it's not the honey, stupid

There was an interesting documentary last night on BBC Four; Martha Kearney was asking, Who Killed The Honey Bee? The honey bee is one creature found the world over and plays a crucial role in maintaining the biosphere. Man, another global creature, has long used bees as a source of food - honey - originally by raiding the food stores of wild bee colonies and then, much later, keeping bees in artificial hives around the home. This is what I believed until seeing this programme.

It's quite a shock to see the commercial scale keeping of bees in America and Australia. In the US, these businesses transport thousands upon thousands of boxed bees across state to pollinate whatever crop is in flower. Cotton, almonds, apples - the sizes of these monocultures are as unimaginable as the truck loads of bees needed to produce fruit. The appalling homogeneity of landscape only adds to the awfulness of this enterprise; we are too big for this world, that is my growing suspicion concerning all our problems.

Inexplicably, honey bees are disappearing at an alarming rate everywhere, except for Australia. They have a number of suspects for the disappearances; viral infections, parasites, cocktails of pesticides, the increased use of monocultures, climate change. However, despite tests a satisfactory truth is not yet forthcoming. Bees continue to suffer ''colony collapse disorder'' (CCD).

It has been predicted that if the bee ever became extinct, then man would follow them within four years. Funding for research into CCD is urgently needed but governments appear not to notice the crisis - one too many crises, perhaps. With many of our leaders and ordinary citizens being urbanites, I'm convinced they think it's a trivial matter of not having honey for tea. But it isn't. The honey is a bonus, a by-product of the bees real purpose on Earth, to pollinate virtually all the land plants included in the food chain. This really could be much more serious than the economic crisis.