More bright lights from the news media:

Britain's 44,000 beekeepers are not very commercially minded. Like the
bees, they work largely for free. I came to understand what was
happening only when I visited an apiary tucked away in a quiet corner
of my Twickenham constituency.

Volunteers tend the hives and manage the swarms because they love
their hobby. Simple common sense and national self-interest suggest
that the Government should support some research into bees and their
diseases.

Without proper research, it is difficult to quantify the scale of
bees' decline absolutely.

But what is known is troubling. There are 270,000 hives in Britain.
Last winter one in five colonies perished. Half of Italy's 50 billion
honey bees died last year. The picture is similarly bleak across
France, Germany, Brazil and Australia.

And nobody quite knows why. American fruit growers have lost billions
due to a phenomenon dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder, first reported in
2006.

CCD has wiped out close to two million colonies across America and
billions of bees worldwide.

We need bees. Einstein was said to have calculated: 'If bees
disappeared off the surface of the globe then Man would have only four
years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants,
no more animals, no more life.'

[no more newspapers]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html

****************************************************
* General Information About BEE-L is available at: *
* http://www.honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/default.htm   *
****************************************************