Sparks: ‘Crucial opportunity to act’ as study finds most of Europe’s wild bee species in decline

You are told the summit convenes to consider the matter, when the matter has been considering itself for a century without anyone's leave, and the bees have already rendered their verdict.

A democratic people will grieve the vanished bee in the same season it paves the meadow, and feel no contradiction, for the grief costs nothing and the paving pays.

The wager is this: act as though the small creatures matter and you lose a fraction of the harvest, or act as though they do not and you lose the harvest entire, and no one has calculated which bet is cheaper.

What is called common sense in the ministry is the sense common to those who own the land, and the bee's decline is the ledger entry they would prefer the meeting not read aloud.

The continent reports the loss of its pollinators the way a patient reports a dream - as a curiosity, not a symptom - while the symptom continues to do its work in the orchard.

Do not wait for the summit's communiqué. The bee does not read communiqués. Act this season, or the season after will have nothing to act upon.

'A crucial opportunity to act,' writes the summit, and in the same paragraph the study reports a century of decline - the opportunity, note, is the summit's, not the bee's.

A man in a warm room signs a paper about biodiversity while a man in a field watches the blossoms fall unpollinated, and the distance between the two rooms is the whole history of the century.

In the orchards of Andalusia I once watched the bees work the orange blossom as they work it in Fez, and I am told now that both orchards are quieter, which is a comparison no caravan can repair.

All I know is what I read in the papers, and the papers say Europe's bees are declining while Europe's ministers are meeting, which is a fine arrangement for the ministers and a poor one for the bees.