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?