I’ve never seen so many distressed-looking Bees and the numbers of dead ones I find (three yesterday and four today for example) simply beggars belief….and it’s not just certain types of Bee that are affected, such as Honey Bees, but all the species appear to be suffering!

It’s not just a question of Bees suffering in the cold and the wet either, because Bees have always been vulnerable to adverse weather conditions. It’s more as if something specific is making them less resistant to things like rain or mite infestations and giving them less chance of survival overall.

It will probably come as a surprise to many that not all Bees are the same, even within the same species….Some are far more active and work much harder than others, while some are simply better and more efficient at what they do. Some have a stronger constitution, while others are more likely to succumb far more easily to such things as persistently inclement weather. In fact, Bees are very like us in that respect. The thing is however, I can’t help but feel that something, as yet unidentified, is making them generally weaker across the board and, therefore, less resilient or robust than would normally be the case!

I often just sit and watch them these days and, although it’s probably just my imagination, there seems to be less urgency about many of them than there ever used to be, even as little as five years ago. Well, whatever it is that’s going on. it’s very obvious to me at least that something is very much amiss in the normally ultra-busy world of the humble Bumble Bee Bee and someone somewhere needs to figure out exactly what it is before it’s too damn late! Meanwhile, we keep gathering up all the dead Bees that we find and passing them on to our admin people who, in turn, send them off to our laboratory chappies en France for analysis. So far however, even they’ve been at a loss to explain what’s going on!