There are not enough bee colonies in Europe to support the boom in biofuel production

Jan 10, 2014 08:44 GMT  ·  By

Professor Simon Potts with the University of Reading's Center for Agri-Environmental Research and his colleagues warn that, according to their investigations, nature is having a fairly difficult time keeping up with the European Union's newly discovered love of biofuel.

In a recent paper, the researchers say that, for the time being, there simply are not enough bee colonies in Europe to support the boom in biofuel production presently happening on this continent.

Click Green ells us that, as part of their investigation into this issue, Professor Simon Potts and his fellow researchers looked at the number of honeybee colonies documented in as many as 41 countries in Europe.

They also analyzed the demand for pollination services documented in 2005 and 2010, and then compared these two variables.

The specialists maintain that, over the past few years, the demand for pollination services linked to biofuel production has upped roughly five times faster than the number of bee colonies that Europe accommodates.

Interestingly enough, this staggering discrepancy was documented despite the fact that the overall count for European honeybee colonies did not stagnate, but also increased to a certain extent.

In their paper, the University of Reading in the United Kingdom researchers explain that, as far as they could tell, several countries currently do not have enough bees to meet their demand for pollination services.

Some of these countries are the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy.

Commenting on the findings of this investigation, Dr. Tom Breeze argued that, “This study has shown that EU biofuel policy has had an unforeseen consequence in making us more reliant upon wild pollinators like bumblebees and hoverflies to meet demands for this basic ecosystem service”

“The results don't show that wild pollinators actually do all the work, but they do show we have less security if their populations should collapse,” he added.

All in all, the specialists estimate that Europe is, for the time being at least, short of roughly 13.6 million bee colonies. Otherwise put, it only has two thirds of the total number of colonies needed to meet its demand for pollination services.