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It happens in the cool of the night, Australia’s largest cattle movement. Before spring, bee hives are loaded onto netted trucks that follow the flowering of crops ready for pollination. The precious cargo includes queen bees, the spokes of any hive and thousands and thousands of workers who serve them, and us.
Bees are remarkable creatures, building their homes out of wax hexagons and communicating through what is known as a flutter dance. Humans have turned bees into extremely efficient biological machines. Without bees, we would miss many nuts, fruits and vegetables that we enjoy. And if the bees stop working, we can see prices go up in the crops they were supposed to pollinate.
But bees are also affected by the vicissitudes of modern life: a crumbling native environment, extreme weather and disease. The plants are cleared to make way for development. Floods wash away hives; fires destroy them. And the varroa mite has caused the destruction of thousands of moths since it appeared in New South Wales in June.
So how are the bees doing? Are queen bees really the boss? And what is a waggle dance?
A European bee. Credit: Getty Images/Monique Westermann
How do bees live?
Most of Australia’s 2000 or so native bee species do not make honey. The blue banded bee is one. With its shiny blue and black abdomen and green eyes, it is a solitary operator that usually nests in tunnels in sandstone banks where other females have previously nested. There are 14 recognized species of blue-banded bees in Australia. The most common bee in the country, and the one that makes up much of the honey you buy in the supermarket, is a European import: Apis Mellifera, or western bee, introduced in 1822.
There are up to 40,000 bees in a European hive. Their pheromones (chemicals released by bees) represent one of the most advanced forms of communication among social insects, says Dr Cooper Schouten, a bee expert at Southern Cross University. “Honeybee pheromones are involved in almost every aspect of honeybee colony life: development and reproduction (including queen and swarm mating), feeding, defense, “orientation and all the integration of the activities of the colony, from the foundation to the decline”.
On a typical day, the males, called drones, eat honey and wait to mate with the queen while the females take on multiple roles: foraging for pollen (bees can visit up to 5,000 flowers a day), cleaning the brood ( bee) cells to lay more eggs, feeding the young, building the wax cells where the “babies” or honey go (bees secrete wax). Females also attend to the queen.
“They’ll even collectively decide to kill the existing queen and make a new one if she’s not performing.”
The queen may seem like the captain of this whole industry, but a hive is actually one of the “purest forms of democracy,” says Schouten. “All the worker bees work together to find information collectively and then make decisions based on that information. They will even collectively decide to kill the existing queen and make a new one if she is not performing.”
If a queen dies, the workers will pick some larvae and feed them highly nutritious royal jelly until one emerges, at which point it will kill all other larvae aspiring to the throne.
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About a week later, the new queen takes her maiden flight, during which she is inseminated by up to 15 drones. Together, they provide him with enough sperm to last him a lifetime; they die shortly after mating, each crashing to the ground. After returning to the hive, the queen will lay up to 2000 eggs a day. “She lays eggs all day. As much as her own body weight every day,” says Schouten. “And then the worker bees feed it, take care of it, keep it clean and take care of it.” While worker bees can live only six to eight weeks, a queen can live up to five years.
Honey itself comes from nectar, the sugary liquid that flowers make to attract bees (more on that below). Bees have pollen sacs on their legs, known as corbiculae, which they fill before returning to the hive to feed others. If a bee discovers an area of abundant or high-quality pollen, it shares the information using a unique form of communication: the waggle dance.
The waggle dance was discovered by the Austrian scientist Karl von Frisch, who received the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his discovery. It is a kind of code that tells other bees the direction, quality and distance of the pollen: the direction of the dance indicates where the pollen is in relation to the hive; the length of the dance conveys how far the bees will have to fly to find the pollen; the enthusiasm of the dance tells the bees how good the pollen is. Big pollen, and the bees will dance their little pollen socks off.
A looping clip of a bee doing the jittery dance. Credit: Flow Hive/YouTube
After the bee has eaten, the nectar sugars in the stomach are broken down into simple sugars that the bee regurgitates into the honeycomb cells. After making a “deposit,” the bee flaps its wings to dry the nectar, reducing it to about one-fifth water—honey is a “supersaturated” solution of complex sugars and water.
That’s why crystallized honey doesn’t spoil, adds Schouten. “There simply isn’t enough water in honey to keep all of its sugars permanently dissolved,” he explains. “Small particles like pollen, beeswax, beeswax, and other nutrients are part of the reason raw honey is more likely to promote crystal formation. You can simply put your jar of honey in warm water for 30 minutes and stir it if you want to return it to its natural state.”
Once the honey is reduced, the bee covers the cell with wax; protected like this, the honey can last indefinitely. Why are cells shaped like hexagons? The shape allows the maximum volume of honey to be stored using the least amount of construction resources. “If they were any other shape, they would be wasting wax,” says Schouten. “And why does this matter to a bee? Because wax is extremely valuable and consumes a lot of energy. Bees use about six kilos of honey to produce one kilo of wax.”
Almond trees in bloom in country Victoria. Credit: Erin Jonasson
What makes bees so useful to people?
It’s not just honey. Although bees are drawn to flowers for the sugary nectar, this is just a treat, the byproduct of bees carrying the pollen that allows plants to reproduce. Pollen is produced by male flowers, or male parts of flowers, and carried by bees to a female flower, or female part of a flower, where fertilization occurs. It is only after fertilization that many plants produce the fruits, vegetables and seeds we eat.
In addition to pollinating native plants, native bees also pollinate some crops. They made up a third of the pollinators on a pear farm in the Adelaide Hills in 2022, for example; and at Coffs Harbor in NSW, wild stingless bees were one of the two most abundant pollinators of blueberries. Some species, such as the blue-banded bee, are adept at buzz pollination, using vibrations to collect pollen from flowers that coincidentally fertilizes the flowers at the same time.
“The European bee is a workhorse. We raise it like we do with cattle”.
But it’s still mostly European bees that are trucked in for crops ranging from citrus and berries to avocados and almonds. The industry operates semi-secretly, says Liz Barbour, CEO of the Honey Bee Products Cooperative Research Center, in part to prevent people from stealing the bees. (Beehive thefts, for example, have made the news in Cornwall and California in recent months.) “Beekeepers don’t want people to know where they are.”
The bee and pollination industry supports 1,800 commercial beekeepers, each with an average of 299 hives serving about 35 agricultural and horticultural industries, according to a 2021 report by industry group AgriFutures Australia. About 26,400 moths are needed to pollinate apples in Australia each season, for example, about 50,000 hives for macadamias, 40,000 for mangoes.
To keep their hives running efficiently, beekeepers are always chasing “maximum nectar flow,” says Barbour. A typical bloom season will last only a few weeks, so almost as soon as the hives are placed on a farm, the beekeeper is looking for his next job.
“The European bee is a workhorse. We breed it like we do cattle,” says former CSIRO researcher Dr Tim Heard, adding that people “take it for granted”.
(Bees are not the only pollinators. Flies, for example, can be the main visitors to the flowers of avocado crops in the Sunraysia region and mango crops in Queensland’s Mareeba region, according to AgriFutures Australia. Birds, bats and wind also play their part.)
A varroa mite feeds on a honey bee. Credit: Cooper Schouten/Southern Cross University
What does the varroa mite do?
As the mite’s scientific name suggests, varroa destructor is the world’s most destructive bee pest. A small red-brown parasite that feeds on developing babies (called pupae) and adult bees, it is found throughout much of the world. “It would be like if you or I had a tick the size of a basketball,” says Schouten.
Adult females enter the honeycomb cells and lay eggs which hatch and attach to larvae and adult bees alike, feeding on hemolymph (insect blood). Mites also transmit viruses to bees, just as mosquitoes spread malaria, which can often be a bigger problem than the mite itself.
“This has led to the collapse of wild bee populations around the world,” says Australian National University bee expert Professor Sasha Mikheyev. “A colony is like a densely packed city. Diseases can spread very quickly.”
So alarm bells rang when varroa was detected in surveillance hives at Newcastle Harbor in June and then throughout NSW. It’s the biggest raid ever…