Farmers need Bees and Bees need Farmers

The first part of this proposition is obvious. Farmers need bees to grow seed and to pollinate their crops.

The second part is not so obvious. After all, bees take a beating when they pollinate crops like almond and kiwifruit. They must get supplementary feed because they expend more energy pollinating than they can get off the nectar they collect from the crop. Hives for pollination need to start strong because pollination work only makes them weaker. Surely bees would be better off without farmers?

In Australia the majority of beekeeping is migratory. Commercial beekeepers don't usually own the land their bees forage on, so they have to come to an arrangement with the land managers of good bee sites. Historically this has been government, in the form of National Parks and State Forests. But increasingly these land managers are closing off access to what were historically bee sites. Beekeepers are going to have to look to private land holders to get access to forage. I think their best bet is to look to farmers.

This is part of the reason why I'm so interested in planning for the transition to a post-varroa Australia. I see varroa as a major catalyst for getting farmers and beekeepers together to find out how they can mutually benefit from each other. This opportunity has been overlooked everywhere else in the world, as far as I can fathom, but then again Australia is unique in that a lot of our honey production comes from state-owned land and forests. It's been this way for so long that beekeepers are scared of losing these resources and can't seem to imagine their industry functioning without them.

How many beekeepers already have agreements with farmers to access private forests on their land, or reciprocal pollination arrangements for clover pasture or other good honey crops, is not well known. But these sorts of arrangements do already exist and there's no reason that they couldn't become more common. However until a crisis like varroa forces farmers and beekeepers to get together and discuss this idea on a bigger scale, beekeeper access to private land will probably only increase slowly.

I see a logical extension to these sorts of access arrangements in farmers actively managing part or even all of their land for pollinator nutrition and creating a floral resource for beekeepers to use for pollination recovery or even honey production. It's important to point out that both farmers and beekeepers would benefit from this. Managing road margins, windbreaks and foresty areas is something farmers already do. These areas have already been identified as good sites to start rebuilding biodiversity and ecosystems services on agricultural land. There's no reason why bee nutrition couldn't also be taken into account when restoring vegetation in these areas. In addition there are other opportunities for getting more honey flora on agricultural land. For example orchard managers could move to cover crops like clover

The opportunity is already there for farmers and beekeepers to recognise their mutual dependence and to put into practise some of these ideas to secure their future together. We should be encouraging this in Australia as a way of preparing for varroa and the transition to managed pollination, but overseas farmers and beekeepers should be talking about it as a way of fixing problems like bee population decline, the rising costs of pollination services, restoring farm biodiversity and access to nutritional bee forage.