Not the Bees! Varroa Mite Madness

A person holds a honeycomb cell for hive inspection at the Shangri-La Hotel in Sydney, Australia, on May 14, 2021. Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

Commentary

Australia was (until recently) the sole major honey-producer in the world free from Varroa mites (also known as “varroa destructors”) after New Zealand fell to infection in 2000.

It has been four months since a Varroa mite infection on the east coast triggered Australia’s biosecurity procedures, during which 15 to 45 million bees were culled by the state of New South Wales (NSW).

Since being detected around the Port of Newcastle on June 22, there are still no conclusive answers about where and how the outbreak occurred.

The mites were first picked up in a pair of early warning sentinel hives—that is, hives specifically set up in close proximity to major ports where they are closely monitored for introduced species. These hives contain a pest strip intended to kill unwanted visitors like the Verroa mite which fall out of the hive and onto strips that are checked every six weeks.

Back in 2018, Orange fruit grower Borry Gartrell described the sentinel hives as: “The home guard defending the shores of Britain.”

But a comparison to NASA might be more accurate—an observation system that takes pretty photographs of the approaching asteroid but does little to stop it hitting the ground.

Varroa mites were considered to be a “when” not “if” situation, with the spread of Varroa seemingly impossible to control in a globalised world.

Australia’s dream run has come to an end, with some tentatively pinning the arrival on the “challenge of COVID” that has left a backlog of container ships at major ports.

An undated supplied photo of a Varroa mite mother and its offspring inside a bee colony. AAP Image/Denis Anderson

Department of Primary Industries (DPI) acting Chief Plant Protection Officer Chris Anderson said the higher number of mites on the infected premises around Newcastle indicated that that was the epicentre.

“That doesn’t indicate that someone has done anything illegal. It may simply be an accidental import on cargo or it may be a swarm that’s come off a ship off the coast of Newcastle and has flown into that area,” he added.

The central and mid-north coast formed ground zero of the mass killing in July, with 1,533 hives across 31 properties “euthanized” in an act which Danny Le Feuvre, acting Chief Executive of the Australian Honey Bee Industry Council, called “heartbreaking” and “certainly devastating for the people involved.”

Feuvre agreed that the large-scale killing of bees was “the only way” to ensure the mite was eradicated. The biosecurity direction resulted in all bees within 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) of identified zones being killed, regardless of whether the hives were infected.

At the time, a special emergency zone was pegged out around a property in Calga and another eradication zone formed at Bulahdelah.

NSW Agriculture Minister Dugald Saunders assured commercial beekeepers that they would be compensated for any hives, bees, or beekeeping equipment that authorities were forced to destroy during containment procedures—but crucially they would not assist beekeepers with lost income.

“It’s a really difficult conversation to have and we want to make sure people are comfortable how it happens,” said Saunders, of officials walking onto properties to kill bees.

The whole thing has turned into a nightmare for beekeepers, who had previously survived a five-year drought, the mid-north coast bushfires, extensive droughts, and COVID lockdowns.

Difficulties With Eradication

Worldwide, pollination services offered by insects is considered to be worth upwards of US$215 billion a year (in 2009). Australia’s market share had been growing, but now, with or without a successful eradication, the industry will lose billions and take decades to recover.

Containing the mite outbreak has been made more difficult by the presence of 12,000 unregistered hives—and there isn’t much incentive for hive owners to volunteer their existence when it will almost certainly result in the government destroying the hive.

So far, commercial hives have suffered the most. Honey Wines Australia, a mead manufacturer in the Hunter Valley, is one of the businesses that has lost 90 percent of its honeybee hives under the watch of the state government.

“Now is not the time for complacency,” Saunders said. He remains confident that the war against the mite can be won. “We know the job is not done until we eradicate this pest.”

NSW Minister for Agriculture Dugald Saunders addresses media while providing an update on the varroa mite parasite, in Sydney, Australia, on June 29, 2022. AAP Image/Dan Himbrechts

Despite months of attempted containment with over 2,000 people involved, opposition is growing to the biosecurity approach. A petition has been put together by disgruntled beekeepers that have attracted over 27,000 signatures.

“We call on the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries to release the modelling underpinning their strategy, specifically the scientific evidence explaining their extreme and impractical actions.”

Their plea comes as millions of healthy bees and hives are slaughtered every month. So far, there seems to be little discussion on treating hives using known miticides, with officials preferring to “slaughter now” and ask questions later.

Beekeepers are also complaining about a lack of support from the government, including unworkable restrictions stemming from the order, such as prohibiting hives in the affected areas for three years, effectively putting people out of business without compensation. Those organising the petition claim that irreversible damage is being done by the DPI.

Honey Wines Australia remains supportive of the cull:

“As much as I love the bees, they are an insect and one that only lives for a little over 30 days at the best of times. Cutting their lives slightly shorter than usual to save many more is a good thing. I wish those complaining would realise that biosecurity experts much smarter than them are in charge of making decisions.’

In addition to unregistered hives, there have been questions raised about the manner in which the DPI is undertaking its quarantine measures, with Honey Wines Australia saying:

“Most of my beekeeper friends (myself included) have assumed that by being a registered beekeeper, the team responsible for the euthanisation would already have our details. In the middle of October, I worried about why it was taking so long to be contacted and phoned the DPI, who redirected me to the Exotic Plant & Pest Hotline—it was only then done I realised they had no idea our 58 beehives in the Toronto area existed.

“From what I can tell, it seems the DPI isn’t sharing registered beekeepers’ details and instead relying on them to self-report. Given that multiple friends of mine were also waiting to be contacted, I expect many more would be in the same situation and not realise they have to self-report.”

Is Culling the Right Approach?

There is an open debate about what approach to take. Left unchecked, Varroa mites can be just as lethal as an NSW biosecurity officer.

“Varroa mites reproduce within honey bee brood cells and feed on the hemolymph of the bee. The reproductive phase of the Varroa mite’s life cycle takes place within honeybee brood cells.” According to PMC, the result of a Varroa mite infection is hive death within four years.

At the same time, European honeybees seem to be acquiring a measure of resistance to attack after 70-odd years of exposure. As we know, the first outbreak wave is the most devastating, but life often finds a way to cope.

Varroa mites are thought to have evolved alongside Asian honeybees and expanded their territory into the European honeybee population at some point in the middle of the 20th century; certainly, they had established themselves within Africa and then within Russian colonies in the 1960s. By the 1970s, they had reached Brazil and America in the late 1980s. They were officially identified in 1904.

Efforts to eradicate the mites via culling remain controversial, given the prevalence of wild bee populations. The mass killing of bees is not the preferred method of control around the world, with miticides and other agents used to control and protect hives.

The prevalence of Varroa mites in foreign bee populations is thought to have reduced natural pollination, with managed hives (protected by beekeepers) bolstering the bee community and keeping the local ecosystem afloat. Environmental groups warn that honeybee populations around the world have declined in recent decades. New Zealand has acted as a test case for this theory, with feral bees thought to have been significantly impacted by the infestation.

Beekeeper Sven Stephan processing honeycombs at an apiary in the New South Wales town of Somersby, on April 20, 2021. Gregory Plesse/AFP via Getty Images

“A review of competitive interactions between honeybees and native bees across multiple continents, however, indicates that honeybees can have a negative effect on native bees (Paini 2004), but nowhere in the world has experimental manipulation of pollinator assemblages and resources utilisation been conducted before and after V. destructor invasion. Thus, the manner of response by native pollinator assemblages to the decline of honeybees, as well as their ability to provide compensatory pollination services, remains largely unknown,” added the PMC.

What is also unknown is what Australia’s ruthless and unique approach of blanket mass murder will have on bee populations.

Professor Sasha Mikheyev at the Australian National University spoke to Phys.org, saying: “What makes eradication so difficult is that we have a very large population of feral western honeybees that live in the bush and are very hard to locate, so even if mite-infected hives can be detected and destroyed, it is much harder to do the same with feral colonies.”

By late September, NSW authorities had begun using insecticide Fipronil baits to kill feral bees within set eradication zones. This is expected to continue for a year.

“Managed hive bees will pick up the bait and then go into their nest, and then the managed hive gets killed, there’s no way then of identifying whether there was a live hive or a dead hive sitting there,” said Satendra Kumar, Chief Plant Protection Officer.

Eradicating “the massive amount of feral bees’ in every red zone is likely to have a significant impact on the local environment. The Varroa mite cannot attack Australia’s native bees, and while a reduction in feral European honeybees would theoretically lower competition for native bees, the bio-security measures are using sugary baits and pesticide which kills all bees.

These baits are being monitored, but as aussiebee.com.au writes, “Feral European honeybee foragers will visit these baits take the Fipronil back to their nests, killing the colony. However, the honey in all of these poisoned feral European honeybee nests could contain active Fipronil for over two years.”

The Cost of Killing So Many Bees

When New Zealand suffered its first infestation 22 years ago, it was eventually considered too severe for eradication to be considered as an option. While the economics were thought to be “worth it,” the nation’s technical ability to achieve it was not considered “feasible.” However, the original position of Cabinet in July 2000 was that it could be done, and doomed bio-security procedures were set in place.

Their efforts were ultimately undone by the general chaos of wild bee interactions, which is what many presume will happen to Australia. Quarantining winged species is not easy…

It is feared by the pragmatists in the beekeeping community that, like what we saw in the dogmatic approach to COVID-Zero, bio-security officials will go deep into the rabbit hole before admitting there’s nothing but foxes at the bottom. New Zealand officially gave up its eradication bid in 2013 after a 13-year battle at the cost of over nearly a billion dollars and the collapse of half of the nation’s registered beekeeping enterprises.

“On both islands, pastoral impacts were estimated to account for 78 percent of costs, horticultural and arable 15 percent, and beekeeping approximately seven percent (Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry 2002b).”

The loss of the bees had unexpected flow-on effects, such as requiring an increased reliance on nitrogen fertilisers (now at the centre of the Climate Change war on agriculture).

In February 2022, Greenpeace went out and commissioned a poll to demonstrate that plenty of climate-loving New Zealanders support getting rid of these synthetic nitrogen fertilisers (a similar ban collapsed Sri Lanka’s agricultural industry and plunged the nation into starvation, poverty, and civil unrest within a matter of months).

Those organising polls like this do not typically alert the public to the unintended consequences of “feel good” politics—particularly the collapse of food-growing industries. Rarely do these organisations suggest tearing down cities, the biggest polluters of all, instead preferring to crucify small farmers essential to keeping civilisation fed. While it is true that fertiliser use has dramatically increased, so too has our ability to efficiently produce large amounts of food on small plots of land.

As New Zealand Herald writes:

“A blanket ban [on synthetic fertiliser] would erase one of the greatest scientific and humanitarian breakthroughs of the 20th century and would dangerously directly threaten the food security of half the global population. At its most fundamental level, modern farming is about a smaller number of people growing surplus amounts of plants, so the rest of society can eat and pursue other activities.”

If Australia and New Zealand want to remain primary food producers, bee populations—including imported bee populations, are crucial. It is a quaint notion to cheer on native bees (if they survive the baiting program), but we need more than solitary native bees to keep our crops alive. We also need every modern advantage, such as synthetic fertilisers, to cover the gap.

It would be a truly apocalyptic decision by both Australia and New Zealand to introduce COP27 demands to kill off small farms (that keep and maintain hives) right when mass cullings are occurring that impact wild bee colonies most severely. We may see this disaster play out in the Netherlands, where farms are to be bulldozed for cities or roped off as “eco strips” by order of the European Union. Without farmers acting as beekeepers, we will soon see a true environmental disaster unfold in Europe.

The NSW government should keep in mind that there has never been a successful war waged against Varroa mites and that it is well within the rights of the people of NSW to question the unnecessary endangerment of native bee populations in the pursuit of an unattainable Varroa Zero goal.

If the DPI is determined to continue down this path, it must do better when it comes to looking after beekeepers who have had their livelihoods ripped away for an extended period of time through no fault of their own.

Someone is responsible for the arrival of the Varroa mites, but the government is responsible for looking after the Australian beekeepers ruined by biosecurity failures.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.