IT’S a sweet life for native Australian bee farmer Tim Heard, who readily admits he has an addiction to the tiny stingless critters.
“It’s a total obsession of mine and I haven’t been able to stop,” Tim said.
Personally propagating thousands of hives over the past 30 years, the Brisbane-based entomologist attributes his PhD in pollination biology at the University of Queensland as really kicking off his interest in hives.
“I started propagating the hives as part of my studies and I’ve been doing it ever since. My motivation is to develop hives now, and I see it as being responsible for creating something that has multiple purposes on top of the conservation aspect – it’s very enjoyable because we’re saving these bees; we’re saving part of our ecosystem that’s naturally present and we don’t really treat all that well.
“We don’t pay it that much attention, but we can conserve that aspect of our environment and use it to our advantage – not just for conservation, but for our agricultural productivity through pollination.”
Tim said, although it might sound trivial, the most important aspect of native bee propagation was as pets.
“Bees make fantastic pets and they can be kept anywhere, by anybody – it could be the verandah of a property or an inner-city apartment of a suburban house, and they will do very well and it gives people an opportunity to interact with nature on a daily basis, even if they’re living in a very urban way.”
Splitting a well-established hive may seem like a hard task, but Tim has a knack for gently rearranging the saccharine structure.
“Sometimes it comes out beautifully in one piece and you can transfer it into a box, but once they’re in a box, it’s all a bit tenuous.
“Bees are insects; they don’t really stress because they don’t feel emotion, but certainly it’s a difficult time for them because there’s a lot of work for them to do to make that box a nice comfortable home for themselves again.”
Tim said there were times when a colony would die off from a split but most often, they would come back bigger than before.
“They’re pretty strong and they’ll grow their colony and their structures out of beeswax and plant propolis, and they’ll use that to construct their colony of pillars and columns that connect the hive to the sides and walls, and then they fill it up with their brood chamber where they rear their young.
“They’ll then form storage pots of food, create entrances and seal up any gaps, but throughout all this they’ll build it with ventilation and get fresh air into the box – they really know what they’re doing.”
An integral part of agricultural production, Tim said many orchardists were looking to extend their insect population by keeping hives permanently on their properties.
“We can permanently relocate the hives and encourage horticulturists and growers of mainly fruit crops to keep bees in their orchids, and even have them on farms that use conventional chemical agricultural production methods – they’re pretty tough.
“The alternative would be to have beekeepers moving hives onto the property during flowering season – and there are pros and cons to both of those ways, but as the potential of these bees is reached for that purpose, we’ll see both of them utilised.”
Protecting remnant vegetation from clearing or loss and taking advantage of the natural ecosystem which provides a home for pollinating insects is what, Tim says, is the most important thing for farmers to be aware of when growing flowering crops.
“You don’t need extensive areas of natural vegetation – even small areas will potentially provide sufficient populations of native insects to pollinate your crop.”
Predominantly dealing with the Tetragonula carbonaria and Tetragonula hockingsi species of stingless bee, Tim has spent a great deal of time in partnership with a team of German and Australian scientists to discover how different environments affect the species.
“We have three different experimental environments set up, including a macadamia plantation near Bundaberg, and natural eucalyptus forests and urban areas.
“Not surprisingly, they do very well in urban areas because people keep a wide variety of plants in their garden and bees derive their food from flowering plants, so it’s very compatible – their food source is consistent.
“This knowledge could potentially motivate people to produce hundreds of thousands of hives within urban areas which can, in turn, help our country cousins to pollinate their crops. Time will tell, but hopefully we can eventually have co-operatives where people breed bees in the city and they go, en masse, out to farmers.”
With only a small amount of honey resulting from the native bee hives each year, Tim said there was no fear of the European honey bee being put out of business.
“They’re compatible within their environment – honey bees are the ultimate honey producer where they’ll potentially make 50kg of honey per year. The native bee may only make around 1kg. Their main job is to pollinate, and it’s important to give people a little bit more insight into developing our natural environment.”