Europe’s bees stung by climate, pesticides and parasites

QUIMPER, France: Bees pollinate 71 of the 100 crop species that provide 90 percent of food worldwide. They also pollinate wild plants, helping sustain biodiversity and the beauty of the natural world.

But climate change, pesticides and parasites are taking a terrible toll on bees and they need protecting, according to European beekeepers, who held their annual congress in Quimper, western France, this week. The congress, which said some European beekeepers were suffering “significant mortalities and catastrophic harvests due to difficult climatic conditions”, was an opportunity for beekeepers and scientists to try to respond to the major concerns.

The European Union, the world´s second largest importer of honey, currently produces just 60 percent of what it consumes. French beekeepers, for example, expect to harvest between 12,000 and 14,000 tonnes of honey this year, far lower than the 30,000 tonnes they harvested in the 1990s, according to the National Union of French Beekeepers (UNAF).

“I´ve been fighting for bees for 30 years but if I had to choose now, I don´t know if I´d become a beekeeper,” said UNAF spokesman Henri Clement, who has 200 hives in the unspoilt mountainous Cevennes region in southeastern France. Clement is 62 and not far off retiring. “But it´s not much fun for young people who want to take up the profession,” he said.

Many of the subjects buzzing around the congress were evidence of this -- Asian hornets, parasitic varroa mites and hive beetles (all invasive alien species in Europe), pesticides and climate change.

With climate change, “the bigger issue is just the erratic weather and rain patterns, drought and things like that”, explained US entomologist Jeffery Pettis, president of Apimondia, an international federation of beekeeping associations in 110 countries.

“In certain places, the plants had been used to a certain temperature. And now it goes up, and you have a hot dry summer, and there are no flowers,” Pettis told AFP. No flowers means no pollen, which means bees dying of hunger. Climate scientists say human-induced global heating is intensifying extreme weather events like flooding, and heatwaves that exacerbate wildfires. “The fires seem to be a big issue,” Pettis said. “They come sporadically and we lose hives directly from flooding and fires.”