But the question is: can New Zealand avoid colony collapse disorder?
As honey bees go about collecting nectar, they perform a vital plant-pollination role – worth about $5 billion to the economy.
In Douglas Copeland’s 1991 novel Generation X, the worry for the future was the threat of nuclear war. “New Zealand gets nuked, too”, was the memorable title of one of the chapters. In his most recent novel, Generation A, it’s not nuclear war that has changed the world; it’s the disappearance of bees.
Colony collapse disorder (CCD), involving the mass death of the world’s most important pollinator, the honey bee, has already destroyed up to 6% of all honey-bee colonies in the United States and Europe, on top of the regular death rate from pests such as varroa mite of 30% a year. CCD is thought to result from the interaction of a number of stressors including parasites, viruses, fungi, pesticides and poor bee nutrition resulting from degraded pollen sources.
The National Beekeepers’ Association (NBA) estimates that honey bees are worth $5.1 billion to the New Zealand economy. The bees are vital for pollinating most fruit species, many vegetables and clover, a pastoral plant vital for fixing nitrogen in the soil. “No honey bees, no horticulture,” says Mark Goodwin, a bee specialist at Plant & Food Research. If the honey-bee population collapses, New Zealand will become a fruit and vegetable importer, and sheep and cattle farmers will need to rely on costly urea applications to do the work that clover currently does.
The varroa mite, which arrived in New Zealand in 2000, has already killed all feral honey bee colonies and is kept in check only by the twice-yearly application of chemicals to managed hives. Although CCD is not yet a problem in New Zealand, there is recent anecdotal evidence of unexplained bee losses and the NBA is conducting a bee-loss survey.
The establishment of the varroa mite has badly affected beekeeping here, and if current trends continue, the NBA predicts New Zealand could face a “looming pollinator crisis that could have far-reaching impacts on the economy”. In a June submission to the select committee on local government and environment, with Landcare Research pollination biologist Linda Newstrom-Lloyd, the NBA called for a range of measures, including banning honey imports, reviewing insecticide use and encouraging bee-friendly rural plantings. It also challenged the Government to produce a pollinator security strategy, which it says is just as important as New Zealand’s existing biosecurity and biodiversity strategies.
The bee everyone is concerned about is Apis mellifera, the European honey bee. While some plants, including many grasses, are wind-pollinated, in other species, Goodwin explains, “the pollen is really sticky, it doesn’t blow in the wind, so it needs something to pick it up and transfer it from one flower to the next”. Honey bees visit flowers looking for nectar, which provides energy to the colony and is used for making honey. “They also need pollen,” says Goodwin, “to provide all the minerals and proteins you need to survive if you’re an animal. The bees might visit up to 200 flowers to get one load and, in doing so, they carry pollen from one flower to the next and effect pollination.” Pollination is an essential part of fertilisation, which leads to the growth of the plant’s seed or fruit.
For commercial horticultural crops such as kiwifruit, bee pollination is essential. “When you plant 100ha of one species, you have a huge amount of flowers ready all at the same time. You need a pollinator that can be brought in at sufficient numbers to pollinate such a big area,” says Goodwin.
Once the plants are flowering, the horticulturist will contract a beekeeper to bring in hives for a few days to ensure the crop is pollinated. When the bees aren’t contracted to a flowering orchard, they forage on plants around their usual hive location – typically roaming up to 5km from home.
But with important pollen sources like barberry, gorse and willow being cleared for dairy farming, or because they are “undesirable” species, the bees are suffering. Barry Foster, NBA vice-president and keeper of about 900 bee colonies in the Gisborne area, says good food sources are vital for bees to “build up a hive of sufficient strength that it can not only pollinate a fruit orchard, it can make a honey crop big enough to make it viable for a beekeeper to continue providing these services”.
As Foster pointed out to the select committee recently, “honey production in this country subsidises pollination. If beekeepers didn’t have honey production it would be unlikely we’d be full-time pollinators – there’s just not enough money in it.” But without good rural pollen sources, we won’t have honey and we won’t have healthy bees ready for commercial pollination.
Foster is concerned about the potential for CCD in New Zealand. “We already have some of the precursors, like the ‘green deserts’ that are appearing on dairy farms, and intensification of agriculture leading to a lessening of quantity and diversity of pollen sources for bees.
“We have the varroa mite established, we have possibly the start of Nosema ceranae [a hardy unicellular parasite]. If we get other pests and diseases coming in through our borders we could get to a tipping point where we get CCD.”
The NBA is hopeful that a pollination security strategy could turn things around by protecting our borders from new bee pests and diseases, restricting the use of rural pesticides and planting bee-friendly species. That’s something all landowners can start doing now.