Bees are such intrinsically fascinating insects
They’ve changed the face of our planet.
Most of us don't understand how much bees are used for pollination.
Bees are by far our most important group of insect pollinators, but they're not the only ones.
We need to show more respect for our native insect pollinators.
Robinvale, Victoria. Home to the mighty Eagles and lucky enough to have two Chinese restaurants.
But I'm not here to see any of that. I'm here to see that single largest pollination event in Australia.
You see, Robinvale is home to the $500M Australian almond industry
An industry that quite literally rides on the bee’s back.
And the bee that bears the load is the European Honey Bee.
Or, if you want to get all sexy, the Apis Mellifera.
Introduced in the 1800s, this bee is found on every continent except Antarctica, they're easily bred,
and hell-bent on collecting pollen, which makes bees like these big business.
Every year, buzzing hives from all over Australia are trucked to South-west Victoria.
for the sole purpose of pollinating almond flowers
To put it simply, if there were no bees there would be no nuts.
That's Trevor. He has coordinated this pollination party for the past 40 years.
This guy's bought this load of bees in from Bateman's Bay and been given this designated spot to put the bees down.
I have 185+ beekeepers on the books that I deal with.
They vary a lot from 20 hives of bees to 5,500 hives of bees.
I went to lift one and said, "Shit! They're heavy!" Craig said, "Yeah, they're screwed to the pallet."
The bees that we bring in appear to get quite excited about almond flower.
I believe the reason is that there is cyanide in almond nectar.
Normally cyanide would kill insects, but it seems to excite bees.
When it comes to large monoculture orchids that we're in today
there's just not enough habitat to create enough native bees or native pollinators to pollinate these orchids.
Let’s be honest, if we had to eat potatoes every day and every night for the next three weeks...
we'd get sick of potatoes. So bees are no different.
So what would it mean for Australia, if the bees we use for crop pollination got sick?
In general the bees in Australia are fairly healthy.
Most of the diseases throughout the world, we have. Except that we don't have varroa mite.
But last year we came mighty close after verroa mite was found on a swarm of Asian honey bees in Townsville.
Varroa mites are nasty bastards.
They attach themselves to the bee, effectively stopping it from collecting pollen and feeding its young.
Everywhere around the world where the varroa mite has invaded the country,
and the bee population has diminished, the prices for pollination has increased substantially.
And that cost would have to be passed on by the grower to the consumer.
Where it would really be noticed the most would be in the homes and backyards.
They would all of a sudden find they had no bees.
To investigate the possibility of alternatives to honey bees is probably an essential part of research that needs to be done.
With an estimated 2,000 native bee species in Australia,
could the alternative for large scale crop pollination, be right under our nose?
Varroa mite is extremely unlikely to affect any of our native bee species.
Tim Heard and Tobias Smith are the kings of the native bee world.
If varroa mite were to enter Australia and decimate our honey bee populations
then native stingless bees are part of the solution.
They all have their own personalities -
how aggressive they are -
they can’t sting but they can crawl on you and bite your eyelids.
It is exciting every time you open a hive, you don't quite know what you’re going to get.
Native stingless bees are one of the wild insects that you can manage.
the fact they can be reared in large numbers
means that they are a great candidate for these sort of managed pollination systems.
We’re seeing more of our agricultural landscapes going over to these monocultures
where we grow vast areas of single individual crops.
While this might be a very efficient way of growing crops, unfortunately it's very hard on many native insects.
In that case, we have to manage them in a more artificial way.
We have to introduce those pollinators back into the orchard.
Does it make you nervous carrying around a boot-full of bees?
It does! It's kind of like carrying a dog in your car.
In fact, it’s more like carrying a couple of hundred thousand dogs in your car.
The idea of using stingless bees and managing stingless bees for farms has been around for a few decades.
But we’re really only getting to the point where we’ve got the numbers of hives available to do this.
We’re trying to take it to the next step here.
We’re trying to set up stands where we can keep hives more efficiently on farms.
So we’ll be seeing a lot of this in the future, I believe.
But many aren't waiting for the future.
Macadamia farmers like Brett Newell are already harnessing the pollination prowess of the stingless bees.
We’ve only got nine hives currently,
so we're not a big scale by any means
but we're certainly hoping to grow that.
I guess with the macadamia being a native, they have always had native bees foraging on them.
So it’s sort of the perfect combination, I guess you'd say.
What we can see here – all of this yellow pollen that's coming in – it’s macadamia pollen.
And I think it’s fairly safe to say that these bees here are doing their job on this orchard.
Native stingless bees can't replace European honeybees as pollinators of crops,
but they can certainly help on a lot of crops and in some they'll be better.
But given the subtropical nature of native stingless bees, it’s unlikely we’ll ever see them in an almond crop.
But bees aren’t the only ones responsible for pollination.
Bees are by far our most important group of insect pollinators for eco systems and for crops.
But their not the only ones.
Yeah, look, I think biodiversity of all the insects is pretty critical.
They're all doing something, they're not just here for a free feed.
It does translate, at the end of the day, to putting food on the plate.
The number one thing that people can do to support insect pollinators: plant more flowers.
That's what they need, it's food.
The world does need more flowers.
Throw away your lawnmower and start planting flowers in your lawn instead.