Managed pollination is complicated

I was very excited to talk to Danny Le Feuvre of Australian Bee Services last week. He told me many interesting things about the state of managed pollination in South Australia, and seeing as he is one of the founders of Australian Bee Services, a company that was established for the purpose of supplying managed pollination services to broadacre farmers, I think you could safely call him an expert.

The biggest flash of insight I got from talking with him was the link betwen water availability and pollination. I know that water allocations are the talk of California right now, because of their potential impact on the pollination market but, you know, that's America, what could their water restrictions possibly have to do with us? This is the downside of being based in Sydney - the most obvious things fail to connect, because at the moment I'm sitting at home looking out over my nice green garden, thousands of kilometres away from the irrigation areas where Australia's food is actually grown. Luckily people like Danny are kind enough to talk to me and wake me up to these things.

Danny explained that in the Riverland region of South Australia, there is almost no feral bee population and the almond growers there are aware of the need for managed pollination and happy to pay to bring bees in. Beekeepers can get good honey off citrus, which is also widely grown in the Riverland, but in the case of citrus the relationship is not so straighforward. Citrus growers don't always want bees on their crop, and even when they are happy to have bees, they will pretty much never be looking for full pollination. There simply isn't enough water to support the maximum crop. And then there are the seedless varieties where bees are not welcome at all. Whatever the case, because beekeepers can get honey off citrus, growers are unlikely to want to pay them for pollination.

Water allocations are another reason why beekeepers might not want to be bothered providing pollination services. In dry years, the demand for pollination will be smaller, as will honey flow. There's no advantage to getting into pollination to smooth out the effect of bad honey years, because a dry year that's bad for honey will be bad for growers, too. If there's no income benefit to pollination, why bother investing the time and resources when you could just stick with what you know.

More and more I am wondering if companies like Australian Bee Services haven't got it right. Instead of convincing every single beekeeper to get into pollination, perhaps we need to encourage entreprenuers to get into bees. Setting up pollination companies, which employ people without a background in beekeeping and train them in-house, or create demand to get beekeeping training actually run at local TAFEs, might be a good way of revitalising the bee industry. It might be the next big step, like back in the 1950s and 60s when migratory beekeeping became the norm. Perhaps the era of the tiny beekeeping concern is ending?

Hopping on the bandwagon

I am reading some interesting stuff from North America (that is, USA and Canada) about beekeeping generally. Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is still getting media coverage over there, and all sorts of grassroots actions have been popping up as a result of the increased awareness of the decline of honeybees and the importance of pollinators in agriculture and ecosystems.

Most excitingly, the idea that CCD is result of a complex set of environmental factors seems to be gaining currency, thanks to a recent article in Science by Ratnieks and Carreck, as reported here by Wired.

Citation: “Clarity on Honey Bee Collapse?” by Francis L. W. Ratnieks and Norman L. Carreck in Science, 8 JANUARY 2010 VOL 327.

While the ageing beekeeping industry is a problem in the USA, like Australia and other countries, there seems to be growing interest in beekeeping among retirees who are keen to do their bit to help save the honeybee (see this article in Bee Culture by Larry Connor from September 2009). This raises the vexed question of how to successfully train people to keep bees. It doesn't seem like there is any easy answer to this. In Australia the courses have been developed, but there is never enough demand at the same time and place to warrant running formal vocational training.

An increase in people wanting to keep backyard hives, coupled with the promotion of urban beekeeping, means trouble in the suburbs. Bees where you live can quickly turn into pests; if swarms establish themselves in people's houses, or garden water features become bee drinking holes, or bee droppings start showing up on people's cars, there is bound to be conflict. This article by James Tew in the November 2009 issue of Bee Culture explains the problems. From the article, it seems that the conflict mainly arises when a serious beekeeping enterprise is permanently located in an urban area. But as the article doesn't mention the size of the problem "bee yards" my conclusion might be wrong.

Initiatives like the Pollinators Park in the City of Guelph, Canada, are very interesting, and it would be nice to see more of this sort of activity around. Incorporating pollinator flora into the urban environment sets a good precedent for rural planning to follow.

Leaving the grassroots and getting back to the industry, Joe Traynor is a pollination broker in the USA, and his article in Bee Culture in September 2009 describes an interesting cycle of boom and bust in the almond pollination business. High almond prices contributed to the expansion of Californian almond plantings in the last decade, driving up demand and prices for pollination. Despite the real possibility that beekeepers did not actually pass on their real costs in setting pollination prices, the income received was more than sufficient to maintain the health of their hives and increase the number of hives available. This was the boom time: many beekeepers would travel over to California whether they had contracts or not, because they were confident that all their hives would be needed for pollination and they could get a good price even at the last minute. Then one year the prosperity of beekeepers and slower growth of the almond industry means that there is an oversupply of bees at pollination time. Beekeepers who went to California without contracts lost money and in some cases could not afford to get their bees home again. Bust, and big time. Add in other limiting factors like water restrictions in California almond regions, and suddenly the future seems very uncertain for beekeepers.

The above situation and the economics behind it really highlight the need for more study and planning to handle the transition into managed pollination. While there might be enough hives on paper to cover Australia's pollination needs, the willingness and ability of beekeepers to provide that pollination is not a given. In addition, being the last continent to get varroa (if and when we get it), Australia is in the unique position to be able to look at the experiences of others and learn, or even come up with entirely new ways of managing crop pollination for food security and the benefit of growers and beekeepers and the general public.