[Pollinator] Welsh Assembly pledges to help protect honey bees

[Ladadams at aol.com]

Welsh Assembly pledges to help protect honey bees
News | 1 July, 2009 By Barry Alston  
WELSH Assembly Rural Affairs Minister, Elin Jones, has  been meeting 
members of the Welsh Beekeepers’ Association today (Wednesday, July  1), to 
discuss how it can work with the association towards reversing the  decline in the 
bee population in Wales. 
 
The Minister pledged her on-going commitment to help protect and improve 
the  health of honey bees and to sustaining and supporting beekeeping in 
Wales.  
She also discussed a number of significant initiatives launched recently  
relating to bee health. These include:  
• The Healthy Bees Plan – a joint Assembly and Defra document which aims 
to  address the challenges facing beekeepers and is aimed at sustaining the 
health  of honey bees and beekeeping in England and Wales over the next 
decade.  
• An increase of funding for the National Bee Unit to enhance the current 
bee  health programme under which the Assembly is contributing £486,000, or 
roughly  double the previous years’ allocation. 

• The Insect Pollinator Initiative, a £10 million research programme to 
help  identify the main threats to bees and other insect pollinators.  
“Honey bees and other pollinators are vital for local food production, 
which  is key to the environmentally sustainable farming we are promoting in 
Wales,”  said the Minister.  
“Several initiatives are underway to tackle the decline in the bee 
population  and working together will be the key to achieving the objectives of 
these  projects.”  
“I am also keen to establish how we can compliment the work of the WBKA and 
 also how it can support us in our policy development of bee health in  
Wales.”

>From Farmer's Guardian





Laurie Davies Adams
Executive  Director
Pollinator Partnership 
423 Washington Street, 5th  floor
San Francisco, CA  94111
415-362-1137
LDA at pollinator.org

_www.pollinator.org_ (http://www.pollinator.org/) 

_www.nappc.org_ (http://www.nappc.org/) 

National Pollinator Week is June 22-28, 2009. 
Beecome  involved at _www.pollinator.org_ (http://www.pollinator.org/) 
**************Dell Summer Savings: Cool Deals on Popular Laptops – Shop 
Now! 
(http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1222696924x1201468348/aol?redir=http:%2F%2Faltfarm.mediaplex.com%2Fad%2Fck%2F12309%2D81939%2D1629%2D1)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sonic.net/pipermail/pollinator/attachments/20090702/b4a5fa1d/attachment.html>