Are Bees Protected By Law

Are Bees Protected By Law?

If you do not want to read the full article below, then the spoiler alert is that YES, U.K. law does protect them.

Amazingly, despite bees being amongst the best pollinators to provide the food that we eat, we still get lots of questions about getting rid of and hear stories about bees being harmed in the most bizarre and awful ways. The text below is genuine example that recently came into our website via our online contact form.

“Hi there.This is a bit of a strange email, but I wondered if you had any advice?
A young man with either special educational needs or mental illness in the area that I live is collecting bees in plastic bottles, and violently shaking them. He does this daily; it seems.

There is a big conversation going on about it online with some people saying he releases them in the evenings and others saying he shakes them until they die.
Some have said that it is because he is trying to get honey from them.

A few members of the local community have tried speaking to him to discourage him from doing this but unfortunately, the man is often not responsive and has (supposedly) occasionally become angry at being confronted.

I have done a bit of research online and bees are not protected in the UK except from pesticides.

Someone has said they have reported this behaviour to the RSPCA but that they did not do anything.

Is there anything you could suggest? Unless someone can befriend him and then explain this to him over time, I do not think he is going to stop”

Whilst this information is makes shocking reading to anyone and us as beekeepers, it raises a few valid questions, regarding the legal protection of bees, despite the poor sole shaking the poor bees having other life challenges to deal with.

In the U.K. there not one single piece of legislation that deals or names specifically regarding harm coming to bees in name of bees. This is in part because who on Earth would think of harming a species that contributes to the human food chain, and puts food on our plates?

Bees are not specifically named directly in any protection law to prevent harming them, but neither are butterflies nor birds, but they are all protected under the umbrella act of law called the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981.

Section nine of the act gives specific information about what we cannot do to harm any wild creature, this of course includes bees. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1981/69/section/9

Contacting the RSPCA is an admiral response, however their level of resources in any one area is unlikely to allow them to respond to calls about insects, regardless of how beneficial they are.

The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, however, is an act of parliament and therefore law in the U.K. it is the Police that deal with issues of law and the court system that hands out the penalties on a successful conviction.

Again, the Police are unlikely to have the resources available to police issues of cruelty to wild insects. However, bees are not always classified as wild and if someone were habitually harming the bees in our hives, it would most definitely become a Police matter.

We work all over the country rescuing bees and live in rural Lancashire. We have in our area a police unit dedicated to rural affairs, cities will not have the same resources available.

They normally bring together successful prosecutions in wildlife cases through multiple agencies working together, these may include the Police, RSPCA, DEFRA, the Environment Agency and the specialist team from the Health and Safety Executive’s Wildlife Incident Investigation Scheme (WIIS).
https://www.hse.gov.uk/pesticides/reducing-environmental-impact/wildlife/wildlife-incident-investigation-scheme.htm

WIIS specialises in the illegal poisoning of wildlife, which includes beneficial invertebrates BEES. To be clear on this point, there are no chemical insecticides licensed in the U.K. for killing bees. It is also illegal to make your own insecticides or use any other substance intending to kill bees. This includes the twit that we encountered who had sprayed bees with Deep Heat to dispose of them.

The only legal and proven method to remove conflict bees from people's properties is to allow TreeBee to remove them alive and then re-home them back to our apiaries, where they thrive.

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