Race against time: the hunt for the varroa mite threatening our honey bees
The varroa mite wreaking havoc on honey and horticultural industries has been in Australia months longer than we thought. Can it be eradicated?
On the morning of June 22, Dr Chris Anderson was in his office at the NSW Department of Primary Industries in Orange when he got a call from the laboratory. “We’ve received the sticky mats and we are looking at them under the microscope,” he was told. “We think we’ve got some varroa mites.” There’d been false alarms in the past but still he went immediately to the lab. Anderson is one of the nation’s leading biosecurity officers and the threat that the mites may have been found in honey bee hives at the Port of Newcastle was like a general receiving intelligence the Russians may have established a beachhead up the coast.
A few days earlier, two DPI biosecurity foot soldiers, Rod Bourke and Mark Page, collected samples from the six sentinel beehives surrounding the Port of Newcastle. These hives are like sniffer dogs at the airports, deployed to detect foreign incursions. The theory is that if foreign honey bees, infested with varroa or other nasties, happened to escape from a ship, they’d likely drift into one of these sentinel hives. Both men are very knowledgeable when it comes to bees. Bourke grew up surrounded by them – his father runs a large commercial beekeeping operation in Tasmania – and Page keeps his own hives. They know the importance of their task as the first line of defence.
The sticky mats at the bottom of the hives are a bit like a tray at the bottom of a budgie cage. The mats collect all the refuse from the hives – dead bees, bits of pollen, bee droppings and all manner of parasites. Miticide (insecticide) strips placed in the hives ensured any mites would drop to the bottom when the bees preened and cleaned themselves. Bourke and Page inspected the mats but couldn’t spot any of the tiny reddish-brown parasites, about the size of a pinhead, among the six or seven weeks of bee detritus. But in line with protocol, they sent the mats off for closer analysis under the microscope.
Australia was the last remaining beekeeping country in the world to be free of the parasitic mite Varroa destructor, which attaches itself to European honey bees like a tick (it doesn’t affect native bees). It can weaken and kill whole colonies and carries a variety of viruses and diseases, including one that can deform wings. The mites were inadvertently introduced to New Zealand in 2000 and a 2015 study by the University of Otago estimated it has cost New Zealand farmers many hundreds of millions of dollars in lost agricultural production. It also wiped out half the country’s beekeepers, who couldn’t afford the time and cost of combating the mite. If it becomes endemic in Australia it will cost commercial keepers tens of thousands of dollars each year to treat their hives and devastate many smaller operators.
So when Anderson got news that varroa had potentially been spotted on the sticky mats from Newcastle, he immediately wanted to see it for himself. He hurried over to the lab and peered into the microscope. “And sure enough, they were the first varroa mites we’d ever seen [that had escaped] in Australia… my first thought was that the sentinel hives had done their job, they’d picked up an early infestation.” The lab technicians were eagle-eyed: there were just four tiny mites, 1.1mm in width, on one of the sticky mats and a single mite on another. Anderson’s second thought was that he wouldn’t be getting much sleep in the weeks and months ahead. He immediately marshalled his troops and sent them into action.
Not long after, Bourke’s phone rang. He and Page were told to prepare to euthanise the six sentinel hives around the port. They knew they had to wait until the sun had set and the bees were snuggled up in their hives. Everything then had to be sealed in contamination bags. “We got the call a bit before lunchtime, which gave us plenty of time to prepare,” Bourke says. The pair thought it may have been a training exercise and that when they arrived at the port, someone would jump out from behind a wall and tell them they’d passed the test. But when they got there, no one intervened. It was real. “We had our red pen lamps – the bees can’t see red light – so we wouldn’t stir them up,” he says. “We had the fuel and we had our PPE. We taped up every beehive so none could escape, and then we poured a cup of petrol into each hive to euthanise the bees [with the fumes].” These were the first shots fired in the battle for the honey bee.
Beekeeper David Vial lives on a small bush block outside Raymond Terrace, 10km or so north of Newcastle Harbour where the infested sentinel hives were discovered. He and his wife Jacquie breed queen bees and have a reputation for providing calm queens that produce workers that are active foragers and therefore good honey makers. For more than 20 years David has been improving the quality of his queens, cross breeding for desirable traits. He’s built a profitable business importing new beehives, suits and tools, selling amateur beekeepers nucleus hives that come with a colony of bees along with all the equipment they need. He also sells individual queens. He recently attended a field day at the Tocal Agricultural College outside Maitland where he took orders for more than 100 hives; he’d also just taken possession of a 12m container of beekeeping equipment for the new season. Business was buzzing. And then his world came crashing down.
I spoke to him a week after he discovered varroa mite in his hives. All his hives, his years of breeding, will be destroyed and sales of hives, queens and equipment has ceased. “It’s been the longest week of my life,” the 67-year-old says, holding back tears. “I’m broken. Every morning I wake at three o’clock staring into the dark… my bees are all on death row, just waiting.” Jacquie chimes in from the kitchen. “Bees were our retirement plan,” she says. “Now what?”
It’s not just the loss of his business. Vial is emotionally attached to his bees and the elegance of their existence. There are between 20,000 and 80,000 bees in each hive and keepers have a peculiar attachment and great admiration for their insects. The bees work as a single entity in one of nature’s most complex societies, all of them striving towards the common goal of survival for the colony. “It’s beautiful and addictive,” says Vial. “It’s just been our life. I talk bees every day – everyone calls me The Beeman – and when I’m not talking about bees I’m dreaming about them.” He was the president of the Hunter Valley Amateur Beekeepers Association, which has more than 300 members, many of whom will have their hives destroyed. His community is in mourning.
Vial is in the red zone – all hives within a 10km radius of any known varroa infestation will be destroyed. Beyond that is a 25km surveillance zone and then a 50km notification zone, which now extends over much of the Hunter Valley, south to Sydney and north almost to Taree. There is a total ban on bee movements from these zones. There’s another zone around Gunnedah, infested from a movement of bees from the Newcastle area prior to the lockdown. Another infestation was recently discovered at Nana Glen, in the hills above Coffs Harbour.
Being inside the red zone means that not only will his bees be destroyed; Vial will not be able to keep bees on his property for at least the next three years. Despite the personal loss, he understands his bees have to be destroyed for the good of his industry and the horticultural industries that rely on bees for pollination. “We are going to cop the bullet for the rest of the country,” he says. “The almond industry, they’re just in the corner, rocking at the moment,” he says. “If they don’t have bees to pollinate… it’s a billion-dollar industry and they need 300,000 beehives to pollinate their crops.”
Crops such as almonds need about six hives per hectare for effective pollination and these hives are trucked in, as they are for a host of other crops including sunflowers, avocados, berries, macadamias, peaches, limes, apples, canola… The peak pollination season for many of these crops is now upon us. No bees, no crop.
It’s been a race against time to get protections in place to allow more than 10 billion bees – Australia’s largest movement of livestock – down to almond crops around Mildura. NSW is by far the biggest beekeeping state and the movement of bees has been disrupted by border closures: Victoria has banned all movement of NSW bees across the border, as has Queensland. Tim Jackson, CEO of the Almond Board of Australia, says Victorian growers are 70,000 hives short of what they need for optimal pollination. They have only half the required hives, he says, to pollinate the $600m Victorian almond crop. A lot is hinging on the weather – if it’s fine, the bees will forage further and fewer are needed. “There are a lot of people looking towards the heavens, otherwise it’ll be a disaster,” Jackson says.
It is this great movement of bees that has the potential to spread the mite and if authorities get this wrong, it will become endemic. But for David Vial it’s already the end of the road. A week after we first met he sends me a text: “Hi Greg, Just wanted to keep you up to date. The DPI called and they are coming to kill all my bees tomorrow. That’s game over for me, my bees and my business.” He will be compensated for the loss of his active hives but not for the loss of his business.
Vial’s small bush block is very close to ground zero in the varroa invasion – closer than first thought. It now seems the entry point was not the Port of Newcastle, as first reported, but a little further north, a few kilometres from Vial’s block at Williamtown, from where they drifted south into the sentinel hives. This discovery has led to an entirely different strategy being devised.
The war room overseeing this biological battle is located in the DPI’s State Coordination Centre at its headquarters in Orange, central western NSW. During bushfires and floods this centre is used to co-ordinate the agricultural response to disasters, such as choppering in fodder to flood-stranded livestock. There are about 450 people working on the varroa infestation, with about 300 people on the ground in Maitland and Newcastle and 150 co-ordinating the response from Orange. The DPI has pulled in experts in disaster management and logistics from other government agencies, such as the Rural Fire Service and the Local Land Services. Representatives from the bee and horticultural industries are helping to communicate with farmers and beekeepers.
Danny Le Feuvre, a commercial beekeeper from South Australia and an executive on the Australian Honey Bee Industry Council, has been inside the war room since the beginning. “It’s been absolutely devastating for these commercial beekeepers to be caught up in something that’s not their fault,” he says. “There’s been some really big operators caught up in this who have worked their whole lives to build what they’ve got.”
But Le Feuvre is confident they can arrest the spread of the mite and hopefully eradicate it. “Every single infestation we’ve identified outside the Newcastle area is directly linked to a movement from Newcastle… We have just got to concentrate on that tracing so we can identify every possible avenue of where it may have spread.”
Dr Chris Anderson, the man leading the response, is himself a keen beekeeper, having joined the Amateur Beekeepers Association as a teenager in Sydney’s southern suburbs. He still keeps hives on farms around Orange and his knowledge has helped him communicate with industry leaders throughout the crisis. Anderson tells me that when his field staff began collecting samples from bee hives around Newcastle, they soon realised the port was not the original point of incursion and the mites gained a foothold somewhere to the north of Newcastle Harbour, around Williamtown RAAF base and Newcastle airport. Mite numbers in hives around Williamtown were much higher than in the hives around the port.
There are a couple of theories for this, he says. “During the Covid standstills you had all these ships moored off Newcastle. It’s totally feasible there’s been a swarm on one of those ships and the bees have come across on the [Stockton] beach area.” It’s also possible the bees were flown in on equipment unloaded at the airforce base. “We are doing a whole genome sequencing of the mite and that will tell us what country it came from,” he says. But it won’t necessarily reveal how the breach occurred.
The fact that mite numbers were low at the Port of Newcastle and much higher at Williamtown indicates that the initial infestation took place much earlier than June this year. “We know that with the levels of mite infestation [around Williamtown] that it’s been in the country since at least December last year, so we are talking six to seven months,” Anderson says. His team now has to trace every single movement of bee hives from the Newcastle area from the past three years and inspect those hives. It’s a mammoth task. “We’ve gone back three years to give ourselves total confidence,” Anderson says. “We’ve been going out to every single place where those bees have [been transported] to look for signs of infestation.”
But the situation is volatile. The greatest threat is not bees but humans. Not long after speaking to Anderson another disturbing outbreak was discovered through contact tracing at Nana Glen, in the hills above Coffs Harbour. A beekeeper had moved 36 hives from Denman in the Hunter Valley to the area as part of a contract to pollinate a blueberry farm. He told authorities he moved the hives in April. This is an area of intense horticulture and the fruit bowl for Australia’s berry industry.
Steve Fuller, a major commercial beekeeper based on the North Coast, says this beekeeper should have reported the movement of these bees to authorities much earlier, knowing they had come from an area where varroa had been detected. For the system to work, he says, it requires honesty and integrity from everyone involved. This one incursion could cost beekeepers, and the horticultural industry, tens of millions of dollars. “It effectively wipes out about 80 per cent of the berries in Australia,” says Fuller, who is president of the NSW Apiarists’ Association. “This is the biggest berry-growing area in Australia and we are midway through the pollination and it’s all come to a dead halt.” Avocado and macadamia pollination is also fast approaching. The livelihoods of many hundreds of people have been thrown into jeopardy. “It is costing people a lot of money, hardship and a lot of anguish.”
The effect on Fuller’s business will be enormous. He usually has about 2500 hives working on blueberry, raspberry and blackberry pollination on the North Coast. His main honey house is at Grafton, which is in the notification zone, along with some 1200 hives. He has a further 300 hives inside the red zone that are likely to be destroyed. “I’ve been talking to the berry guys and they are not happy, they are really not happy,” he says.
NSW Minister for Agriculture Dugald Saunders says an investigation has been launched into the movement of the 36 hives. “I’ve tried not to persecute anyone along the way, because it makes it more difficult for people to come forward,” says Saunders. “It is possible that someone has done the wrong thing, whether intentionally or not.” He says measures are being put in place to allow as much of the pollination to continue as possible.
Fuller reckons the varroa mite can still be eradicated, but only if everyone in the industry complies and co-operates. “People want to criticise the DPI, but they can only work on the evidence they have,” he says. “If this beekeeper had come along and said, ‘I’ve got hives here and I’ve been there’ we could have been on to this weeks ago.”
While one group of scientists is working on containing the infestation, others are looking for clues contained in the mites’ DNA. Dr Will Cuddy, the DPI’s manager of plant biosecurity research and diagnostics, says that on the day the mites were first discovered a sample was driven 250km from Orange to the Elizabeth Macarthur Agricultural Institute at Menangle. The following day scientists confirmed, through DNA sequencing, that the mites were Varroa destructor. Teams of scientists from the DPI, CSIRO, ANU and Sydney University are now working on more advanced sequencing.
The industry knew that varroa was likely to arrive in Australia and researchers including Professor Alexander (Sasha) Mikheyev, an evolutionary biologist from ANU, have been focusing their efforts in that direction. “Sasha has collected a data set of varroa genomes from around the world, and their viruses,” Cuddy says. Teams of scientists are working on advanced DNA sequencing to match with Mikheyev’s data, which will tell them exactly which part of the world the Newcastle varroa mite has come from. “Knowing where the mites come from will guide us to what pesticides they are resistant to,” Cuddy says.
Leigh Pilkington, the DPI’s director of emergency management, says the process of contact tracing is labour-intensive but fairly straightforward. “You know in the detective movies where you have pins on a board and bits of wool and twine linking people? That’s essentially what we are doing, but on a computer, obviously. When we find the infested premises we interview those people and find out where they’ve moved hives to and where they’ve got stuff from. So it is tracing forward and tracing back.” At the time of publication there were 43 known infested premises including at Nana Glen; that number is growing as more sites are inspected. “They are all linked, which is good,” Pilkington says. “They were either geographically close to each other or the bees were transported to another beekeeper.”
At the Tocal Agricultural College at Maitland field staff from the DPI, Local Land Services and NSW Fisheries, along with volunteer rural firefighters from around the state and a bevy of volunteer beekeepers, gather for their morning briefing. The waters from the recent flooding of the Hunter River have not fully subsided and in the background helicopters take off and land, delivering huge bails of fodder to stranded cattle.
Today there are 14 teams with four to five people in each team. “Has everyone got a copy of the beekeeper welfare sheets?” asks the marshall before his troops set off. These teams are being sent to areas throughout the Hunter Valley to test every hive within the restricted zones. We join a crew headed by Peter O’Shannassy, an LLS officer from Corowa in southern NSW. He too is an amateur beekeeper. We jump into a fire truck and arrive in a valley overlooking floodwaters where a dozen or so hives are located. The crews pull on white biosuits and bee veils and start collecting samples. The process is meticulous and time-consuming and when they’re done they sterilise all the equipment in alcohol while their suits are bagged for disposal. Each crew will do two to three sites a day; there are many hundreds of sites to be inspected.
DPI biosecurity epidemiologist Shannon Mulholland says the mite’s natural rate of infestation will be limited. “It is very slow-moving because it is not a highly mobile insect – it’s not spreading like a wildfire or anything like that.” The greatest threat is the movement of hives and unregistered hives. The other threat is feral hives; at some point a baiting program targeting feral honey bees will be launched within the red zones.
Hundreds of people are working towards eradicating the mite, not least the beekeepers themselves. Sheila Stokes, president of Amateur Beekeepers Australia, has temporarily relocated from her Blue Mountains home to work alongside Mulholland at the Maitland control centre, helping to wrangle amateur beekeepers. Many hundreds have answered the call for help. Stokes says comparisons have been made between Covid and varroa. “But the benefit for us with varroa is that we are the last country in the world that doesn’t have it. Australian beekeepers have long understood the risks and have planned for this day. We know what works and what doesn’t work.” Stokes’ organisation has about 5000 members, mainly in NSW. These amateur beekeepers are now performing a vital surveillance role around the state.
The response to the varroa invasion is being keenly watched by the livestock industry, which has the threat of foot and mouth disease looming over it after the disease was discovered in Bali. It is an industry worth many billions of dollars.
State agriculture minister Dugald Saunders says that despite the latest outbreak near Coffs Harbour, he’s confident the mite can be eradicated. But people need to be honest. “If people stupidly don’t talk about what they have done, you can’t trace it,” he says. “We saw that during Covid.” He says they are looking at measures that would lock down the area around Nana Glen but allow the berry and avocado pollination to continue.
Saunders says many of the systems and methods being used to combat varroa would be deployed if an outbreak of foot and mouth disease did occur. “The risk of a full-on incursion of foot and mouth is massive and I think raising awareness of what that might look like now is key – it would affect every cloven-hoofed animal, not just the cattle or the pigs.” He says the DPI has done an incredible job so far in combating varroa and he’s hopeful we will see the first ever successful eradication of varroa mite anywhere in the world. “We’ve got a really strong surveillance network, good contact tracing and we are getting on top of every single case. Our primary aim is to eradicate the mite from these shores.”
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