By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website The decline of honeybees seen in many countries may be caused by reduced plant diversity, research suggests. Bees fed pollen from a range of plants showed signs of having a healthier immune system than those eating pollen from a single type, scientists found. Writing in the journal Biology Letters, the French team says that bees need a fully functional immune system in order to sterilise food for the colony. Other research has shown that bees and wild flowers are declining in step. Two years ago, scientists in the UK and The Netherlands reported that the diversity of bees and other insects was falling alongside the diversity of plants they fed on and pollinated. … David Aston, who chairs the British Beekeepers’ Association technical committee, described the finding as “very interesting” – particularly as the diversity of food available to UK bees has declined. “If you think about the amount of habitat destruction, the loss of biodiversity, that sort of thing, and the expansion of crops like oilseed rape, you’ve now got large areas of monoculture; and that’s been a fairly major change in what pollinating insects can forage for.” As a consequence, he said, bees often do better in urban areas than in the countryside, because city parks and gardens contain a higher diversity of plant life. …
Bee decline linked to falling biodiversity via The Oil Drum
