We get asked this one a lot, usually by someone who's read a headline about bees dying out and wants to know if the honey bee is about to vanish. It isn't. The trouble is mostly with the wild bees, and there are far more of those than people realise.
Honey bees are doing fine
Honey bees are holding up well in this country and that's largely down to beekeepers. When you look after a hive you feed it if it runs short, you treat it for mites and you split it when it gets crowded, so the number of colonies doesn't depend on luck the way it does for a wild bee nesting under a hedge. That doesn't mean honey bees have it easy. Pests like the varroa mite and long spells of wet weather can wipe out a colony that's already struggling, and we keep a close eye on all of ours for exactly that reason.
The bees we're losing
Two British bumblebees have already gone. The short-haired bumblebee was declared extinct here in 1988 and Cullum's bumblebee disappeared decades before that. A few more are clinging on in pockets. The great yellow bumblebee used to turn up all over the country and these days you'd have to go to the far north of Scotland or one of the islands to see one, because that's where the old flower-rich grassland it relies on is still left.
Why so many bees are struggling
Habitat loss is the big one. Most of Britain's wildflower meadows have been ploughed up or built over since the 1930s, and with them went a huge amount of food and nesting space. A lot of wild bees are picky eaters too, so if the one plant they like stops growing nearby the bee usually disappears along with it.
Pesticides add to the pressure. Some kill bees straight away and some just leave them a bit weaker, slower to find their way home and less able to shrug off disease. Then there's the weather. Warmer springs are pushing flowers to open earlier, and a queen bumblebee waking up on her usual schedule can find the plants she needs are already over. Put all of that together and a nest that's short of food has very little in reserve when something else goes wrong.
What we do about it at our apiary
We only ever take honey our hives can spare. We also support Bees for Development and we've trained more than 500 people through our beekeeping courses, many of whom go home and start making their own gardens friendlier to bees. Every bottle in our gift bundles is made with that same surplus honey.
How your garden can help
Gardens make a bigger difference than people expect, simply because there are so many of them. If you've got flowers going from the first crocuses in early spring to the last asters in autumn there's always something for a bee to eat, and natives like knapweed, bird's-foot trefoil and red clover are well worth a spot in the border. We'd also leave a corner of lawn to grow long and keep a bit of bare sunny soil for the solitary bees that nest underground.
