Next Wednesday, on November 5, a swarm of beekeepers is marching on the Houses of Parliament, puffing their apiarist smokers and calling for MPs to save the British honeybee. Their 130,000-name petition is nothing short of a cry for survival in the face of serious bee-deaths and dire native honey shortages. The situation is so bad that there will be no English honey by Christmas, according to the Honey Association, which represents Rowse and Gales.

The harvest has been dreadful. While some beekeepers had a decent crop, the majority suffered badly. Bees die every winter but the losses this year were up 25 per cent or more, rather than a more standard 5-10 per cent. Worst of all, the wet spring and summer meant that the bees stayed in their hives. No flights, no nectar, no honey. “Last year I did two farmers' markets a month, and craft fairs and county shows. I did a Christmas fair at Ripon Cathedral with huge amounts of honey,” says Rusty Wise, who has been keeping bees for 20 years. “This year I've had 26 jars. The greatest problem is the weather, but this goes farther.”

What is happening to the bees? This is the question asked by the march's organisers, the British Beekeepers' Association (BBKA). Its petition will plead with MPs to find £8 million for research. Beekeepers need help. British honey is still a small-scale industry, with just a tenth of it sold in supermarkets. Much is still found in village stores and farmers' markets.

This is more than a question of what we spread on our toast. Bees are worth an estimated £165 million to agriculture through pollinating the plants that provide a third of the food we eat, including such common crops as orchard fruits, carrots, broccoli and onions.

Bee deaths are not just a British problem. Worldwide, apiarists have been distressed by their dying hives, not least in the US, where a syndrome dubbed “colony collapse disorder” has meant bee losses of 30-90 per cent.

Nobody is sure, yet, exactly what is behind the bee deaths, but one factor is common to all beekeepers and widely accepted to be at the heart of the problem: the worldwide plague of the varroa mite. This reddish crab-like parasite, just visible to the naked eye, sucks the bees' blood, damaging the developing pupae so that they emerge deformed from the comb. Most damaging of all, they spread viruses. Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum in their book on the crisis, A World Without Bees, make an analogy between the varroa and the dirty syringes that spread HIV.

The crucial connection between varroa and viruses was discovered by a British bee scientist called Brenda Ball. Two years ago, the painstaking work done by Ball and three other government-funded colleagues at the Rothamsted Research institute in Hertfordshire was broken up, and Ball is no longer working in the field. Yet the Government has acknowledged that there is a problem. Last year the minister who was then responsible for animal health, Lord Rooker, told Parliament that if nothing is done, the British honeybee population could be wiped out in ten years.

And as research funding is squeezed, the varroa mite is developing resistance to the current treatments, starting in Devon and now moving around the country. As diseases and infestations weaken the colonies, more and more die over winter.

“We need the money now,” says Stuart Bailey, the chairman of Rowse. “I compare this to foot-and-mouth and blue tongue. This is an environmental catastrophe going on around us.” The company is giving £100,000 to fund bee research at Sussex University and has put “Save the Honeybee” on the labels of its dwindling stocks of honey.

Rusty Wise says that answers are urgently needed. “It's vital,” she says. “Because bees are little invisible things that buzz about and occasionally sting, they don't reach the public psyche. We're standing here watching our bees die off.”

Hattie Ellis is the author of Sweetness & Light: The Mysterious History of the Honeybee (Sceptre, £8.99)

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