|
Our crops and pastures, like the honeybee, come from elsewhere. They are exotic. Crops depending on, or benefiting from, pollination by the exotic honeybee, have a combined value exceeding $4 billion per annum. The annual almond harvest, alone worth over $500m, will cease without pollination by A. mellifera By way of contrast, Australia’s annual honey crop itself is a modest $90m. We have around 9,600 registered beekeepers; but only 340 businesses produce over 60 per cent of the honey crop. Lose these 340 producers and paid pollination services will largely collapse. Our food security will be strained, and our menu will certainly be less diverse and interesting. Many fresh foods will be scarcer and more expensive.
Nature’s premier pollinator goes global
A honeybee visiting a flower to collect nectar is a familiar sight. To the more observant, other foraging bees are collecting pollen instead of nectar, and packaging their harvest as neat orange, green or yellow balls on especially adapted hind legs. What exactly happens back at the hive with the pollen and nectar is a mystery many folk accept. The queen, the workers and drones, the nurse and guard bees, how they cooperate and communicate to regulate hive activities, and the coded dance telling other foragers where to find the latest nectar flow, are secrets better left to beekeepers and curious naturalists.
But we are all back on familiar terrain when it comes to honey and bee’s wax, the two visible outputs of the busy bee’s endeavours. This ‘liquid gold’ has served as a food sweetener and component of a healthy diet since time immemorial. Wax provided candle light in churches and homes for millennia. Today it is a common ingredient in many cosmetics. What matters to us today is how important are honeybees to society, especially in Australia. And is there offsetting damage to our rich and unique biodiversity from this exotic insect?
The European honeybee, Apis mellifera, hails from the old world-Africa, Europe and The Near East. It was imported to the Americas in 1638 and, two centuries later, to Australia and New Zealand. Thus, the flora of the New World evolved without honeybees. Pollination outside the Old World was done by many other insects that co-evolved with flowering plants. This large pollinating fauna in the New World included a fair sample of the 25,000 other species in the huge bee family, Apidae. Australia is home to over 1600 species of bee, including the sting-less social bee familiar to aboriginals. The honeybee genus itself, Apis, boasts only four species with three occurring in Asia. One of these, the Asian honeybee, Apis cerana, poses an ongoing ecological and economic threat to Australia.
A. mellifera was first introduced into the colony of NSW by the ‘flogging’ parson, Samuel Marsden, around 1812. These hives, located at Parramatta, probably perished, but not before some swarms had become established in surrounding bushland. The more successful introduction occurred when Captain Wallis (Wallace) safely transported a number of hives on the ‘Isobella’ from Ireland to Sydney in 1822. Some of these hives finished up with D’Arcy Wentworth (father of William Charles) and John Blaxland (brother or Gregory) at Homebush. William and Gregory, with William Lawson, crossed the Blue Mountains in 1813. Honeybees linked these pioneering families.
There were further importations, but subsequent propagation and spread of honeybees within Australia occurred in two ways. Beekeepers continually split hives to increase numbers and they transported hives to suitable food sources. In nature, honeybee colonies propagate and spread by swarms that leave the parent hive and set up home largely in suitable tree hollows.
The purpose for importing honeybees to the New World was honey and wax, pure and simple, not pollination. Indeed, it was only in 1750 that Irish clergyman, Arthur Dobbs, established pollen as the ‘male seed’ which fertilises the ovum. The role that bees played in pollen transfer (pollination) was established by Christian Sprengel of Germany in 1793. However, the sordid field of plant sexuality was largely ignored until Darwin’s work on fertilisation in orchids in 1862 gave it respectability. Linnaeus (1707-1778) had already labelled the honeybee, mellifera which means ‘maker of honey’. Had Linnaeus known what we know now, he likely would have used the name ‘polleniphora’, carrier of pollen, to reflect the true biological significance of the honeybee.
We can safely assume that wild colonies of honeybee had colonised every available bush site across mainland Australia and Tasmania by 1900. A similar process occurred in North America 200 years earlier; and is better documented, especially its impact on native Indians. James Denny, a reviewer of Tammy Horn’s 2005 ‘Bees in America’ states “Perhaps her strongest chapter is the one in which she describes the effect upon American Indians in observing the ‘white man's fly’. Here is insight into the trigger event for Indians to remove themselves from their historic grounds, for as the bees came in, so too would settlement and occupation of the land. The Indians realized that that once this happened, their historic way of life was gone. The ‘white man's fly’ was the canary in the coal mine a sign of danger, time to go”. The spread of honeybees in Australia would have been just as comprehensive, and possibly more rapid. The density of feral hives is much higher because of our abundant nectar resources and nesting sites, especially in our Eucalypt forests.
While we don’t have the same familiarity with the detailed spread of A. mellifera throughout Australia’s bushland, it is reasonable to assume that the density of feral colonies in Australia is higher than in most other countries; and therefore, the role that these colonies have played in incidental crop pollination, while largely unquantified, is probably very high.
This brief history allows us to appreciate some of the major threats to beekeeping and pollination services in Australia. These include:
♦loss of access to floral resources through the exclusion of commercially managed hives from public lands and national parks by State Governments, especially in Queensland, Victoria and NSW. Continued access is essential for beekeepers to generate their primary income source, honey production. This access to floral resources positions beekeepers to provide strong hives capable of providing the necessary pollination services for crops like almonds. There is no convincing evidence that commercially managed hives impact adversely on the native flora and fauna sufficient to warrant their exclusion from most public lands. This issue requires further research and education so that the relevant government policies are well informed and not driven by ideology.
♦Entry of exotic pests and diseases which are widespread globally but not yet present in Australia. Foremost amongst these are Varroa mite spp and other mites. Varroa would spread rapidly through wild and managed hives. It would therefore decimate both feral colonies and managed hives, especially those maintained by amateurs and smaller commercial beekeepers who provide much of the unpaid pollinations services. Any quarantine breach by Varroa spp would have a major impact on Australian agriculture and food security. Australia needs to be prepared for this likely eventuality. Pre-emptive R&D is needed including re-opening of the Eastern Creek Honeybee Quarantine Facility.
♦A general decline in rural communities and fewer diminishing opportunities for training and skills development. Public policy needs urgently to address these generic social problems which are particularly harmful to beekeeping.
♦Shrinking public funding for R&D which is essential for sustainable beekeeping and food security. There has been a general decline in government funding for public good R&D, especially for the rural sector. Lobbying to reverse this trend is important.
These are some of the issues that the Wheen Foundation is determined to tackle on behalf of Australia’s beekeepers and the many primary producers whose crops depend on honeybee pollination. Hence our motto “Healthy bees feed the world”.
|
