Save the Honeybee?

7:30PM Thursday 12 July 2018 The Old Monkey
Save the Honeybee stories are never far from the news, but is the species really under threat? And should environmentalists be interested in them at all? Britain has around 250 bee species, yet almost all the attention goes to the domestic honeybee. Queen bees are traded around the world, and honeybee populations are dependent on the work of beekeepers, so should we see them as wildlife.

Rebecca Nesbit will explore how we choose which species should be conservation priorities, and therefore whether protecting honeybees is important. She will argue that the evidence for the EU’s widely-publicised ban on neonicotinoid pesticides is not as clear cut as many news outlets would have us believe.

Rebecca is an ecologist and writer with a particular interest in the science and ethics of setting conservation priorities. For her PhD she used radars and flight simulators to study butterfly migration, and she now works in science communication. She has written two books: ‘Is that Fish in Your Tomato?’, looking at the fact and fiction of GM foods, and ‘A Column of Smoke’, a novel.