Sir – It is great to see such articles appear in the Witney Gazette (August 20, Making buzz to help boost bee numbers).

And it is also encouraging to see councillors wanting to help, so could there “bee light” in the tunnel for my fully registered charity www.givebeesachance.org.uk I have been running this with very limited donations, and go out freely to help distressed householders who phone in to say they have a swarm of bees in their gardens etc.

I have some 500,000 bees. I don’t take their honey, as I am a natural beekeeper, and have been seeking funding to develop my four acres into a haven for the bees, but no-one seems to care, in truth, with funding me. I let the honey stay in the hive for the bees to survive the winter, as it’s their natural food. They can’t survive on just sugar and water. Can you?

I wanted to raise enough money to buy 130 acres of farmland, and make a statement by creating a cultural and teaching facility for bees and pollinators to educate young people as to the value of organic and mixed farming without the reliance of chemicals. It says it all on the website.

So, if you can make a difference, then good on you all, as I have supported Friends Of The Earth on many of their campaigns to protect the biodiversity and ban neonicotinoids and chemicals that not only harm the bees and the rest of the biodiversity, but cause us humans far more harm that you can imagine.

Google and read “A Generation In Jeopardy”, an article by Pesticide Action Network to understand the harm these pesticides do to us all.

So it starts with the bees, the birds, the animals who predate on them, the insects, indeed the full biodiversity and eventually US, and our children.

Compare the bee population in the cities to the countryside. The cities are free from industrial farming with chemicals, and therefore the health/wellbeing of the bee enables a healthy population, whilst in the countryside, where you’d expect the numbers to be in an abundance, it is not so. My motto is, “The Answer lies in the soil” and “you are what you eat”.

I have written to many organisations until I am blue in the face, even Cancer Research, as with all these chemicals that we digest, I ask myself why after all these years, is there no answer to the increasing number of bowel cancers? We are what we eat. It seems to me, as a layman, that the amount of chemicals that contaminate our food could be the cause of this all. Indeed why not, as the food is absorbed into all parts of the body, is it not?

So the bees are telling society something. Like the rest of nature, our agriculture policies are harming the countryside and its biodiversity far more than many of the public even care, in this self-serving society.

Perhaps if this is not just electioneering, your council population will support the charity.

Harry Watts Burford Road Shilton