Megachile erythropyga, a common species to use bee hotels. Photo: Dr Kit Prendergast, @bee.babette_performer.
It was business as usual for Australian bees on World Bee Day last week, while the United Nations emphasised the need to protect the busy pollinators.
This year’s theme “bee inspired by nature to nourish us all” was designed by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation to highlight the role of bees in food production and environmental protection.
University of Southern Queensland native bee researcher and taxonomist Dr Kit Prendergast said Australia had more than 2000 native bee species of which around 74 per cent are scientifically labelled.
“Australia has an incredible biodiversity of native bees… they’ve co-evolved with the wildflowers and they are pollinators… they can also be hosts of other insects that are parasites so they’re part of the natural ecological web of interactions,” she said.
“Some native bees are pollinators of crops, some are pollinators of wildflowers and Esperance has beautiful wildflowers.”
But Australia’s native bees are facing environmental threats in a world which has already witnessed a decline in bee populations.
According to Dr Prendergast, Australia does not have a monitoring scheme to accurately assess the native bee reduction, though she said records from other countries showed habitat loss and climate change were key contributing features.
“Livestock agriculture is the biggest cause of habitat loss and we’ve got livestock agriculture all over the country, including around Esperance,” she said.
“If you look at a cow field it’s got hardly any flowers and hardly any trees so it’s really bad habitat for native bees.
“We’ve got many specialist native bees here and heaps of exotic plants, and our gardens are mainly dominated by exotic plants from overseas which many native bees can’t forage on, so many urban areas are unsuitable for rare specialist bees.”
In line with the diminished bee population, backyard beekeeping has become a “hot” hobby, with nearly 30,000 Australians now registered as honeybee keepers.
But unbeknown to many, honeybees are an invasive species in Australia and according to Dr Prendergast, they may also be driving the extinction of Australia’s native bees.
“You are not helping native bees at all by getting a beehive and putting it in your backyard,” she said.
“Honeybees as a whole are a threat to native bees like any mass managed introduced species, livestock, feral pigs, cats, foxes, cane toads – they are an introduced species and can harm native bees through competition.
“Honeybees are important for the Australian industry for crop pollination… and honeybees are the main producers of honey as well so they are important from that perspective, but it should be left to people who have it as a job and source of income.”
Data from the Australian Honeybee Industry Council found Australians on average consume 1kg of honey per person per year and while honeybees seem more beneficial for humans Dr Prendergast said it did not make native bees less important.
“If we only conserved what’s relevant to human food security then we would lose so many species,” she said.
“That’s a loss of something that can never occur again because it was created through the blind process of evolution, chance, mutations and the environment at the time, so we’re losing this rich biodiversity.
“It’s like asking: why are koalas important to humans? They’re not really – but it’s not all about us and I think that mindset is why we are in a biodiversity crisis.”
Dr Prendergast said Australians could help preserve native bees by planting native wildflowers, retaining flowering gumtrees, and reducing the demand for livestock agriculture.
