-Perhaps some tomatoes?
-Tomatoes? No, no. Absolutely no tomatoes. It's fruit pollinated by bees. Like it, enjoy your meal?
-No, it's little bit dry, though.
-Bit bland.
-OK. You may know I've been looking into the disappearance of our bees and what's been going wrong, and I thought I have an experiment to see what the impact would be on our lives, if there were no honey bees in Britain. And this is the result. So without bees, no much pollination goes on, so that's all you left with. But to make up for it, here's a breakfast you can have, while we've still got honey bees. So, tuck in.
To be honest, this is a bit of treat. It's not what they used to. Take away bees, and you risk losing this, most fruits, but not bananas and pineapples, and most vegetables along with protein-rich beans. And because most animal feed is made from plants pollinated by bees, it means meat and dairy products could also become more scarce.
-So what we really need to do is to save bees, if we want our breakfast.
It does give you a sense of just how important bees are. I want to track down the most groundbreaking research into what's killing our bees in such numbers.
I'm starting at a rather special place, R* Research. They've been studying bees here for 90 years and they recently invented some rather ingenious ways of observing them. I'm here to look at the first suspect in our mystery, the veroller* might.
-This is tiny parricide is led to the spread of some of the most contentious and widely distributed gareties on the planet, killing billions of bees and truly earning its name, veroller distracter. It can be utterly devastating.