I was reading through some of the leaflets I picked up at the show last weekend and one of them was from the British Beekeepers’ Association.

It seems that DEFRA are out to save money by making cutbacks. The savings they have identified is a 20% cut in the already small Bee Health Programme. This £250,000 saving, in a department whose total budget is £3.2 billion, means that half the country’s Seasonal Bee Inspectors will be sacked. Without them it will be a lot harder for keepers to diagnose the highly contagious ‘brood diseases’ which kill off colonies.

So why get so upset about the loss of the odd bee hive here and there ? Well, balancing out the cost of the Bee Health Programme is the value which bees bring to the economy. According to the government’s own figures the ‘the pollination army’ contributes more than £120 million per annum to agricultural output.

We have more or less lost the wild bee in this country due to the varroa mite, we can’t afford to leave the beekeepers to stand alone to guard the honey bee population in the UK.