The UK faces a food security catastrophe because of its very low numbers of honeybee colonies, which provide an essential service in pollinating many crops, scientists warned on Wednesday.

 

New research reveals that honeybees provide just a quarter of the pollination needed in the UK, the second lowest level among 41 European countries. Furthermore, the controversial rise of biofuels in Europe is driving up the need for pollination five times faster than the rise in honeybee numbers. The research suggests an increasing reliance on wild pollinators, such as bumblebees and hoverflies, whose diversity is in decline.

 

The study, published in the journal PLoS One, found that Europe has 13 million less managed honeybee colonies than would be needed to properly pollinate all its crops, equivalent to 7 billion individual bees. Across the continent, honeybees provided just two-thirds of the pollination but the situation in the UK was particularly stark, with only Moldova having a bigger bee deficit. Many major agricultural nations, including France, Italy and Germany, had too few honeybees to provide all the pollination services.

 

The poor situation in the UK is partly due to a big decline in honeybees in recent decades. More recently, cereal crops that are wind-pollinated have increasingly been replaced by biofuel crops like oil seed rape which require insect pollination to give full yields. Elsewhere in Europe, biofuel demand has increased sunflower production, another crop that needs insect pollination. Overall, production of oil seed crops has risen by almost 20% from 2005-2010 in Europe. Biofuels produced from edible crops have already become controversial because of links to rises in food prices and suggestions that some are just as polluting as the fossil fuels they replace.

 

In December, a two-year ban began across the Europe Union on widely used insecticides that have been linked to serious harm in bees. The UK unsuccessfully opposed the ban, arguing there was insufficient evidence for it.