild bees sorted themselves out. Maybe the trees did the same.

I’ve recently been driving through Gloucestershire on several occasions and been quite horrified at the vast quantity of felled trees along the roadsides. Ash dieback has taken its toll, or rather the human response to it has. The current procedure is to fell all ash trees showing any sign of disease. The older trees along the roadsides with the slightest effect of the disease on the canopy have been removed. The fear of sick trees falling on passing traffic is of course legitimate. As I drove past, sometimes slowly due to the tree surgery traffic lights, I could see the stumps of very healthy-looking trees. No signs of rot or decay. Trees reduced from 20-30ft to 1-2ft. A comment I heard from a tree activist protecting ancient trees during the HS2 development in 2020 was that it takes 200 years to replace a 200-year-old tree.

Our decision to remove young, middle and oldaged ash trees has been like culling a vast number of the human population, after as much as a sneeze, just in case they developed the full symptoms of a disease. No room for any of the trees to develop recovery or methods to exist with the disease. There have been rumours of some ash trees not succumbing to ‘die back’, but they’re not making the wider news. Roadsides are marked by the stumps of trees culled. Hedgerows look remarkably neat and tidy to please those eager to ‘smarten’ up our wilder parts of nature.

Meanwhile in Australia, honeybees are being culled due to the outbreak of varroa mite. Despite 30 years of global miticide use, and the evidence that the untreated bees are faring better, able to live alongside varroa, or even overcoming it, the New South Wales government, not happy with euthanising all the managed colonies of honeybees, are now spraying the really toxic fiprinol insecticide across the state, to ensure that no insect will survive for varroa to infest.

If ever there was a time for mankind to step back, it is now, and for those who care about nature, to step forward. There’ll be no swarms of honeybees in New South Wales next spring. Let’s value every single bee we see in our gardens this summer. It only takes one minister to decide the bees are sick and need culling. If we all decide we’re happy to sacrifice our nature, we will never get the chance to witness its true wisdom – millions of years of evolution, overcoming extremes in climate, and disease, only to be slaughtered by the humans placed on earth to protect them. Once again we’re shown how everything is connected and how vital it is that more of mankind realise that we cannot be killing nature without affecting ourselves. paulacarnell.com