ISLE OF WIGHT BEE DEATH
Did modernity nearly kill UK bees? In the decade before the first World War, UK bees began to die. Something was killing them. The culprit has never been properly fathomed and is still debated. Populations were so depleted, that modern British bees carry the genes of imported strains who replaced the dead. For a time the native Black Bee was thought to have gone completely extinct.
The crisis became known as the ‘Isle of Wight Desease’ but unlike a normal outbreak, the symptoms were reportedly variable. All that was consistent was inevitable colony collapse. A researcher in the 1960’s observed that IoW Desease “was assumed to be the cause of all the losses for which there was no obvious explanation at the time”*. A mass die-back was clearly happening, but something quite complex was going on at the heart.
By the 1920’s the culprit was widely posited, in hindsight, to have been the Acarine or Trachea Mite (Acarapis wood), or, perhaps, one of two variants of Nosema (Apis or Ceranae), a microsporidean gut parasite – a fiction still widely believed. However. although these problems were undoubtedly present during the IoW Desease outbreak, neither are logical propositions as the ‘smoking gun’ (or have symptoms that fit the description of bees ‘unable to fly’ recorded at the time).
Today’s academic authodoxy suggests that IoW Desease was probably “caused by a combination of multiple factors, principally chronic bee paralysis virus, together with poor weather conditions, and an excess of bee colonies being kept for the amount of forage available.”** That assumption seems much more likely. Starvation and stress could easily have opened the door to a perfect storm of pathogens, some of which were novel and whose symptoms became integral to the IoW Desease narrative.
I would argue that these events should be a warning. Numerous factors may be reproducing quite similar conditions. As our weather becomes increasingly weird thanks to the #ClimateEmergency, we are selfishly reducing the ammount of forage available for bees (and other foragers) and, (although broadly a good thing) , beekeeping is becoming more popular and diverse with desease vectors more difficult to control without experience. It is true, of course, that the number of beehives was far higher before WW1 (800,000 est) compared to 2024 (288,000 registered), but our meadow land has reduced by a staggering 97% in the same period! There is a limit to how many foraging species can thrive on verges and front gardens.
The potential for another IoW style collapse could frankly be just around the corner? Perhaps, and here’s the rub, it’s time to make registration and inspection of beehives mandatory and enforceable? Maybe, we should already be considering a limit on the numbers of hives, per 5 or 10km square, within some kind of a licencing system? Such measures would no doubt be very unpopular, with some, but they may just be better than sleepwalking into another crisis?
Thoughts?
* Leslie Bailey of the Rothamstead Research Institute, speech, 1963
** University of Sussex Website
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