Karen grabbed his arm to make him stop. ‘What’s any of this got to do with my dad, Chris?’
He turned to face her and wild eyes searched hers. ‘You would think, wouldn’t you,’ he said, ‘that, with so much at stake, everyone everywhere would be doing what they could to solve the problem, to protect the bees?’
‘Well, why wouldn’t they?’
‘Money, Karen. Fucking money!’ His voice rose almost to a shout, and Karen was startled, but more by his language than his tenor. She had never heard him swear before. Just as she had never heard her father use bad language. She supposed that adults did swear, just not in front of the children. But it still came as a shock to hear it. He relented, and uncertainty consumed him again. ‘I... I’m sorry.’
Karen stood awkwardly, looking at him. And he wouldn’t meet her eye. After a moment, she stepped in and put her arms around him. He tensed, then after a few seconds she felt him relax, and his arms slipped tentatively around her, and they stood in a long, silent embrace. Two solitary figures on an empty beach. Beyond them, somewhere out there in the firth, they had both lost someone they loved.
When, finally, they broke apart, she said, ‘Tell me.’
He was pale now, and resigned somehow. He nodded, and they resumed their walk towards the distant pavilion. But their pace was more leisurely now. He watched his feet as they walked, scliffing the wet, compacted sand left by the recently retreated tide, and she slipped her arm through his. She felt as close to her father in this moment as she had in years.
He said, ‘The project that Ergo had funded Tom to pursue was...’ He forced a smile. ‘You’ll laugh. It sounds so prosaic.’ And he put an emphasis on each of the words. ‘The impact of floral diversity on bee resilience and learning capacity.’ He looked at her and took in her expression. His laugh was spontaneous and genuine. ‘Yeah, exactly. In other words, they wanted to find out how poor diet affected the performance of bees.’ He hesitated. ‘But they wanted your dad to do something else, which I think was the real object of the exercise. You’ve heard of neonicotinoids?’
Karen shook her head. ‘Sounds like it might have something to do with tobacco.’
‘Close. It’s actually a class of insecticides that are chemically similar to nicotine. They have unpronounceable names like clothianidin and imidacloprid. Anyway, a bunch of them got banned by the European Union about three years ago, because there was strong scientific evidence that treating crops with this stuff was harmful to bees. Some scientists were even claiming that it was the primary cause of the sudden decline in bee populations. Trouble is, there was no actual proof. No smoking gun. And the big agrochemical companies, Ergo among them, were furious. Loss of revenue from the banning of these products was running to billions a year.’
Connor stopped suddenly and stooped to pick up a shell lodged in the sand. A classic small scallop shell. He turned it over in his fingers.
‘Big corporations run the world, Karen. Biotech, agrochemical, oil. They are bigger than a lot of governments. And in certain cases they turn over more in profit than the GDP of many small countries. They wield enormous influence. Politicians and political parties, particularly in America, rely on them to fund election campaigns. They are powerful lobbyists. Which is why the US has not banned the use of neonicotinoids, and thousands of tons of the stuff are still being used on crops there every year. Biggest usage is on oilseed rape. They coat the seeds with insecticide, so that, when it germinates, the insecticide is diffused throughout the plant, including the nectar and pollen that’s harvested by the bees.’
‘In spite of the danger to them?’
Connor laughed. ‘Well, of course, the agrochem companies say there is no danger. They produce all these studies showing that the level at which their insecticides are found in the environment has no effect on bees.’
Karen raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?’
‘Which is why Ergo was keen to have an independent researcher — your dad — show unequivocally that neonicotinoids do not kill bees, and are therefore not responsible for the decline in bee populations.’
‘And did he?’
Connor nodded. ‘He did. They got him to repeat an industry experiment that exposed bees to levels of insecticide one hundred and forty times higher than you would typically find in areas where the stuff had been used on crops. An absolutely toxic level of imidacloprid, which you might think would simply wipe out all the bees exposed to it. It didn’t. Only about fifty per cent died. A level they call LD50. And proof that, at normal levels, neonicotinoids were not at all toxic to bees.’
‘Wow. So what did my dad do?’
‘Well, Ergo were keen to have him speak out in support of his findings.’
‘And he did that?’
Connor sighed and nodded. ‘He published his research, Karen. Ergo put out press releases and made his findings available to every media outlet on the planet. He spoke at several industry conventions. Making him very unpopular with the environmental lobby.’ He shrugged. ‘I mean, your dad was a scientist, Karen. These were his findings.’
Karen said, ‘Why do I have the feeling there’s a but somewhere in our future?’
Connor’s smile was rueful and sad. ‘Oh, yes. Remember the research project on the impact of floral diversity on bee resilience and learning capacity?’
‘How could I forget?’
Now his smile widened with genuine amusement. ‘Well, Tom had handed that over to one of his students. A bright lad called Billy Carr. And since half of your dad’s bees had survived his experiment, Billy borrowed them to use in his. He employed them as his control group. In other words, they were fed a normal diet, while another group of bees was given a restricted diet, so the effects of the poor diet could be compared with the normally fed control group.’ Connor spread his arms and his hands. ‘It was pure bloody chance, Karen. A complete accident. But, in the course of his experiment, Billy found that your dad’s bees were the ones suffering from learning difficulties. They were unable to associate floral scent with the reward — the pollen and nectar they would find in the flower. Their memories were screwed. And, Karen, memory is everything to a bee. It’s how they find their way to food and convey that information to other bees. It’s how they find their way back to the hive. Without it they can’t find tomorrow’s food, and the colony in the hive breaks down.’
Suddenly Karen saw the significance of it. ‘So the imidacloprid hadn’t killed the bees directly, but it had left them brain-damaged.’
‘And unable to function properly. Exactly.’ Connor’s face was shining as he took pleasure in Karen’s intelligence. Her ability to see things clearly, and reason as her father had done. But, just as quickly, it clouded again, as if a shadow had passed directly over it. ‘But, for such an intelligent man, Tom could be so bloody naive.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, he and Billy took the results from that experiment and reran it, this time using bees that had only been exposed to environmental levels of the neonicotinoid. Same thing. The bees suffered neuronal brain damage and weren’t able to forage properly for food. Tom went straight to Ergo to warn them that there was a major problem. Their neonic insecticides were fucking with bees’ brains and leading ultimately to colony collapse.’ He threw back his head and hollered at the heavens. ‘So fucking stupid!’