Future for bees in agriculture
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 Hogendoorn said native vegetation plantings helped crop sets because they helped attract pollinators. She is conducting research into which plantings will best increase pollinator numbers.
“The plantings should increase food for the pollinators,” she said.
“They hate rainbow lorikeets so we need to plant flowers that don’t attract the rainbow lorikeets.
“When do these crop-pollinating bees need flowers? Flowers are needed almost all year round. Late autumn and early winter maybe slightly less.”
Environmental scientist Professor Saul Cunningham discussed the role that crop pollination would play in the future.
Prof Cunningham said it was a common misconception that the world would starve if bees suddenly ceased to exist. Crops have different levels of dependency on pollination.
He said crops such as cereals have zero dependence on pollination, while almonds have total reliance on pollination.
Most crops have some kind of dependence on pollination,
while most will produce fruit or seed without pollination but they will produce more if they are pollinated.
Prof Cunningham said there was the problem of underpollination in agriculture in Australia.
He used the example of a faba bean farmer, Danny Le Feuvre.
“With Danny Le Feuvre, we provided bees for a faba bean crop,” he said.
“The amount of bee activity depends on how close you are to the hive.
“We’re looking for the effect of bees but it will be uneven over the field.”
Right next to the hive will have high densities of bees and 500m away the density will be more sparse.
“Close to the hive there was a 17 per cent improvement, which is a significant improvement. The further you go away from the hive the less benefits you see from the bees,” Prof Cunningham said.
“So why don’t growers always chase those benefits?
“There’s clear evidence putting honey bees on faba beens increases yield, but not all farmers are doing it.”
Prof Cunningham said there was some science working towards removing bees from the system.
“The only reason for growers to have bees is to increase production and if you can do this without bees then you might go that way. You can hand pollinate a whole almond tree and lift yield, but not economically,” he said.
“Technologically replacing bees is happening in some contexts. I don’t think we’re about to be swamped by robotic bees.
“Even if you have machines spraying pollen you have to collect the pollen somehow. And we found the most efficient way was to let the bees collect the pollen and strip it from them. So I think bees are likely to be involved somehow.
Prof Cunningham said breeding self-fertilising crops happened but other traits might be more important.
“Self-compatible almonds exist but they just don’t taste as good!” he said.
❝ Technologically replacing bees is happening in some contexts. I don’t think we’re about to be swamped by robotic bees. — Prof Saul Cunningham