I believe that we have not just one problem, rather a number of underlying problems, that are currently effecting our honey bees. Diseases and parasites like wax moth, veroa, foul brood & nausea are becoming increasingly difficult to treat, therefore effecting our honey-bees, plants and flowers which are now more exotic then ever before. Unfortunately, our bees don't reconise them. Shrubs and trees for our bees are not as common as they once were, also GM modified crops have been designed to give maximum crop yield, but don't provide enough nectar for the bees, they then forage all day on these crops and still end up starving and die. Pestisides too, are responsible for a lot of colonies dying, but there are still many areas were no pestisides are used and still the honey bees are dying. Climate change too may be effecting matters, warmer Winters mean our bees are waking up in Winter and finding there is nothing for them to forage on, and a worker bee in Winter lives as long as 6 months. But in Summer (when active) only lives 36 days so as you can imagine, waking up in the middle of winter is not a good thing.

In Yorkshire it is a lot more difficult to keep bees, than say in the South, quite simply because of the length of the season, it's much shorter here in the North than in the South, where the weather is better and lasts longer.
In my opinion all these are reasons for the decline in the honey bee. A major factor over the past 6 years has been brought to my attention by the badgers, badgers you may say, hows that ? Well I'm sure all you badger lovers out there have noticed how well they have been doing over the last 6 years, this is because the weather early on in the year has been very wet, this makes it easier for badgers to get at there favourite food worms, April May and June have been the wettest on record for the past 6 years now, great if your a badger but not so great if you are a bee. Queen bees have struggled to mate properly for a good few years now, no-one knowing the real reason why.

My theory is this, the drone or male bees only have one function and that is to mate with the queen, they dont contribute to a hive at all. Drones only eat supplies so at the end of Summer they get kicked out , wheras, at the very begining of Summer they are needed to mate with queens. Now imagine you are wearing marigold gloves, when you take them off they end up inside out, so to get them back to how they should be you blow into them with a bit of force and they go back to normal. That's exactly how a male bees penis works, but in order to get enough puff to do this, it takes a lot of energy, it's hard work, and it needs to train itself to this. Around 1 pm they come out of the hive and fly around it, this is not to get a bit of fresh air or to go to the loo , it is to prepare itself for mating, exercising to be able, when the time comes, to have enough puff to get its penis erect and up (as it were). Well it's been so wet at the beginning of the year that the drone bees have not been able to get out and exercise, which has meant that when its come time to mate, they have been ready and willing, but unfortunately have not been able to get it up to mate properly.

It all makes sense doesen't it ?