TalkScience@BL: Pollinators and Pesticides: What is Plan Bee?

Overworked, suffering a lack of available housing while living off a caffeine-rich sugar diet, bees are not happy. Pollinators, including bees, provide a free pollination service to fruit orchards, bean and rapeseed oil farms worth an estimated £440 million to the UK economy. 

However, as farming practices have become more intensive to meet growing food demands, pollinator and bee numbers have declined. Bees are suffering habitat loss, fungal and viral infections and attacks from parasitic varroa mites. To add to the mix, researchers are now finding that certain pesticides used to protect crops may be harmful to bees. Are these pesticides the real culprit for the decline in bee numbers? Do we have to choose between sustaining pollinators and using pesticides?  

Join our chair, BBC Presenter and Beekeeper Bill Turnbull, with Dr Peter Campbell, Syngenta and Dr Lynn Dicks, University of Cambridge.