Beekeeping Around the World: Australia

- Hello, everybody.

Thank you for coming.

Thank you very much for remembering that this week's webinar is at 4:00 PM.

We're very excited today to have with us Dr. John Roberts.

John Roberts is a senior researcher for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, also known as the CSIRO.

His research applies molecular approaches and tools to address a variety of health and biosecurity issues that impact Australia's honeybee population and the valuable pollination services that it provides.

We're very excited to have John coming here from the future.

Actually where he is, it's tomorrow morning, so we're very glad to have him, and I'm sure you can understand why we changed the time for this webinar.

So, John, if you're ready, we're very excited to hear about beekeeping in Australia.

- Thanks, Robyn.

Just share my screen.

Okay.

Is that working?

Working fine?

- [Robyn] Looks great.

- Excellent.

Well, thanks for the invitation to present and give everyone a bit of an insight on some of the beekeeping in Australia and also the local region in the Pacific I'll be touching on as well.

And so I just wanted to start with just an acknowledgement of the indigenous people of Australia.

Just acknowledge the Ngunnawal people for the area that I'm coming from in Canberra as the traditional owners of the land where I am and pay my respects to their elders, past and present.

So today, we did plan on having myself and a colleague talking a bit more about his work in the Pacific region that we collaborate on.

But today, you've just got me and so I'll be trying to touch on that in some respects.

But my work that I, or the areas that I was going speak about today, is just to give you a bit of a snapshot of Australian beekeeping and some information on our current situation with Varroa destructor.

And then some of the work that I'm involved with, have been involved with, around mite issues for beekeeping in the Pacific region, which are very relevant and for Australia's biosecurity as well.

And, luckily, I stuck this photo up of me to remind me just to give you a bit more background as to where, of who I am.

As Robyn said, I work at the CSIRO in Australia.

It's a national science agency with lots of sites around the country.

And I have worked here for I think a little bit over 12 years now in honeybee health, pest and diseases, working around surveillance and diagnostics, and working closely with the bee industry to help manage endemic pests and pathogens.

But yeah, a lot of my work has also been getting us thinking around Varroa mites and the viruses that are a risk for us.

And those of you might know Denis Anderson, who has done a lot of work with Varroa mites.

And so he was my former supervisor and I joined him at SCIRO over a decade ago before he retired.

So let me get into my talk.

So beekeeping in Australia, we have quite a long history of beekeeping and it's got a lot of similarities with some areas of the world, but I think we also have some, a lot of unique aspects as well.

And so for those of you that aren't all that familiar with Australia, I thought I should put this map up.

And most of our beekeeping is done around the coastal areas.

That's, you know, where our populations are.

The center of Australia is a bit drier and not as densely populated.

So the bulk of our beekeeping is on the east coast, New South Wales, and Victoria, and Queensland are our largest beekeeping regions, the most number of beekeepers and hives.

We have beekeeping, strong commercial beekeeping, in Tasmania, South Australia, and Western Australia around this southern area.

But around the northern parts of Australia where it's a more subtropical, tropical environment, we don't have as much commercial beekeeping.

The beekeepers, commercial beekeepers, are very, are quite migratory in Australia.

A lot of similarities with places like the US.

So they're moving their hives around, looking for different honey flows, and the flora in Australia, the native flora, the eucalypts, the nectar flows can be quite sporadic and not occurring on an annual basis.

And it's really quite a, the commercial beekeepers build up quite a skill of understanding their local environment and understanding when and when to expect some of these honey flows.

So there's a lot of movement across the area.

And over the last decade, as well, we've had growth in pollination, which is increasing some of that movement as well.

And I might come to that on the next slide a little bit, just I thought I'd throw up some numbers.

This is a recent report funded by industry levies.

And just to get a bit of an update of some of the numbers of our industry, which we don't always capture so well, but some of those numbers, currently we have around 1800 commercial beekeepers who are managing around 530,000 hives across the country.

These numbers have been pretty stable since the early two thousands, they haven't increased all that much.

Although we do think there is potential to certainly increase those hive numbers if there's the demand.

Our, I guess, areas of production, our beekeepers are predominantly still very much honey-production focused.

And there's a reasonable split of using our public forest areas.

We have allocated bee sites in some parts, but there's also a lot of private land use.

We are producing officially around about 20,000 tons of honey per year.

Although in this report, they capture there's probably around another 17,000 tons of honey that's not captured in these numbers that are produced either from, you know, commercial beekeepers and recreational gatekeepers that we're not getting levy funds from.

Our production is around 147 million per year, which is fairly modest compared to other agricultural sectors.

And over the recent years, I think like a lot of places around the world, we have been trying to capture the broader value for beekeeping in terms of pollination value.

And our estimates for that are around 14 billion to the Australian economy from those broader services.

And I just wanted to add here, which wasn't in this snapshot, that recreational beekeeping has certainly grown exponentially over the last decade at least to about 28,000 recreational beekeepers in Australia now.

Multiple factors for that.

Flow Hive, as a little pitch there on the side, is probably one of those factors that certainly increased numbers in Australia, I know most of you are familiar with that.

But if not, check it out, it's a bit polarizing for some around whether it's good for bees or not, but it's certainly quite novel and interesting for recreational beekeepers.

So Australia has a very good record or image as having very healthy honeybees because, largely, we have been able to remain free of parasitic mites for a very long, well, for a very long time.

And a little asterisks there, that still technically free of endemic parasitic mites.

But I'll get on to our incursion worries shortly.

And also work that I've been involved with is we also don't have some of those key viruses that are associated with Varroa, such as deformed wing virus.

So this certainly makes beekeeping in Australia a little easier than some other places, but we do have quite a number of other pests and pathogens that we're dealing with.

And so here's a bit of an image gallery that many of you might might recognize.

For us on the east coast, we have small hive beetle and that's very much a significant pest problem for us.

In the warmer coastal areas, we have the full range of brood diseases in on the east coast.

On our western, in Western Australia and Tasmania, they're been able to stay free of some of these pathogens such as as EFB and small hive beetle in Western Australia.

So we do have to still deal with many of these endemic pathogens.

So we are healthy, but we do struggle already with hive losses and high productivity at some points.

But it has been very beneficial of not being, to not have the added management challenges that come with parasitic mites and we have very strong biosecurity to try and protect that.

So in Australia, we have been, since the early two thousands, been building our national biosecurity for bees.

And so in various forms, have had a national bee pest surveillance program.

And that has, for a while, a large, I guess a backbone of that has been to have sentinel hives placed at ports of risk, ports of entry around the country.

The red dots on this map are where sentinel hives have been placed.

Those have been reduced in recent times due to the just the resourcing around that to eight high-risk ports.

But as well as these sentinel hives that get inspected, you know, routinely every six weeks for, particularly, parasitic mites, but also some other exotic pests and pest bees that we might be looking for, We have other parts of the system where there's surveillance, particularly around ports of looking for swarms of bees that could be introducing things.

Something that we have had fairly regular interceptions and incursions of is the Asian honeybee, Apis cerana.

And we do have an established population of Apis cerana in Cairns, which is up here, you can see my cursor, which is tropical North Queensland, quite separate from a lot of our main beekeeping region and queen breeding areas in Australia.

And that was identified in 2007 and couldn't be eradicated as and is under some level of response and containment to keep in that area.

We've also had interceptions incursions of- Sorry, a little step back, this population up in Cairns didn't bring with it its parasitic Varroa mite, Varroa jacobsoni, which is fortunate.

So it's just the bee that's established up there.

But in later years, 2016 and I think two years after that, we've had a second incursion of Apis cerana, this time carrying Varroa jacobsoni, in Townsville, which is this red dot just below, where we have mounted eradication efforts that were successful of getting rid of this Asian honeybee incursion and the mite it's carrying.

So that's been good for our industry.

And then in 2018, we did have a bit of excitement and a reminder that Varroa destructor is never too far away with an interception of a ship just in the port of Melbourne where there was a swarm of Apis mellifera, which the ship originated from Texas, I believe.

So, you know, potentially a swarm coming from that part of the world bringing Varroa destructor.

So that was, again, a near miss.

And now we, in June last year, 2022, we have been dealing with a full incursion of Varroa destructor and so it's been a very different time for beekeeping in Australia.

A lot of, I guess, a lot of stress and a lot of concern for large parts of the industry and certainly a lot of things coming into action, and really uncovering how well or how well prepared we are, and areas where we're not so well prepared or performing.

So how our current situation is, seeing this map, and this is, I think, very up to date, unless something has happened in the last day or so.

We have 137 infected premises.

So these are apiary sites, essentially, where Varroa has been detected.

And these are the center of these red dots on the map.

And each time there's an infected premises, say 10 kilometer radius, which is these red circles, is formed and all hives, managed hives, in those areas are eliminated or destroyed.

And then there's a surveillance zone of 25 kilometers around that area as well, which is including that purple area.

So maybe taking a little step back, the initial incursion was detected in Newcastle, which is here and just north of Sydney.

And it was detected in our sentinel beehives placed at the port of Newcastle.

And so there has been a lot of debate of whether the sentinel hives had the sensitivity to actually detect a Varroa mite incursion.

And so in a lot of ways it's been a win, I guess, for the sentinel hives that they were our first detection.

They did detect Varroa for us.

The problem is, which is what we had our concerns around the sentinel hives, is just the how quickly that we were picking it up in the sentinel hives.

So these hives were not the first, the point of entry, basically, or the first hives.

After detecting mites in these hives, further surveillance identified other commercial hives that had much higher levels of mites, suggesting that Varroa had been in this area for many months and possibly up to 12 months.

And so that's where we see ourselves of having this, you know, broader area of mites being detected.

And there's still fortunately been an area that has been somewhat contained.

These outer points were movements, beekeeper movements of hives, and have been eliminated from those areas and there's no further detections up in those north points.

Some things that, I guess, it highlighted for us is that we have been talking about the risk of Varroa destructor for a long time and trying to get that awareness, and I think that's been going very well for industry and they're very mindful of those, of the impacts, and that we certainly don't want it.

We do have guidelines in place for beekeepers and expectations that beekeepers are doing routine annual inspections for Varroa.

But I think this was a bit of a highlight that we certainly weren't doing as much of those inspections in our hives as we should have been because we weren't picking it up in some of these hives that clearly had detectable levels of Varroa mite if you're doing any sort of alcohol wash or mite inspection.

Some of the impacts that this has had, there's certainly been restrictions of hive movements from New South Wales, that's the state of Sydney here.

So beekeepers can move within that state at the moment, they're in that blue zone outside of these areas, but certainly causing challenges for beekeeper movement.

The diagnostics that's been going on for around this incursion, I've been involved in parts of that.

But our New South Wales State Department, their resources have been doing the bulk of that diagnostics.

They're, you know, there's originally identifying that, yes, it is Varroa destructor.

And we've been doing, been involved with some work around genomics and genetic tracing of this mite, can we identify where it perhaps has come from?

Some of that work is not yet finalized and we haven't really got a clear pinpoint of where it's come from.

And so I can't really comment too much on that other than that it certainly looks like it's a single introduction, but we've still not got a clear picture as to where it's perhaps come from.

We've also been doing a lot of virus testing to work out whether we have deformed wing virus introduced with this incursion.

And fortunately we haven't detected any deformed wing virus in the honeybees of this zone that we've been eliminating, but also in the mites that we've been, that have been collected as well.

So that's quite interesting, you know, important for us, but also interesting to think about the, I guess, for some, there's been that expectation that the virus would inevitably arrive with Varroa mites, but it doesn't seem to be the case.

There is also, I'll just add a view, probably not my view, but a view that there could be a undetectable existing presence of the virus in Australia that the mites have the potential to, you know, exacerbate and bring to detectable levels.

So certainly as our Varroa incursion evolves, if it becomes more established, we could certainly see a changing virus landscape.

So the impacts of Varroa in Australia are certainly in its early stages.

And some of those, the short-term impacts that I've been talking about, but there's obviously the local impacts are very high, have got some bee keepers in those areas that are losing, you know, huge numbers of their hives and that's having, you know, a big impact on their business, and, you know, mental health, and it's, you know, can be, it's pretty difficult for commercial and recreational beekeepers in those zones at the moment.

And there's sort of, and while we're in an eradication response, it can be difficult for them to rebuild their beekeeping businesses.

There's also the timing for the incursion was back in June, and so in Australia, our largest pollination event is in August in the southern parts of New South Wales and North Victoria, so southeast Australia there.

And so there were some challenges there around having enough hives available that were able to move to these almond-growing regions to meet the pollination demands there.

And I don't have accurate numbers to hand, but we were able to have still a reasonable level of pollination service, but there were certainly deficits there and industry are certainly expecting some impacts, almond industry expecting impacts from that.

So that's gonna be quite interesting to see how that has unfolded.

Over the following months, we have been fortunate to still be able to work with some of the restrictions and incorporating surveillance to allow a bit more hive movement to allow pollination services to continue.

Some of the medium to long term impacts we're certainly thinking about and I guess are going to unfold a little bit and we're trying to prepare for, but I guess some of the things that I thought are worth pulling out, points of difference for Australia, many people listening today are gonna be more than aware of those impacts of Varroa, obviously, Varroa, some of the the biggest impacts from Varroa are coming from their association with viruses.

And for us, where we haven't found deformed wing virus in Australia and it doesn't look like it's been introduced with this incursion, it's how we manage Varroa could be quite different to the overseas experience where, and it's something that I've observed in the Pacific region and I'll comment on in some following slides, but the Varroa mite, the damage from feeding alone as a parasite is potentially more manageable and lower impact than when there's not the added virus impact.

And so it will be interesting to see how management evolves in Australia in terms of the need and/or frequency for chemical control or whether other control options might be more viable without the added impact of viruses.

Something else that I think is a little unique to Australia is we have a extremely dense, you know, a large feral bee population.

And that is, with the establishment of Varroa, we're expecting that feral population to be essentially wiped out over time.

And so there's the expectation that a lot of cropping industries are going to lose free pollination that they've been benefiting from and relying on over the years.

And so there's some, that's certainly gonna change the pollination landscape, as has been observed overseas.

That's maybe a win for beekeepers in that there's more paid pollination, to get better prices for that.

But there's already concerns in Australia for meeting those pollination demands with the current hives available.

And so it's certainly gonna be quite interesting to see how the Australian beekeeping industry can respond to this loss of feral bees and that demand for pollination.

Something that I did touch on I think in some of the earlier slides and that many of you may not appreciate is just how big Australia is and some of those natural barriers we have.

So Western Australia is quite separate from the east coast.

There's, you know, large desert areas that are, that form natural barriers for Western Australia.

And there's already movement restrictions between east and Western Australia for beekeeping equipment and bees.

So they've been able to keep out European foulbrood and small hive beetle, and I would imagine that they will also be able to keep out Varroa mites should it become established in the eastern states.

Similarly, for Tasmania, which is a small island down the bottom of the country and they also do not have small hive beetle and there's obviously, you know, a water, you know, a significant water barrier there that will also help keep Varroa out of those regions.

So even if we are not successful in eradicating Varroa from New South Wales, I think the efforts that are going on at reducing the spread are certainly gonna be very valuable, and I think for some time, we're gonna have large parts of Australia that still are Varroa free.

So again, this comes into how we manage mites in Australia and it's going to be having to cover quite different beekeeping regions.

So for me, my area of interest is very much around biosecurity, and so certainly thinking around those biosecurity risks and things, I guess, that we're continuing to think about and wanting to make sure industry and government are thinking about that even if Varroa does establish, there are further risks that come from additional incursions and we do need to maintain that biosecurity.

So we certainly don't want to see any further introductions of Varroa destructor for a few reasons.

One, it's just is bringing more increased genetic diversity for the mites, there could be pesticide resistance that is coming in with those and with future incursions, and similarly, it just increases that risk of bringing in deformed wing virus.

So certainly maintaining that same level of biosecurity, I think, is pretty important.

We also have some other regional mite threats that have been on our radar and, you know, and still need to be there.

We have a related Varroa mite, Varroa jacobsoni, that has undergone a host shift in Papua New Guinea in the recent years and has more recently spread to Fiji.

And so we have another Varroa mite species in our region that is a very close threat for Australia that we need to be mindful of.

There's also Tropilaelaps mites, which some of you may be familiar with, which is throughout Asia and that is also spread into Papua New Guinea, which is in blue on our map there, north of Australia.

So again, a local risk for us.

And work that I've done in that region around particularly looking at some of those mites and the viruses in those populations has been quite interesting in that we've also haven't been finding deformed wing virus in some of these populations.

And Papua New Guinea, in particular, has been interesting to see how they are managing Varroa without deformed wing virus, and also generally due to just access and to some of the control options, but they're not typically controlling the Varroa with chemicals.

And so that's been quite interesting to see and reflect on how that might, what we might see in Australia.

So just wanted now to, this is where I was gonna hand over to Cooper Schouten who has done a lot of work in the Pacific region working with having beekeeping as a way to improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers.

But for me, I'm going to just touch on some of the work that I've been doing, mostly in Papua New Guinea just to sort of finish up for today.

So beekeeping in Papua New Guinea is, you know, relatively small scale, has certainly been, you know, influenced from Australian and New Zealand beekeeping, and has been quite productive in the past.

Back in the eighties, I think, it was their peak production of about 120 tons of honey with 6,000 hives.

But over time, one of those reasons being mites, not the sole reason, but those numbers have dropped down to about 2000 hives and 40 tons of honey per year.

Beekeeping is, I think I've got a better slide maybe, beekeeping in Papua New Guinea is in the more Central Highlands regions of the country, not so much on those coastal areas, and it's a bit more of a temperate climate up in those highland areas, and yeah, quite a, you know, amazing place to be doing some beekeeping.

Just some, maybe some quick introduction, invasion history for how they came to have Varroa mites.

So it was introduced through Asian honeybees back in the 1970s as a parasite of the Asian honeybee only, and became established, my arrows on this map are just indicating movement of Asian honeybee spreading through the region and bringing Varroa jacobsoni with it to some of those areas, not establishing in Australia, as I mentioned before.

And so for a long time the Varroa mite had remained on Asian honeybees in Papua New Guinea and not become an issue.

But in 2008, Denis Anderson, you know, who is from CSIRO and retired now from CSIRO, was doing a lot of work with Varroa mites in Asia and obviously, just identified Varroa destructor as being something separate from Varroa jacobsoni.

And he identified that in Papua New Guinea that the mite, Varroa jacobsoni, had undergone a similar host shift to Varroa destructor and was now a parasite of Apis mellifera and having damaging colonies in that same way.

So since then, I'll take a step back, so since then, that's been, you know, having big impact on the local beekeeping industry and we've been trying to work with PNG industry over those years to understand that mite more and how to manage that mite.

But certainly a very challenging area of the world for, largely in terms of infrastructure, for beekeepers there.

And overlapping that and probably getting a lot of, well, certainly getting less attention, was they also were having the arrival of Tropilaelaps mercedesae from Indonesia or the western part of New Guinea.

I do have a short video here.

Some of you may have seen Tropilaelaps before, they're a small mite.

It may or may not work, the video.

Well, maybe if I click over here, how's that?

So it's a small, fast mite compared to Varroa.

And this is just a single mite here, if you've got a high infestation, you might see quite a lot of them running across your brood frame.

And certainly, in Asia, they can be considered a more damaging mite than Varroa destructor, typically they have a faster reproduction cycle, but a lot of similarities with how they parasitize honeybees.

Their natural host is the giant Asian honeybee, Apis dorsata, have undergone a host shift as well.

Again, just a quick view of where they've come into this region is it's been through the movement of European honeybee from Indonesia into the island of New Guinea.

And interestingly, they have, there was an earlier spread of this mite into Papua New Guinea in the 1990s that basically wiped themselves out by not being able to, where there was a no longer, I guess, a bridge of wild colonies.

And, but in 2009, which is overlapping with that 2008 detection of Varroa jacobsoni, this mite was detected in the western parts of the country, but there wasn't, I guess it wasn't really noticed by authorities there because of the focus on Varroa.

And so it was largely ignored and has allowed to spread and has become established throughout the beekeeping region.

So in Papua New Guinea, the beekeepers there and bees there are dealing with these two mite pests simultaneously, similar to other areas in Asia.

I'm running low on time, I might skip past this.

Some work that I've done with Cooper is just trying to look at some management options.

We had a small project there, which is quite interesting, of trying to do some queen caging and comparing that to some chemical work that they've done that, you know, chemical strips.

In a nutshell, we were seeing, we were doing this mostly maybe for a more Tropilaelaps control, but basically, you know, queen caging was less effective than the synthetic chemical for Varroa mites.

And we're finding that the queen caging was having some good promise for Tropilaelaps, which require brood time to feed, they can't feed on adult bees.

So by introducing a brood break, you can knock down those mild populations.

And I'll move it along.

Just to sort of finish up a little bit, I wanted to come back to viruses, it's certainly an area of interest for me.

So from the work that's occurred from deformed wing virus and some examples overseas, some of you might be familiar with these, these pieces of research.

So the work by, you know, Martin and others of deformed wing virus in Hawaii was where they were comparing areas that were islands that had Varroa and didn't have Varroa.

They were finding deformed wing virus in these Varroa-free areas.

And the evidence that they had there was certainly indicating that deformed wing virus was existing before mites and mites were then, you know, exacerbating that virus issue.

Similarly, with the introduction of Varroa into New Zealand in the year 2000, then following the spread of that mite from Mondet and others, they were also seeing the, you know, the increase of deformed wing virus over the invasion front of Varroa mite.

So these studies were some, you know, really nice studies of being able to capture that invasion history in comparing Varroa-free and Varroa-infested areas.

And both of these were suggesting that deformed wing virus may be present in all honeybee populations and with the arrival of Varroa then is, you know, creating that problem with the virus and forming this new association.

But certainly, the work that I've done in Australia and in our local region, where we've had, you know, we're much more isolated, it's certainly is not the case for us.

And I would be arguing that that's certainly not something where deformed wing virus is existing in all bee populations waiting to become a problem with the arrival of Varroa.

So I've done quite a lot of, you know, which has been really, you know, enjoyable for us, I've been able to visit a number of these countries, PNG, Fiji, Solomon Islands in the Pacific.

On the right here is an image of Norfolk Island, which is an external territory of Australia, which is also in the Pacific.

And, you know, we're not finding deformed wing virus in these bee populations, which typically have their origins from Australian stock and New Zealand stock and have been isolated for some time.

And so I think it's really giving us some extra insights as to the virus landscape of these areas and certainly what Varroa mites might look like when viruses are not part of the equation.

So I might leave it there and leave some time for questions.

So thank you very much for the opportunity to talk to you today and give you a little bit of information around mites in our region and happy to take any questions.

- Thank you very much. - Do you want me to stop sharing?

- Yes. - Yes.

- Okay, there's quite a few questions and I'm sure some more will come in.

So you didn't mention manuka honey, is that something that's made in Australia?

- So that's a whole nother talk, but I'll touch on it briefly.

But manuka, the Leptospermum plant that you're getting manuka from, we have, originates from Australia, so the manuka, the Leptospermum species that are in New Zealand that they have such a successful manuka honey industry from, originate from Australia and we have a diversity of those plants.

But New Zealand have just gotten that ships quicker.

They've done it so well and it created this industry, and Australia has sadly been very slow to wake up to the opportunity there.

But certainly, now there is studies happening in Australia where we're trying to capitalize on that more.

Certainly is a bit of contention between Australia and New Zealand around, you know, whether we can call it manuka honey.

But certainly, we have those same species of plant and to generate manuka honey in Australia and other Australian varieties as well.

- Interesting, I did not know that.

You mentioned that there's a lot of beekeeping near forests.

What are the bees feeding on there?

Is it eucalyptus?

- Typically.

So there's, you know, a lot of those forest sites are, you know, native flora.

So we have a lot of eucalyptus species that are the main, you know, nectar resources for honeybees.

But a lot of other native flora as well that's coming into that mix.

- Okay.

Reading through the questions here.

I think you mentioned when you were talking about the Varroa incursion, that that's a single, you think it's a single introduction and so, you know, the genetics diversity would be quite low.

I do hope it stays that way for you.

I assume that it's been sort of, you know, genotyped and things like that.

So does that help you possibly find its origin?

- So we've got a whole genome sequence data.

Obviously, it's the Korean haplotype, for those that are familiar with Varroa genetics, of Varroa destructor.

Varroa, itself, globally is, you know, there is diversity, but obviously, it's undergone significant bottlenecks of its own genetic bottlenecks.

So the diversity is overall relatively low in those invasive populations.

And so the challenges we've had where I'm working with colleague across the road here, literally, at Australian National University, Sasha Mikheyev, on genomics of this incursion, and have quite a large reference database of Varroa genomes.

But yeah, we are still finding it challenging to- The genetic profile of the mites we have here is not, you know, clearly matching with any one population in our reference database.

So we've got some indications, but certainly it's not as clear cut as we might have liked.

But certainly, the genetics is pointing to a single introduction.

Still unknown, whether that's through a shipping network, you know, a swarm, or somewhat, you know, illegal importation, basically, I guess is the other alternative.

I presume, you know, through queen bees.

And that's, you know, a difficult one to get to and whether we will or not is unknown.

Perhaps irrelevant in the end when you're dealing with it, but certainly still unknown as to how it's come into the country.

- Certainly, well if you need any samples, we have plenty. (laughs)

- Always, always keen to take people up on that.

- Right.

So I'm sure you've been watching as, you know, the last few decades unfold and we're having lots of high losses of bees.

Have you seen that?

And if not, do you have any tips for us for how to keep our bees healthy?

- So pre-Varroa, have we seen high losses?

Is that, or currently? - No, I mean like, we have been having high losses in the United States since about 2006.

- Yep. - And it doesn't seem to be getting better.

- Yeah, so in Australia it's, again, I would say we are still a bit slow to be having, collecting good data on our hive losses and other things like that.

But the information we do have through industry, more anecdotal, which is, you know, still reasonably good, is that we certainly have our hive losses, but we're not, we still yet to see them at the levels that have been reported over in the US and in parts of Europe and elsewhere.

And really, that, I think, is down to the, by not having those, that impact of mites, added to the, you know, we do have fairly mild winters as well.

So we are not, we don't have that more significant, you know, winter-loss challenge.

But we do see issues with, you know, pesticides at times.

We do have issues with pathogens and pests, but they're, you know, not to the same level where we're seeing, you know, large scale losses from beekeepers.

It's more of a typical 10 to 15%.

In recent years, we have had a little bit of data be more formally collected and that's kind of the ballpark area that we've seen, certainly less than 20%.

- Great.

I'm super curious to see how things proceed without deformed wing virus.

That's, yeah.

So you were mentioning that you're anticipating losing the feral colonies. - Yes.

- Is anybody going around and collecting, say, germplasm from the drones to preserve those genetics?

- So short answer, no, but that's definitely something that we're very, you know, mindful of as a research community here and an industry, I guess, is the, there's been things that we've been wanting to prepare for and we certainly have done some areas, but there's, when the emergency hits you become, you know, painfully aware around the information that you wish you had been collecting or things that you had been doing already, and which can often be hard to get money for in advance for, you know, some potential threat that's, you know, not known when that might happen.

So we are certainly interested in trying to get more of that information now of, you know, the, the pre-Varroa, post-Varroa areas and trying to maintain our genetics that we have, you know, so that we're not losing that.

There's probably not a lot of work that's really been gone in trying to, even in the past, of trying to specifically capture genetics from the feral population.

I'm not sure if that's being looked at.

Will certainly be significant efforts, I would imagine, around securing the genetic stock from our managed population that has been, you know, undergone its own selection over the years.

- Sure, yeah, I know there's quite a nice established cryo-preservation of germplasm program, so it would be excellent to get some of that just, like, tucked away somewhere.

- Yeah, definitely.

- So on the topic of feral bees, do you know how much pollination is performed by feral versus managed colonies?

- Again, not, you know, a bit of a lack of data there.

In some contexts, they've been able to gain some of that data and it does vary from crop to crop, that their reliance on feral bees for that.

And so, yeah, I think for some growing industries, there's a fairly good understanding of just how reliant they are on those feral bees.

But still, a lot of that is going to, I guess, be measured as we go in trying to understand what those losses are, and whether they can buffer that either through increasing their pay pollination or increasing reliance on other alternative pollinators, other native pollinators.

- Sure.

So we have quite a few introduced plant species that, you know, a lot of people dislike and wanna get rid of, but beekeepers love because they make great honey crops.

Do you have any examples of that?

- Sure, so yeah, weeds, weeds are great for bees and they are such an important part for maintaining their health at different times.

I guess probably the best, well, something I'm most familiar with in Australia that has certainly changed in the last decade or couple of decades maybe, something, I'm not sure it's full name, it's called Patterson's Curse, or Salvation Jane here in Australia, it's a, I'm not sure of the actual plant species name, but it's a purple flowering plant that's a very weedy plant and can be a really good food resource in Australia for beekeepers typically when there's not a lot of, hasn't been a lot of other forage around.

But in Australia, has been actively eradicated and, you know, introduced biocontrol agents for it to try and reduce this down because it, the presence of alkaloids, I guess, in this plant and it can be poisonous to, particularly, horses that feed on it.

Again, something that's maybe out of proportion to its risk where there were some deaths of horses from feeding on this and so it's been through that that it's mounted this eradication, but something that, yeah, that certainly changed the landscape for beekeepers.

Something I didn't realize before joining CSIRO but been interesting to find as I became more involved with the industry, but it's actually CSIRO, the organization I work for, that has been involved in that weed biocontrol, that's a large part of, you know, research that we have done.

So on one hand, there's researchers in our organization that have been removing this valuable food resource for beekeepers and I'm also on the other side trying to help beekeepers, so I try to distance myself from those guys.

- Yeah, we have the same thing with many plants here.

A lot of people are asking questions about subspecies.

One of the questions is that swarm that was from Texas, did that get sequenced to see if it, you know, may be Africanized?

And then also what is the dominant subspecies of honeybees that you're using there in Australia?

- Yes, I should do a little bit, I always forget, I should do a little bit more research.

I'll take the second part of that.

So we do have your, you know, from the typical genetic view, it's the sort of M and C lineages, I believe.

So you've got Italian type stock, Carnolian, Caucasian type, you know, hybrids of that.

So quite similar, I'd say, to a lot of, you know, a lot of other regions, you know, in Europe and in the US.

And so we don't have any Africanized bees in Australia.

That's again one of our biosecurity risks or threats that we're on the lookout for.

And I wasn't involved with the genetic testing for that interception.

I certainly was looking at the mites and we did some testing for viruses and weren't able to find anything on that particular swarm.

And I'm not sure of the outcome for that, offhand, for the genetic testing for that swarm, offhand.

Quite possible coming from that area, could have been some sort of Africanized genetics.

- Okay, one more question, let's pick one more question.

I think we should talk about Tropilaelaps a little bit.

I personally get confused about the species.

There's mercedesae and then there's.

- Clareae, it's another- - Clareae, how do you know the difference?

- They're completely different.

They- - Are they?

- Yeah, just like Varroa destructor, Varroa jacobsoni, completely different.

But, so mercedesae is the more widespread of the species in terms of its distribution, and certainly would be, I guess, the bigger threat because of that.

Clareae has a much more restricted distribution, you know, broadly around the Philippines.

And so both, and so they have slightly different native host areas as well, I guess in terms of the giant Asian honeybee that is their natural host, but both have undergone these host shifts to Apis mellifera.

And so if that answers your question enough?

- Well, you know, we fear getting Tropilaelaps and I wonder if we should be fearing both of those or only one of those?

- Both are on our radar for, you know, as biosecurity issues.

Generally, the risk of the impact is certainly high if they arrived the, when we look at it as, you know, relative risk type things in Australia, the risk of introduction is probably relatively low because of they are very dependent on having access to brood.

They can't survive for all that long.

Not as long as Varroa on adult bees.

They can't feed on the adult bee.

So for them to survive on a swarm, which is, you know, our main route for invasion in Australia and probably a lot of places, for them to arrive in a swarm bees, I guess, is difficult for them to survive.

Or even with queen, you know, or queen bees, something like that.

So I think the spread outside of Asia, that's partly why they haven't spread so far to some of those areas.

And so I would say, again, mercedesae is probably the bigger issue because there's, I guess, just a bigger distribution for that mite and so I guess more potential places that that could be, where incursions could originate from.

- I see, okay.

Well thank you very much for sharing beekeeping in Australia with us.

It was great to have you.

And if you wanna join any of the rest of our webinars, you'll have to do it recorded or be up in the middle of the night.

- Yep, I'll certainly be keen to catch some of the recordings.

- Yep, so all the recordings of previous webinars are freely available on the Penn State extension website.

So just go there and search for Beekeeping around the World and you can click Watch Now.

Future ones, please register and come along with us.

Next week, we'll be going to Australia.

No we are not, we just went to Australia.

Next week is China.

(laughs) China.

So thanks everybody and hopefully we'll see you next Thursday.

- Thanks very much. - Thank you.