Nine new projects were announced this week to address the decline of honeybees and other insect pollinators in the UK including looking at sustainable pollination services for UK horticulture crops.

The projects are worth £10 million and were launched by the Insect Pollinators Initiative which is run jointly by the Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council, DEFRA, the Scottish government, the Wellcome Trust and the Natural Environment Research Council.

The work will explore the causes and consequences of threats to insect pollinators and ask questions about the decline of honeybees and other pollinating insects recently in order to inform the development of mitigation strategies that will ensure that the pollination of horticultural and agricultural crops is protected and biodiversity in natural ecosystems is maintained.

The initiative is being funded under the Living with Environmental Change programme. Its director professor Andrew Watkinson said: “To tackle a complex problem like the decline of pollinating insects, where there are a number of potential causes, requires wide-ranging research. That is why it is so important that a number of funding organisations have come together in this initiative to provide the essential breadth and critical mass of research that would not be possible if the individual funders

worked in isolation. It has also allowed us to bring in new skills in gene sequencing and epidemiological modelling with the expertise that already exists in the pollinator research community. I am delighted to see the broad and innovative range of projects being funded.”

Among projects funded under the initiative is one on sustainable pollination services for UK crops. This will be led by Dr Koos Biesmeijer at the University of Leeds. The other eight projects are: modelling systems for managing bee disease, investigating the impact of habitat structure on queen and worker bumblebees in the field; an investigation into the impact of exposure to industrial chemicals on the learning capacity and performance of bees; linking agriculture and land use change to pollinator populations; ecology and conservation of urban pollinators; impact and mitigation of emergent diseases on major UK insect pollinators; the impact of varroa mite on the interaction between the honeybee and its viruses; and meeting bees’ nutritional needs in the UK landscape.