What a beautiful bird.

A couple of mornings ago, I was enjoying a cup of tea on the balcony watching a flock of beautiful birds, which I discovered were bee-eaters.  They alternated their behaviour between being perched on a large tree in my garden and flying around an adjacent field full of sweet corn and ready for harvesting.  Most species of bee-eater can be found in Africa and Asia but others occur in Southern Europe, Australia and New Guinea.  They predominantly eat flying insects including bees and wasps, which are caught in the air.  Whilst they will eat almost any flying insect, honeybees can comprise a large part of their diet.

In the part of the world where I live, I often hear the sound of gunshot, which I am told is to frighten, not kill, the bee-eaters and that is because beekeeping is an important rural activity in this area.  I don't know how much of a threat the bee-eater is to beekeepers.  Certainly, the bee-eater only stalks bees in flight, not on the hives.  There has been a lot of concern in recent years about the declining bee population and not just because of the obvious product from bees, i.e. honey.  One of every three bites of food eaten worldwide depends on pollinators, especially bees, for a successful harvest.  I have not done extensive research on the causes of the declining bee population, but they include the use of pesticides, notably neonicotinoids, fungicides as well as the spread of viral pathogens and parasitic mites in beehives.

Ironically, recent research by the University of Sussex in the UK suggests that the fad for keeping bees in the cities as a means of preventing bee population decline, actually poses a threat to honeybees.  In London alone, the number of beehives has doubled in the past five years.  Professor Francis Ratnieks from the University of Sussex, summarised the problem as follows:

"Both honeybees and wild bees have been declining.  Although the causes are complex the most important seems to be the loss of flowers and habitat.

If the problem is not enough flowers, increasing the number of hives makes that problem worse.  The honeybee is just one of many insect species which feed on nectar and pollen.  Having a high density of honeybee hives is not only bad for honey bees, but may also affect bumble bees and other species feeding on the same flowers.

If a game park was short of food for elephants, you wouldn't introduce more, so why should we take this approach with bees?"

So what about the threat of the beautiful bee-eaters to the magnificent honeybees?  Beekeepers quite understandably regard bee-eaters and other insectivorous birds as pests, but other branches of agriculture generally do not consider them as their enemies.  In fact, birds that prey on insects are mostly considered to be beneficial for farming because they help in the control of insect pests.  The biggest threat to apiary bees usually occurs  during a period of migration of the birds and two possible solutions that can be adopted by beekeepers are to relocate the apiaries temporarily during that period or to scare (but not kill) the birds with the sound of gunshot.

Let's hope we can continue to live in harmony with bees and bee-eaters, taking precautionary measures where necessary and controlling human bad practices that threaten the natural habitats for the planet's pollinators 😊