Globalisation and agriculture industry exacerbating bee decline, says UN

Globalisation is killing bees, as bee pests and diseases are being passed swiftly around the world thanks to the opening up of trade, says a UN study. Attempts to industrialise pollination are making the problem even worse, the authors found.

Unexplained bee deaths have become an increasing issue around the world in the past five years, a phenomenon labelled "colony collapse disorder". Bees in the US, Europe and Asia have been affected, though it is hard to gather reliable data on how many of them died. Some bee colonies die off naturally all the time, chiefly in winter, but the scale of the demise reported by beekeepers has prompted governments and scientists to examine why bees appear to be under threat, and in some cases to try to get around the problem by changing the ways bees are kept.

Click here for the rest of this Guardian article by Fiona Harvey