Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what is their latest assessment of the health of the bee population in the UK.

The National Bee Unit has an extensive programme of monitoring and advisory visits to beekeepers to check for the presence of notifiable pests and diseases of honey bees and provide advice on biosecurity within the hive. They carry out around 5,000 visits per year. Levels of endemic notifiable diseases (European and American foulbrood) remain at low levels. The Government has well-tested plans to tackle incursions of exotic pests, such as the Asian hornet, which have been successfully used to find and destroy nests. The number of beekeepers registered on the BeeBase system (the National Bee Unit’s biosecurity system which underpins the bee health actions of the Government’s inspectorate) has increased significantly over the last 10 years from 12 thousand to over 40 thousand today.

In terms of wild bees, the UK’s ‘Status of Pollinating Insects’ indicator summarises trends for almost 400 pollinating insect species and was last published on the 19th July 2018. It measures how widespread each species is in each year since 1980 and shows that the overall status of pollinating insects has declined, but has stabilised in recent years. The Government is keeping this under review as an encouraging but not yet definitive sign of progress and is determined to continue working to see positive results across the full range of activities under the National Pollinator Strategy to improve the health of our bees.