Long life | 28 May 2015

From reading the newspapers you might get the impression that honeybees were on the way to extinction. In Europe, it is said, the number of honeybee colonies has fallen in a few years by a quarter. In the United States, it has halved since the 1940s. Nobody knows exactly why. The experts blame any number of things, from pesticides to climate change, from disease-bearing parasites to the loss of those plants on which bees like to feed. They all agree, however, that the disappearance of the bee would be a disaster. Bees don’t just make honey and beeswax. Eighty per cent of all plant species depend on them for pollination. One third of all the food that people eat would not be available but for bees.

Worrying though all that sounds, I am reassured by the fact that there always seem to be plenty of bees buzzing about in my garden in Northamptonshire; and when I arrived there from London for the Bank Holiday weekend, I found a note from my cleaner on the kitchen table warning me to be careful because there was a swarm of bees in the garden outside.