One summer a few years ago a local landowner suggested I put a few hives of bees at the edge of some fields of oilseed rape on his estate. Both the quantity and quality of the oilseed crop would be improved if the bees pollinated it, and I would get honey. Although beekeepers have always been wary of rape, for a couple of very good reasons, in my part of Herefordshire it is almost the only honey-yielding flowering plant left in any quantity in the springtime, wild flowers having been almost entirely eradicated by the farmers, who are attached to the idea of ‘clean’ monocultures and do not seem to understand the value of ecological complexity both to the planet and to them as individuals.
After a couple of weeks, early one May morning as the mist and sun were rising on a still day promising the heat shimmer of summer later in the day, I was called by the farm bailiff. A spraying contractor was going to spray the rape with a fungicide and he thought I might want to tape over the hive entrances before the bees started to fly, to keep them in until the spraying was over. It was ‘only’ a fungicide, he said, not an insecticide, but the code of practice said you should spray flowering crops early before the sun was up and the before the pollinating insects were abroad. He reassured me that it was ‘only a fungicide’ and ‘won’t harm the bees’. Although I’m not fool enough to believe that labelling a chemical ‘fungicide’ means it won’t harm bees, farmers and manufacturers have acted for years on that rather simple-minded (and incorrect) assumption. Fungicides are harmful to many other forms of life.
When I first arrived the sprayer was not in the field. The bees weren’t flying yet, so I was able to put adhesive tape over the hive entrances. When I came back later on that morning the sun was shining on the bright yellow fields, and all the pollinating insects in the area seemed to have been drawn to the strong perfume and dazzling colour of the rape fields. The sprayer was travelling round the field drenching the flowering rape, in absolute defiance of the code of practice designed to protect pollinating insects.
I found out later, when I met the bailiff, that a tree branch had fallen across the track to the rape fields, so the sprayer had diverted to spray fungicide on the potato fields while the bailiff got to work with his chainsaw. The spraying contractor, who was paying off a huge loan to buy the spraying rig, wasn’t about to come back on another morning just to comply with some code of practice – and anyway he was fully booked up spraying chemicals on our countryside pretty much every day for the rest of the summer.
As a beekeeper, an environmentalist, but also a neighbour, on the same pub quiz team as the landowner, I didn’t think that making a formal complaint would change anything, even supposing I could find someone to take my complaint seriously. It would alienate my neighbours but achieve nothing. I had no belief that reporting the incident would result in any action from the authorities. Although there are various laws and codes of practice, farmers seem able to ignore them, in the knowledge that the Environment Agency (or DEFRA, or whatever the agency or ministry is called at any particular time) does not proactively enforce anything. You would have to score a major fish kill in the river to run the slightest risk of prosecution. Gradual attrition of the natural world carries no penalties, it seems.
The doctrine known as Integrated Pest Management recommends using a range of strategies to reduce pest problems while minimising damage to the environment. There is a requirement to apply the principles of Integrated Pest Management throughout Europe, which at the time of this incident applied to the UK, of course, though there do not ever seem to have been any serious attempts to promote this approach here beyond a little lip-service. Strategies to be considered should include biological controls, cultural techniques, plant breeding and physical controls. If it is believed that there is no alternative to the use of pesticides, they should only be used if there is an actual problem serious enough to justify their use. In other words, sprays should not be used prophylactically. The farmer is supposed to wait until he has a ‘pest’ problem before resorting to the sprayer, rather than spraying when there isn’t a problem, just in case.
Round here it appears to me that spraying is almost the only tool in the farming toolbox, and I suspect that this is true for much of Britain. Most farms in this area set up a spraying programme for the year and book the spraying contractor and he goes gaily round spraying from farm to farm all summer whether or not. Whatever the laws and codes of practice, they serve no purpose unless they are enforced.
Oilseed rape is a problem for beekeepers. We need it – there is almost nothing else for our bees in spring. Most of our flower meadows have been destroyed, our road verges are turned into lawns by tidy minded fools, and herbicides drench the arable land. Rape honey sets in the hive before you can extract it if you aren’t very careful, and sometimes even if you are; and it sets in the jar in a way customers don’t always like. But at that time rape was also treated with the notorious neonicotinoid pesticides (eventually banned by the EU in 2018, not safely banned here if present government enthusiasm for deregulation takes over, and widely used in the USA, where they having serious effects on wildlife, such as causing jaw deformities in elk). At the time of writing the government has backed away from the emergency permission to use neonicotinoids on sugar beet this year, but they are clearly prepared to allow its use if ‘necessary’.
Incredibly, or maybe not in this age of deregulation, the spray manufacturers do the safety testing on their own products. I tried to research this particularly British form of corruption when I was worried about the effect that neonicotinoids were having on my bees, and as far as I can work out the manufacturers devise the safety tests that give the results they want. For example, a test might show that used at a certain concentration a spray would kill a high proportion of bees, so in their tests they reduce the dosage until bees don’t actually drop dead in the fields. They can then say it is harmless for bees if used at that level, because it isn’t directly drop-dead lethal and the government will usually approve the pesticide on their say-so and support the continued use of that pesticide until there is a very sustained public outcry. In the case of neonicotinoids it has taken beekeepers and others 36 years to achieve a fragile ban on their use; if they had been properly tested by impartial scientists they might never have been introduced. Even though bees and beekeepers are popular and make a fuss, and in spite of lobbying by conservationists, it takes years to get chemicals banned or even reassessed under this system. DDT was introduced in 1945; Rachel Carson published her book on the effects of DDT, Silent Spring, in 1965 and caused a worldwide sensation but it took another 7 years for the USA to ban it in 1972; the UK dragged its feet until 1986, and the chemical companies continued to sell it in the third world until the worldwide ban in 2001. We really need to start campaigning against new poisons long before they are invented!
That kind of crude drop down dead test, then, might be adequate if the chemical companies were testing their insecticides on insects with a simpler lifestyle. But honey bees and other wild bees take nectar to the hive and concentrate it, so that the proportion of spray residues found in the nectar becomes far higher in the honey that is fed to the developing bee larvae. And these larvae do not develop into simple insects that just mate, lay eggs and die, if indeed such simple insects exist; bee larvae develop into individuals that can perform complex tasks in the hive and in the fields, that can communicate and learn and remember and cooperate with each other, navigate round the countryside, lay scent trails to guide their colleagues to honey sources, remember features of the landscape and doubtless perform other complex functions that we may never fully understand. The chemical manufacturers do not concern themselves with investigating the effects of their products on the developing brains and nervous systems of bee larvae in the hive being fed on contaminated honey. Such research might jeopardise their safety data. But subtle damage to developing bees reduces their ability to function, to reproduce, even to survive. I used to have 86 colonies of bees. Now I have 25, which I’m fairly sure is the result of reduced fertility, a known effect of neonicotinoid sprays. I seem to be fighting a losing battle to continue to be a beekeeper.
If rape is a problematic crop for beekeepers, it also poses an extremely interesting dilemma for farmers. It is prone to attack by various flea beetles and weevils, and the response of farmers –of course - is to spray it with insecticides. They have relied very heavily on the recently banned neonicotinoids. But although rape is partly self-fertile, the crop is improved very significantly by pollination by insects, which increases both the quantity and the quality of the crop. The use of insecticides conflicts very directly with insect pollination because it kills the pollinating insects that increase the quality and the quantity of the yields.
Oilseed rape is also a very important crop nowadays in the general ecology of the countryside. Beekeepers find it useful partly because modern agriculture has virtually eliminated wild flowering plants in much of the British countryside. If we didn’t have rape our hives might starve. And I have long held the belief that the powerful smell and bright colour of the rape fields attracts insects from the surrounding countryside. If the rape was not sprayed with insecticides, it would provide a hugely important source of food for our vital but declining insect populations. It can support butterflies, and also many natural enemies of crop pests, as well as supporting invertebrates used as food resources by our declining farmland birds. But if it is sprayed with insecticides it functions as a very effective insect trap, luring insects from across the countryside to fields where they get sprayed. I believe this mechanism - in flowering crops like rape and sunflowers throughout Europe - may have contributed to the great insect decline.
There seems, then, to be a strong case for growing rape organically, but as long as it is easier for ignorant farmers to spray it they will do so. Only bans on farm chemicals will force farmers to look for other more benign methods that they would not otherwise consider. So since neonicotinoids have been withdrawn from use on oilseed rape, new strategies are emerging. For example, some farmers are dressing the fields with a very smelly human sewage product, and undersowing the rape crop with buckwheat, in an attempt to mask the odours that draw in the pests. So banning or restricting chemicals on farmland is an important mechanism to stimulate the development of more harmonious farming methods
I have also long wondered how far the supposed higher yields obtained by using chemicals on crops are balanced by the higher costs of production. So I was delighted to read of studies published recently in no less a journal than the Proceedings of the Royal Society which concluded that greater yields in oilseed rape may be achieved either by increasing agrochemicals or by increasing bee abundance – exactly the dilemma mentioned earlier. Crop economic returns were only increased by increasing bee abundance, because pesticides did not increase yields, while their costs reduced gross margins.
Adding to that all the benefits of increased insect populations, increased farmland birds, and better bee health, would makes the case for growing rape organically seems strong, especially if the accounting system were to take into account all the other benefits to the planet and to society apart from the simple farmer’s profits..
Unfortunately most of our farmers have no training in ecology, and have a deeply scornful attitude to most alternatives to agrochemicals. Until we have an agriculture ministry which concerns itself with developing truly sustainable agricultural policies, and resists the lobbying of the chemical manufacturers and the NFU, change is going to be unfortunately slow. But oilseed rape would be the place to start, because the contrast between the organic and the chemical approach is stark and clear both for the environment and for the farmer. One day maybe the farmer will realise that what is good for the environment is good for the farm.
A couple of sources if you wish to investigate further:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/18/bees-fungicide-flowers-farm-insecticide
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.1550
Very informative and great links