Emergency honey bee plan in the wings

Emergency honey bee plan in the wings

Friday, 28 March 2008 Anna Salleh
ABC
bee pollination

Beekeepers, your country needs you. Australian beekeepers are under pressure to deliver bees to farmers (Source: iStockphoto)
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Australian farmers are facing a shortage of bees to pollinate their food crops and are working with beekeepers to develop an emergency plan.

Many crops, such as fruit and vegetables, rely heavily on free pollination by wild European honey bees.

But these are under threat from the Varroa mite, says Dr Max Whitten, former CSIRO chief of entomology, who is involved in the plan.

Varroa has played a key role in Colony Collapse Disorder in the US. It has spread throughout the world and been in New Zealand since 2000, says Whitten, who has long advised the honey bee industry.

The mite is not yet in Australia. But Whitten says that pollination-dependent industries, worth up to A$4 billion, are holding their collective breath for its arrival.

"We expect Varroa to come in any time," he says. "Once it comes in it will spread rapidly through the country."

If millions of wild bee colonies are destroyed by Varroa, there will be a greater reliance on beekeepers to supply bees for polllination, says Whitten.

The relatively small honey-focused industry will need to ramp up their number of hives to take up the slack left by the destroyed wild honey bee population, he says.

So, food producers met with the honeybee industry recently in Canberra to discuss the development of a new body, called Pollination Australia

With the support of the Australian government, the body will co-ordinate research and development into bees, pollination, biosecurity and train pollination-dependent industries.

"It's an emergency plan triggered principally by the likelihood that Varroa will come in," says Whitten, who is based in Queensland.

Other issues to be dealt with by the new body, expected to be established in July this year, include payment for pollination services and beekeeper access to flowering plants on public lands.

Whitten, who is on Pollination Australia's steering committee, says even without Varroa there is a need to boost commercial hives to service rapidly growing industries such as almonds.

Whitten says certain native bees could be used in select crops but they would never become a mainstream source of pollination.

"They should be exploited to the hilt but they will be an entirely secondary source," he says.