NEWS that farmed honeybee populations are booming forces us to consider how we understand conservation in the natural world. 

There has been lots of great news for giant pandas in the last month. 

Pandas have long been an emblem of conservation efforts due to the extremely low number of wild bears and the notorious difficulty in breeding the bears in captivity. 

This week Beauval Zoo in central France announced the birth of healthy panda twins from a pair of bears on loan from China. 

Pandas are famously a token of Chinese diplomacy. Given as gifts since the 1950s, they are now rented from China by state governments worldwide. 

Even more excitingly, the Chinese government announced last month that wild population numbers of the bear have risen above 1,800, which means that the species will be reclassified as “vulnerable” rather than “endangered.” 

The same decision was made by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List in 2016.

But why save the giant panda in particular? Until recent efforts to conserve them and their habitat, they topped the list of the most iconic endangered species in the world, and a picture of one remains the logo of the World Wildlife Fund. 

The most iconic endangered species list is now topped by the Javan Rhinoceros. Many of these species are called “charismatic” due to their popularity among the general public (unlike unglamorous tiny or non-distinctive insects for example). 

Their causes are championed by the creation of reserves and the development of ecological tourism. 

The idea of conservation tourism is to make ecological preservation commercially viable by charging rich tourists to visit for a glimpse of a charismatic mammal while using the profits made to replace the profit that could otherwise be made from farming, hunting or forestry.

However, in the time during which vast resources have been poured into the conservation of giant pandas, many other species have gone extinct. 

On a planet in the process of mass habitat destruction through human development, pollution and global warming, we are living through an age of mass extinction. 

The UN estimates the loss of a million species by 2050, but nobody really knows, partly because it’s hard to know exactly how many species there are on the planet currently. 

The IUCN Red List, which is the most comprehensive list of endangered species, has a headline number of “35,000+” threatened species.

Globally, individual humans are also dying due to the unnecessarily restricted distribution of medical treatment, colonial war, poverty, hunger, and miserably low living and working conditions. 

We must therefore consider the conservation of endangered species against a backdrop of preventable immiseration. 

This is not an argument against the preservation of endangered species. Merely to say that although the loss of the natural world is clearly a tragedy in human terms, it should be considered besides all of the other legitimate claims on international attention and resources.

So what makes some species more important to conserve than others? What’s the rationale for the conservation of endangered species at all? 

One of the most common cases made is that we simply can’t live without the richness of biodiversity that we find in nature. 

Many drugs and medical interventions, as well as engineering ideas and materials have been taken directly from nature. 

There is still much more to be discovered about species, many unidentified, living on the planet. 

The unexamined reservoir of species alive today contains the answers to many human problems, both existing and future.

There are also the hidden “jobs” done by species within ecosystems that we rely on for our food and health. 

One of these jobs is pollination. Insects, the most numerous group of species on the planet, are to thank for this arduous task. 

The Royal Entomological Society estimates that there are about 1.4 billion individual insects for every human living and insects also make up the largest proportion of total species. 

Insects are the main target of pesticides, which are used globally to improve the yield of farmed crops. 

Pesticides are mostly indiscriminate and devastate all insect populations across regions where they are used.

This includes species that reduce crop quality, but also bystander populations as well as insects that are crucial to pollination (which are important for the successful growth of crops).

Campaigners have raised the alarm about the loss of insect diversity and numbers for decades, but populations are still in decline. 

Perhaps the most famous campaign to protect an insect has been for bees. Bees are excellent pollinators and have an unusually high biodiversity concentrated in temperate regions such as Britain. 

Recent research has shown that in Britain farming is of such high intensity that cities now provide a crucial haven for insects like bees. 

This is due to the maintenance of public and private gardens filled with a diversity of flowers that are designed to keep flowering for a much longer proportion of the year than farmland. 

The heat islands of cities also contribute to the longer flowering period that allows bees to thrive in cities. 

City bee populations can even help with crop pollination in surrounding farmland, as bees can travel for miles in search of nectar.

The plight of bees has been recognised, and the message is now everywhere. 

In fact, beekeeping as a hobby has experienced a boom, with more people than ever maintaining a personal hive of honeybees. 

However, commentary from the president of the British Ecological Society Jane Memmott was reported in the Guardian this week raising the alarm about urban honeybees. 

She has called attention to the overpopulation of honeybees where the popularity of beekeeping threatens to fall into the trap of intensive farming. 

Honeybees are just one of the 270 species of bee native to Britain, and due to their high numbers, appetites and social habits are a very competitive species. 

With the encouragement of beekeepers they can outcompete other bee species, the vast majority of which are solitary and do not produce honey. 

Different bee species pollinate different plants so we cannot rely on one species of bee to perform all of the pollination required to maintain current plant diversity. 

A high density of homogeneous species of bees are also at particular risk of disease, which threatens their numbers with sudden collapse, but which might also spill over into other wild species.

Honeybees may be doing well (and pollinating city flowers brilliantly!), but other bees remain precarious, along with all the other non-honey-producing insects, and the health of Britain’s countryside in general. Saving the bees might be appealing because of the benefits to humans in the form of jars of honey. 

But as a case study in conservation under capitalism, bees are an important lesson. 

We can be sure that conservation for profit will not manage to save the biodiversity that we need to preserve. 

It can only manage to promote the saving of a small range of appealing animals and not the widespread structural changes in the way that humans interact with nature that will be needed to prevent mass extinction.  

The conservation of ecological spaces is not a zero-sum game, and species do not need to be played off against others. 

What is important, however, is that conservation is done for its own sake, by re-imagining the world in which we live, and not merely with the promise of other profit incentives.