Bowldes, honeys and heaps of produce: bees play a big role in the natural ecosystem, and without them, we wouldn’t have any of these things.
To mark World Bee Day, Aussie blokes and sheilas have been chinwaggin’ with the ABC about how to track down native bees and how technology is helping us get a better understanding of these important pollinators.
Here are five speedy facts about bees:
What’s the best way to tell a native bee from another type of bee?
G’day from the head of the native bee tech facility at Monash Uni, Alan Dorin, says there are about 20,000 species of bees around the globe
“G’day, Australia might only know the honey bee, which was brought here, but we’ve actually got about 2,000 native bee species that don’t actually produce honey,” he said.
The most are harmless. If you’re on your own, it won’t do any good, and most of them are on their own and don’t live in big groups like honey bees, and it wouldn’t be good to go around without risking being stung to death.
Associate Professor Caitlyn Forster from the University of Sydney said two of the most well-known Aussie species, the blue-banded bee and the teddy bear bee, can often be heard before you catch a sight of them.
She reckons this is because they’re buzz pollinators – which means they bang flowers about to shake loose the pollen from ’em.
She said any native stingless bees are harder to spot.
They’re tiny little black bees that look like flies or flying ants.
She reckons most of these bees live underground on their own.
What’s going on with varroa mites?
June 2022 in Newcastle.
Dr Forster said the initial plan to get rid of the mites, which spreads viruses that cripple bees’ ability to fly, had since been adapted to manage the spread.
“We know the varroa mite is here to stay in New South Wales,” she said.
Dr Dorin said the varroa mite is mostly a problem for the introduced European bees.
“Our native bees have stuck around for millions of years before the European honey bees arrived. So it’s a fair chance that when the varroa mite really takes its toll – and it’s getting worse – the populations of European honey bees could tumble dramatically in the wild,” he said.
We’re still managing many populations, fair dinkum, and we’ll keep doing that because they’re so valuable for our agricultural industries. But our native bees are top-notch pollinators of the native species.
How is tech benefiting bees?
Dr Dorin reckons better monitoring and artificial intelligence have led to advancements in bee research.
“We also use computer science to build simulations that work a bit like a computer game,” he said.
You can picture a game like Pac-Man with ghosts roaming around in this game, the ghosts are the insects – no Pac-Man chalking up points by gobbling them up – and instead, we watch what the insects do as they wander over crops or wildflowers, tracking their pollination behaviour along the way.
He said, more importantly, they can use the technology to make predictions about how blokes will react in different situations, like when it’s bright, to feed tips to growers about how to reorganise their set-up to give pollination a fair dinkum.
He said advances in technology helped experts gain a deeper understanding of the unique visuals of bees, like their ability to spot parts of the ultraviolet spectrum that humans can’t perceive.
We might say some flowers look almost identical to each other, but it’d be clear to a bee if they check out the UV markings on the petals – it stands out, apparently.
You’ll need those little AI eyes if you like to see what it’s like from the bee’s point of view, then run simulations with thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of virtual bees.
What do we know about the decline of bee numbers?
Around seventy-five per cent of crops rely on some form of pollination, Dr Forster said.
“It’ll have a big effect on food security,” she said.
Pollinators in Australia include hoverflies, often referred to as flower flies or drone flies, which tend to be more active come autumn than most bees.
“Our local pollinators are pretty crucial, we often don’t appreciate just how big a deal they are,” Dr. Forster said.
She’s of the opinion that it’s because not a lot of research has been done on individual species and which crops they primarily affect.
There’s no official records of feral honey bee colonies and native bee species populations, despite there being data available on commercial honey bee populations.
“Some local pollinators we don’t even know what to call,” she said.
What can individuals do to assist bees?
Dr Forster said helping bees is really easy – and if you’re into gardening, you’re probably already giving a hand.
“Make sure we’ve got some flowers in the backyard,” she said.
Try not to rely too much on pest killers.
