The future for our bees in agriculture
THIS week the Rural Weekly attended the Australian Bee Congress to get the buzz on the bee industry.
A swarm of robot bees isn’t on the horizon, so Australians need to stop working their natives bees so hard.
That’s the sentiment from experts from the University of Adelaide, Professor Saul Cunningham and Dr Katja Hogendoorn, who spoke at the Australian Bee Congress last week.
This was the first time the seminar had been held since 1988, with 917 people attending. The event hosted a variety of vendors and speakers covering a range of bee-related products and topics.
Dr Katja Hogendoorn is working towards tailoring vegetation to enhance crop pollination. She highlighted some of the biggest issues for pollinators in Australia.
“Managed hives have gone up by 1.5 times since 1961,” she said.
“But in the same time we use twice the the amount of land for agriculture.
“And we have 2.2 times more mouths to feed.”
Dr Hogendoorn said we were working bees harder than ever before. There were multiple stressors for the bees, including climate change, herbicides, fungicides and limited floral resources.
“Native bees and honey bees really like canola,” she said.
“But come three weeks later, the bees are still around but there is no crop anymore.
“The next year the farmer decides to grow wheat and there’s nothing for the bees to eat and they starve.”
Dr Hogendoom encouraged farmers to plant native vegetation to attract pollinators.
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