CorpComms Magazine

They may not seem like natural partners but, for the past two years, the Co-operative Group has spent almost £500,000 tackling the decline in the UK's honeybee population. The group, which prides itself on its ethical credentials, launched Plan Bee after it emerged that the number of honeybees had halved in the 20 years until 2007 and it was affecting its trading partners.

Dave Smith, corporate public relations manager for the Co-operative Group, says: 'We have commercial beekeepers operating on our farms. In a normal winter, they would expect to lose up to ten per cent of their colonies but in recent years, ours had reported losses in the region of 25 to 30 per cent.' Despite their name, the primary concern with falling honeybee populations is not the loss of honey, but the loss of the bees' pollinating properties. About 80 per cent of plant species, including many crops, need insects to pollinate their flowers. 'The decline of the honeybee touches the business on a variety of levels,' Smith continues, 'We have beekeepers on our land and sell honey in our stores but the implications are much wider than that.'

As one of the biggest farmers in the UK, tending to over 70,000 acres in England and Scotland, the Co-operative has high stakes invested in bees' fortunes. Smith notes: 'A third of all the food we eat is directly pollinated by bees. And they're all the nice things - the strawberries, the blackberries, the broccoli. If there weren't any bees, we wouldn't all die; we'd just have a really boring diet. It'd be all noodles and grains - sustaining just not very colourful.' Indeed, apocalyptic visions of a world without bees would be beige - the colour of the remaining foods available.

Pesticides, particularly a variety called neonicotinoids, climate, viruses, a disease spread by Varroa mites called varroatosis, a lack of genetic diversity, a decline in wild flowers and a decline in the number of beekeepers have all been proposed to explain their dwindling numbers. With such a variety of contributory factors, any immediate campaign to reverse the trend has to be a war on many fronts. Smith confesses: 'We don't think that there is one silver bullet, so we've introduced a ten point plan of things we are going to do about it. The first is simply to lift awareness because a lot of people just don't know that this is going on.'

To this end, the Co-operative is continuing to support the UK distribution of an American documentary film Vanishing of the Bees, which explores America's own bee crisis known as Colony Collapse Disorder, a phenomenon characterised by bees mysteriously deserting the hive, seemingly unable to find their way home. The consumer group is also petitioning the UK Government to carry out a systematic review of the impact pesticides are having on honeybees. Smith continues: 'We've prohibited the use of neonicotinoid pesticides, linked to bee declines elsewhere in Europe. As we're one of the biggest farmers in the UK we have a lot of impact.' The loss of wildflowers in the UK is also exacerbating the problem. Matt Shardlow, conservation director at invertebrate conservation trust Buglife, says: 'The UK has lost more than three million hectares of wildflower rich habitat since the Second World War, but has only created 6,000.'

Over the past two years the Co-operative Group has been trialling a new wildflower seed mix designed to be particularly nourishing for bees. The retail group also gave away more than 300,000 packets of wildflower seeds in stores and free with copies of The Sun to help provide essential nutrition for bees and make the UK landscape rather more hospitable to pollinators. The retail group is also working with the British Beekeepers' Association (BBKA) to address the decline in British beekeeping. Martin Smith, president of the BBKA explains: 'There had been a slow and steady decline in the number of British beekeepers since the Second World War, when sugar rationing meant honey was in particular demand. There was a bit of a blip in the 70s around the 'Good Life' period.

After that beekeeping just fell out of favour.' The Co-operative has invited beekeepers to keep hives on its farmland, with more than 500 hives across six farms, and is promoting urban beekeeping in gardens and allotments in UK cities. Last year, it started a pilot project to train beekeepers in Manchester after predicting that there would be three million more honeybees in the city this summer. The scheme has now been expanded to London and Inverness. The BBKA has been busy with its own schemes to promote existing beekeepers, such as its Adopt a Beehive programme, which allows 'armchair beekeepers', who may be unable to take on the responsibility of owning their own hive, to show their support. The proceeds raised by the scheme, which owes much of its existence to the sponsorship of the magazine SAGA go towards education in best practice for beekeepers, as well as funding further research into honeybee health and husbandry. The scheme is backed by Michelin-starred chef Raymond Blanc, whose signature dish 'Apple Tart Maman Blanc' would be one of the first culinary victims of a bee exodus. The BBKA's Smith notes: 'People have woken up to the problem. The growth of the green agenda coupled with the publicity surrounding the US bee crisis have got people's attention.

While the number of British beekeepers dwindled slowly, it is now rising sharply.' The association's membership has risen from 8,000 to 20,000 over the past four years and its Honey Survey, published last month, recorded a 50 per cent increase in the number of bee colonies in the last six months. The Co-operative's Smith highlights the worst-case scenario that the retailer is working to avoid. 'There is a part of China with no bees at all where they pollinate everything by hand. They go around with a stick with a chicken feather on it, from flower to flower, tree to tree.'

The place is Szechuan province and if it were not for this process, it could be that the popular local cuisine would not have its characteristically spicy flavour as chili peppers are also on the list. But it is estimated that if humans were to take over from bees in pollinating crops in the UK, it would require approximately 30 million people working full time. The British bee predicament is less far advanced and with so many parties co-operating to tackle the decline, it may have less of a sting in the tail.

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