One in ten wild bees face extinction in Europe

Found on BBC News on Thursday, 19 March 2015
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Almost one in 10 of Europe's native wild bees face extinction, according to the most comprehensive expert assessment so far.

Commenting on the findings, Prof Mark Brown of the School of Biological Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London, said: "A lot of our bees have been in decline or are at risk of extinction and we need to change how the landscape is managed to deal with that.

Farmers need to produce more and more, even though a lot of the food is later thrown away. To achieve this, they rely on monoculture; and with herbicides they get rid of "weeds". So the number of different species gets extremely low; along with the pollution and stress, it's not much of a surprise that remaining species struggle.