The silence of the bees - Le silence des abeilles?

This week 10,000 bee specialists from all over the world have gathered here in the south of France for the 41st Apimondia conference. I hadn't heard of this until our local newspaper published an article today highlighted the event and the work of Vincent Tardieu. He is a French journalist who writes a blog (and has published a book) called L'étrange silence des abeilles, about the often mysterious disappearance or reduction of bee populations. Of course this is deeply worrying because much fruit and vegetable production depends on bee pollination.

As the newspaper says, the problem is that although they disappear by the thousands or millions, nobody really knows why, and Tardieu has attempted to find out through enquiries in the USA, in France and elsewhere. He says: "beekeepers think the problem is pesticides, virologists think it's definitely a virus, some entomoligists think it is a parasite, while other researchers blame some kind of genetic decline or competition with foreign immigrant insects.

One of these is the Japanese hornet (voir aussi article en français), a fearsome beast 5 cm long with a violent sting and no natural predators. As a wasp-hater since childhood I'm particularly worried about these because their huge nests have been spotted in the south west of France. Apparently they kill ordinary honey bees by hovering outside their hives and decapitating the workers as they pass. Ugh!

The article refers to the industrial-scale pollination practised in the USA with huge trailers of beehives being towed round orchards from Florida to California. There, bees are disappearing though nobody has found carpets of corpses. In a murder mystery, it goes on, if there are no corpses then there isn't a mass murderer, but Tardieu is convinced that reductions in bee population are due to a cocktail of ills, parasites and chemicals which threatens their very survival. He ends "these extraordinary insects preserve our delight in food and in the beauty and diversity of the countryside, so keeping them alive is very much our business."

Two footnotes. Our friends Christine and Martial Vanvooren who have a market garden here in Lunel use other insects to pollinate their crops inside poly-tunnels - this is obviously practicable if you have an enclosed space but not in the open. And I was relieved to discover that grape flowers are pollinated by wind so it seems our wine supplies will survive threats to the bee population.