On opening the new bee laboratory at the University Of Sussex earlier this month, chief scientific advisor to the Government, Lord May, remarked: “If it isn’t furry or a feathery, it doesn’t get much attention.”

This, in the opinion of those at the Laboratory Of Apiculture And Social Insects (LASI), is a grave injustice. The buzzy and stingy animals have much more to offer than we all realise.

Every year, honeybees contribute £191.8m to the UK economy through crop pollination. Of course, they also directly contribute the resulting food. However, the last few years have been tough on bee populations, with mysterious losses of 30% reported in hives across the country in 2008.

The importance of a healthy bee population cannot be stressed enough. No bees means no pollination which, in turn, means no food.

Professor Frances Ratneik is leading the new laboratory and is the only professor of apiculture in the UK.

He says: “Bees aren’t going to go extinct any time soon but they do need our help.”

Many theories have been proffered for the sudden disappearance of the bees, including disruption to their homing instinct by mobile phone signals, pesticides and even transportation to other dimensions.

Professor Ratneik insists it is most likely due to a new treatment-resistant form of parasitic mite Varroa.

While the Soil Association has called for a ban on pesticides linked with bee deaths, particularly neonicotinoids, the professor does not believe they are linked to the recent rapid decline.

He says: “As a bee keeper, I certainly welcome reduced use of insecticides but when you look at the evidence it seems an extremely slight cause of bee mortality in the UK. The cause is much more likely to be in the direction of pathogens than insecticides.”

The lab is also studying ants and wasps, known as social insects because of the highly complex way their societies are organised. One researcher said: “Because of the way they work together, you can consider each hive as a single organism, rather than ten or 20,000 individuals.”

These social insects have methods of communication – the famous waggle dance in bees or pheromones in ants – which allow other workers to organise without a leader or voting.

A greater understanding of these processes can be used in studies of conflict resolution or in the organisation of complex systems.

Lord May said the fundamental difficulty with solving climate change is not necessarily technical, but social. The study of bees and other social insects can give us a greater insight into the ways our own institutions are bound together and the evolution of co-operation.

For this reason, he says, the study of bee societies is “hugely important”.