Bee behaviour under close watch in preparation for pest battle

LINDSAY Bourke has developed a unique technique to help fight a pest threatening the honey industry.

Weather

AWARD-WINNING beekeeper Lindsay Bourke has developed a unique technique to guard against the varroa mite pest that threatens to devastate the honey industry.

His solution – snap-frozen bees.

Mr Bourke said when coping with varroa mite in other parts of the world, it was important for bees to be fastidious in removing their dead colleagues from the honeycomb cells as fast as they could.

To check up on bee laziness, Mr Bourke sacrifices a small proportion of bees in a hive by wafting them with liquid nitrogen, which freezes and kills them instantly.

Then he watches to see how enthusiastically the survivors pitch in to dispose of the sacrificed bees’ bodies.

Mr Bourke, who is Tasmanian Beekeepers’ Association president, says if the bee-killing mite happened to arrive in Tasmania tomorrow, many of Tasmania’s bee colonies would be wiped out.

He said Australia was almost the only country in the world that remained free of the destructive varroa pest, but it would only be a matter of time before the mite arrived.

Testing had shown that local bees were nowhere near as prepared as they should be for the mite’s arrival, he said, and urgent action was needed to improve the bees’ resilience.

“Most hives couldn’t stand up to it (the mite) at all,’’ he said.

He said from now on, apiarists needed to favour queen bees whose worker progenies had scored high marks in bee hygiene.

Mr Bourke was this year awarded Australia’s Biosecurity Farmer of the Year award for his bee hygiene work.