After 20 years of beekeeping – inspired, he says, by Sherlock Holmes's decision to take it up in retirement – Tim Lovett remains as fascinated by bees as ever. "The more time you spend with bees, the more you get drawn into their amazing world: the way they organise themselves, control themselves, and what they're responsible for," he says.
"Just think about your breakfast; if there were no bees, there would be no orange juice on your table, there would be no jam, no honey. I've been to China, to Szechuan, where the bee population was wiped out, and you see men on ladders there using paintbrushes to pollinate the fruit trees. Can you imagine the cost of our food if we had to do that all ourselves? You'd only be able to afford half an olive on a pizza, and the mozzarella – which comes from cows raised on [bee-pollinated] alfalfa – would be absolutely prohibitive."
For the last few years, Lovett and the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) have been successfully raising awareness of the dangers currently facing the UK's honeybees. "We're not facing the same losses as they're seeing in the States, where some bee farms are losing 60-70% of their stock in one year. Here, we're seeing a steady, incremental decline: 30% a couple of winters ago, 20% last year and 14% this year. That may seem to be improving, but in fact 14% is still a big loss. In a more typical year, you'd expect about 5% loss, maybe as much as 10%."
Lovett points to a number of possible causes such as the varroa mite, the viruses vectored by the mite, and a microsporidian parasite known as Nosema apis. He says: "These three together – along with other factors like bad weather, a lack of forage, a lack of variety in that forage, pesticide use – can all bring about the ultimate demise of the bees." It is, in short, a perfect storm.
The varroa mite has been particularly problematic. "It has only been in the UK for about 20 years," Lovett says. "It made its way across from the far east over several decades, but while Asian honeybees had time to adapt, European bees are not well adapted to deal with it."
Unfortunately, there is a dearth of effective treatments. "We use various medicines to get rid of it," Lovett says, "but you're trying to kill off a bug on a bug, effectively, so you have to be careful or you kill the patient. If you imagine an espresso saucer on your back, that is the relative size of the mite to the bee, so it is quite big."
The 21st-century world is, in many ways, also less bee-friendly, he points out. The agricultural treatment of the countryside, for example, with single crops covering vast areas does not suit bees. "Those fields full of rape, for example, produce a lot of pollen and nectar for a very short time and then disappear; it's like a super-size diet, and bees desperately need variety."
And the family traditions of beekeeping have been lost. "Two hundred years ago everybody kept bees; if you had a garden, you had a hive. And even a couple of decades ago you would have had sixth- or seventh-generation beekeepers; when grandpa died, someone would have taken over his hives. But with the move into cities and away from the land, a lot of that tradition died out."
Lovett does, however, see some grounds for optimism. The BBKA's campaign has been so successful at raising awareness that it has waiting lists for its training courses. Beekeeping, and urban beekeeping in particular, is becoming increasingly popular. And under environmental stewardship schemes, farmers are now allowing wildflowers and wildlife to flourish in their hedgerows and around the edges of their fields.
"People are coming into beekeeping on a bit of mission," he says, pleased that the BBKA's campaigning has managed to make so much impact. But he hopes that people will remember that this is not a pastime that can be abandoned when you get bored. "It's really important to remember that you have taken on a responsibility here, a responsibility to yourself, to your neighbour and, most of all, to the bees."
