Native bees are important for us, for a number of reasons.
Firstly we need them in our ecosystems pollinating native plants.
Secondly, and sometimes more obviously, we need native bees pollinating our crops.
So there's a range of different plant species that we grow to eat that get there
best yields when we've got bees visiting them.
Toby was aware that the P&F (Property and Facilities) grounds team had Australian native bees in
valve pits in the irrigation system around the campus.
We schemed up a solution to actually
get native bee hives on campus here at St Lucia.
Of the native bees we've got here in Australia one group, the native stingless bees, the
ones that we've got here on campus,
they nest in cavities and they are a large social group.
And usually that's in a hollow tree, a big old hollow tree.
In the urban environment
there are not many big old hollow trees left and so they choose different places to nest and
those can be human made cavities in the sides of building, walls, or underground in this case.
So a water meter, like they're nesting in here, is a nice insulated cavity of about
the right size, a few litres in volume and it's got a small entrance.
We've got pollen pots here,
the ones that have yellow inside, and there's a few lovely ones that they're still filling.
There's a honey pot there that I've uncapped. You can see the honey. I won't give
that a squeeze because that might be a nice one to move, but all of these little pots
here as well.
More honey pots.
So their food stores, here and here, and their brood where all the babies
are growing just here.
So any brood I'm going to put straight into the box.
I think before I even do that, I'm
going to get some of this material.
So the young bees, they secrete wax from their wax glands,
similar to what we've got in our ears. And then they go out and go to trees where there
is sap, resin dripping. They collect that, they mix the two – the wax and the resin –
and that's called propolis and this is what they are going to use to repair the nest.
I'm going to do quiet a lot of damage in the process here, and we need them to fix that
damage as quickly as possible. This is their building material.
There's probably two main ways that these sorts of things fail.
One is not getting enough bees to fix up the damage afterwards,
or the colony being too young in the first place to do a transfer.
And the second is giving them too much food and them not being able to deal with that food.
After the transfer it ferments, they can't deal with it,
and it's the beginning of the end.
The damage that we've ended up doing
to the brood, I want all of these bees in one colony to fix that. So now we'll put this
box on carefully without mashing any of that brood.
There is probably somewhere between
about seven and ten thousand in this before.
It was a little bit more traumatic for these
bees than we were expecting.
So I got the lid off the water meter to look in there and
see what the nest looked like and it was more complicated because there were wires in there.
So there was electricity in this valve box, so the wires were going through the nest.
Also the box opened up more as we got inside,
so the brood, the babies, the most important
bit that we transfer was actually in a corner that was very hard to access.
So what we do need now though is all of these bees to get back inside
because these are the bees that are going to help
fix the damage we've done.
So it's a few hours since we did the transfer this morning
and you can see that the swarm that was in front of it has completely settled down. The bees have
gone into our box, they've accepted this as their new home.
And we can tell even further
when we look inside, we've created a window,
there's thousands of bees in there. Most
of the bees from the colony, they're fixing up the damage we've done. It's looking really fantastic.
Right now these bees know this location and we're going to move them just
a short distance that way.
So what I have to do at the end of the day today is take
them right away off the university campus. Leave them there for three weeks,
and then bring them back to there new spot, and in that three weeks
their collective GPS will be reset, and they will fit right in straight away.
These bees here, they were adults when they previously lived here.
But they weren't old enough to go outside.
So while they have lived at
The University of Queensland before, they've never seen the outside world.
So right now
they're going to reorientate and you can see them now starting to fly around.
They immediately know that they are in a new place.
Once they're orientated here they will start foraging,
and they will forage up to about 500 metres away from the colonies.
I think they are going to love this spot.
Nice and safe, good box, and we are going to start using them for teaching
and research, and engagement.
We've already got a student lined up to use them.
So I think it's big things from here
and these bees are going to be great.