Can eating honey help save bees?

CrowdScience

BBC

Science, Technology

4.8 • 985 Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

CrowdScience listener Saoirse is vegan and doesn’t eat honey. But she’s been wondering - might honey actually have environmental benefits, by giving bee populations a boost?

To find out, presenter Anand Jagatia dons a bee suit and opens up some hives with biologist Dave Goulson, who reveals that there are over 20,000 bee species on earth – and not all of them need saving. Honeybee researcher Alison Mcafee talks about the importance of beekeeping for crop pollination, and why honeybee colonies around the world are collapsing. Although, as she explains, in some places beekeeping might actually be bad for endangered wild bees. We travel to Kenya to meet Loise Njeru and Lucy King, who show how the humble honeybee can be a powerful tool for conservation – helping to protect the mighty elephant. And, on a rooftop in London, former beekeeper Alison Benjamin explains how we can support the wild bee species that need our help.

Producer and presenter: Anand Jagatia Location recording: Sophie Ormiston Series Producer: Ben Motley Production Co-ordinator: Ishmael Soriano

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, it's Lucy Worsley here and we're back with a brand new series of ladies swindlers.
0:07.5	Promise never to mention a word of what is going on.
0:10.1	Join me and my all-female team of detectives as we revisit the audacious crimes of women trying to make it in a world made for men.
0:19.5	This is a story of working class women trying to get by in a world made for men. This is a story of working-class women trying to get by.
0:24.4	This is survival.
0:25.3	Join me for the second season of Lady Swindlers,
0:28.2	where true crime meets history with a twist.
0:31.4	Listen first on BBC Sounds.
0:35.5	Right, get the smoker going.
0:38.3	This is crowd science from the BBC World Service.
0:45.3	I'm Ann Ann Jagatia, and that's the sound of a bee smoker, pumping out smoke to calm down honeybees.
0:53.3	And we're going to need it because we're about to open up a hive.
1:00.0	So this is a frame which you can see all that glistening honey.
1:06.3	Yeah.
1:07.0	That's all just been collected in the last week or two.
1:11.0	Helping me in the hunt for sugary liquid gold is bee scientist Dave Goulson.
1:16.1	We're at the bottom of his garden in Sussex in the south of England.
1:19.7	I harvested just a few of these frames the weekend
1:22.6	and got about seven kilos of my own lovely honey.
1:26.3	So I do love honey, I have to say.
1:28.9	That's amazing, seven kilos?
1:30.2	Yeah, yeah, by the end of the summer there'll be lots more.
	...

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