The diversity of bees and the flowers they pollinate has fallen drastically in Britain and the Netherlands over the last 25 years, a study said.

“We are shocked by the decline in plants as well as the bees,” Koos Biesmeijer of the University of Leeds, the lead author of the study published in Science magazine.

“If this pattern is replicated elsewhere, the ‘pollinator service’ we take for granted could be at great risk. And with it the future for the plants we enjoy in our countryside,” said the researcher.

The study — conducted in Britain, the Netherlands and Germany — is believed to be the first of its kind staged in Europe. It found that bee diversity fell by almost 80 percent in hundreds of sites that came under revue.

The economic value of pollination worldwide is thought to be between 20 billion and 50 billion pounds (36 billion and 92 billion dollars) each year, the study said.

The research said that a decline in the number of pollinating bees would not be so damaging if it had been offset by growth in the number of other pollinating insects in the their place.

But this was not the case — the hoverflies population, for example, grew only marginally over the same period of time, said the study.

Researchers said it was too early to tell if the bee decline was leading to the plant decline, or vice versa, or if the two were locked in a “vicious cycle” of cause and effect.

“Whatever the cause, the study provides a worrying suggestion that declines in some species may trigger a cascade of local extinctions amongst other associated species,” Biesmeijer said.

Source: AFP