By Ruth D'Alessandro, The Wildlife Gardener

The Wildlife Gardener went to a Women’s Institute meeting the other night, for a talk by the delightful Audrey Gill from the Surrey Beekeeper’s Association. The WI is so concerned about the decline in the honeybee population that the ONLY Resolution for discussion at the National Federation of Women’s Institutes' AGM at the Royal Albert Hall on June 3rd is whether to urge HM Government to increase funding for research into bee health. If a majority vote yes to the Resolution, The NFWI will lobby for that funding increase.

With all the financial tribulations of the government, why should it dig deeper to fund research into insects? Here’s why:

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• Bees contribute £165 million a year to the UK economy
• 80% of flowers are insect-pollinated: flowers of fruits, nuts, avocados, soya beans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squashes, tomatoes, sunflowers, cucumbers, oil-seed rape, alfalfa, peas, runner and broad beans.
• 85% of these insects are honey bees
• 90% of fruit is dependent on honey bee pollination
• Every third mouthful of food we eat is reliant on honey bees

So if we don’t save bees, we won’t eat.

Albert Einstein is reputed to have said: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."

Or, as one WI member wittily put it, everyone will have to crawl around with fine brushes hand-pollinating every flower. For the sake of our knees, protect the bees!

And bees are utterly fascinating too. Audrey’s talk was packed with enough Anorak Facts to fill whole pages with our yellow boxes, so here is just one choice one, all about sex:

Without bees pollinating wild flowers, the flowers won't set seed. Over time, the countryside would be dominated by plants such as grasses that do not require insect pollination. Imagine a meadow with no colour. Dull, dull, dull. We won’t eat, and there’ll be nothing pretty to look at. What a life.

So what is causing this honeybee decline? I haven’t seen many in the Wildlife Garden this year, despite resisting the urge to pull off the flowers on the dandelion plants, leaving them for the early bees to forage. Wild habitat loss, intensive farming and overuse of pesticides and herbicides and varroa mites bringing disease have all contributed to the decline.

In the USA, honeybees have been devastated by Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), where whole bee colonies disappear or die, leading to declines of between 30-90% in at least 27 states (2007). The deaths of some UK bee colonies suggest that CCD may have arrived in Britain, and most beekeepers believe that its arrival is inevitable, even suggesting that honeybees may be wiped out by 2018.

What can be done about it? On a national scale, £8 million of government money over 5 years must be pumped into research into honeybee diseases, which is why the WI’s stand is such a noble one. If you belong to the WI, vote yes to the Resolution: this is an important cause. On a local scale, grow blossoming fruit trees, aquilegia, borage, monarda (bee balm) cardoons, foxgloves, echinops, verbascum and poppies in your garden for bees. Keep chemical use to a minimum. Keep a local beekeeper’s number handy in case you see a swarm of bees: the bees can be collected and rehived. A swarm appeared on the outskirts of our town last year. Unfortunately, by the time the local beekeeper arrived the swarm had moved into an air brick in a house, and had to be eradicated by pest control. Another bee colony lost.

Many people this week, including Mr Wildlife Gardener, have been swept up in by swine ‘flu fever. It’s nasty, certainly, but not an automatic death sentence. People die of ordinary ‘flu, meningitis and respiratory complications after colds. We are privileged in the UK to have the backup of First World medical treatment if we get ill, unlike many people in Mexico. What worries me more this week is that in 10 years we may no longer have honeybees. That would mean slow death from starvation on a bleak landscape. But does that make a good headline?