Bees starving for lack of blossoms
KÜPFENDORF-STEINHEIM (NNA) – Honey bees in Germany are suffering starvation at the height of summer because there are too few blossoms in fields and meadows on which they can feed. This is the alarming conclusion drawn by beekeepers working under the biodynamic Demeter label.
Spokesman Günter Friedmann said in a statement the bees were only surviving because they were being given sugar water by beekeepers.
Speaking on the basis of his own observations and similar disturbing reports from other beekeepers throughout Germany, Friedmann, who has worked professionally as a beekeeper for 30 years and who has been awarded the German government’s promotional prize for ecological agriculture, said he had never before in his career as a beekeeper encountered such a situation.
“If there is not a rapid rethink and a new way of working in agriculture, we will experience silent summers – and will discover that bees are essential for pollination and thus also for harvests,” the Demeter beekeepers’ statement adds.
Such a development had been on the cards for years and had also contributed to bee losses in previous years.
Responsibility for this state of affairs had to be laid at the door of the ever faster intensification of agriculture, the beekeepers say. The cultivation of regenerative raw materials and the production of biogas had a particularly negative effect.
Furthermore, the planting of maize dominated in many regions and fields were cut for silage before flowers had a chance to blossom with such frequency that there was nothing left for insects which depended on blossoms.
Thus once rape had flowered in mid to late May, a period of want and, indeed, starvation started for bees in many regions of Germany. Wild bees and butterflies were even worse off than honey bees because their lobby was so small, Friedmann emphasised.
The findings of the Demeter beekeepers are supported by research. Professor Dr. Jürgen Tautz from Würzburg University’s Bio Centre affirmed that the fitness of bee colonies had deteriorated, sometimes dramatically, as a result of the insufficient quantity and lack of diversity of blossoms and that “a too small and one-sided range of blossoms leads to a weakening and, in extreme cases, collapse of bee colonies”.
On the one hand beekeepers “understand the difficult situation in agriculture”. But on the other hand it was “an absurd situation that farmers for example have to produce ever greater quantities of milk at ever lower prices and that as a result our bees are starving to death,” Friedmann said.
The Demeter beekeepers are calling on the politicians responsible to take action so that developments do justice both to farmers and the basic needs of human beings and nature.
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Item: 090812-01EN Date: 12 August 2009
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