Dear friends

Insectageddon – insect armageddon - is the term being used to describe the catastrophic loss of insect numbers. We have little data to enable us to compare current with past insect numbers because, in contrast to birds and mammals, insects are not well studied. Why not? Mainly because on the whole, humans do not like insects - with a few exceptions like bees and butterflies. For example The Times newspaper this week 1 reported that tourists in the south of France are complaining about the noise made by cicadas, deemed especially strident this year after the exceptionally hot, dry summer, and asking to have them killed with insecticides - fortunately their requests are being refused.

Readers of this Journal know that bees are important, but maybe we need to do a better job at explaining the value of other insects too? They have existed here on earth 1,000 times longer than us, and create and maintain the world resources amongst which we live. Harvard biologist Edward Wilson famously described insects as ‘the little things that run the world’. If humans were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago, but ‘If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos’ 2 . This is because without insects and other arthropods like spiders and millipedes, the planet would quickly become covered in carcasses, with plants and animals unable to decompose. Insects play multiple crucial roles within ecosystems - in addition to pollination they are an important part of the food chains providing food for birds, mammals, fish, reptiles and amphibia.

In industrialised nations farmland birds are in sharp decline 3 according to data from many nations, yet few studies have been made to similarly measure insect populations over the years. The few studies 4,5,6 that do exist, show insects to be in severe decline. For example the mass of insects collected by monitoring traps in a nature reserve in northwest Germany dropped by 76% between 1989 and 2016.

There is no single explanation, though the causes are familiar to everyone: climate change, loss of natural habitats, toxic chemicals, light pollution, though these factors do not apply directly to the German nature reserve study, where insect abundance has probably declined because of changing farming practices in nearby farmland, where intensive wheat and cornfields support little or no insect life.

The way to recover insect numbers is to restore and maintain every scrap of natural habitat wherever possible, and to abandon or at least reduce use of herbicides and pesticides. As mentioned in these pages before, beekeepers are not only enabling crop pollination and harvesting precious bee produce, we have also a key role in raising awareness of the need to support wider insect diversity and abundance.

Nicola Bradbear Director, Bees for Development

1. 2018 C. Bremner, It’s not cricket: tourist sick of cicadas. The Times. 22 August

2. 2007, E O Wilson, in interview

3. 2018 M. Greshko, Around the world farmland birds are in steep decline. National Geographic. June

4. 2012 Collen et al., Spineless, Stautus and trends of the words’ invretebrates Zoological Society of London

5. 2014, G. Vogel, Where have all the insects gone? Science

6. 2017 C. A. Hallmann et. al., More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas https:// doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185809.