Precious queen bees are bundled up in travelling cages with some bee candy for the ride, and attendants to feed them.
But delays in Australia Post’s delivery service have seen queens turn up to their destinations bedraggled, weak – and even dead.
“It’s devastating,” the Australian Queen Bee Breeders’ Association president, Richard Sims, said. “It seems to have really come to a head now. In Victoria especially it is horrendous and it’s so hit and miss … one package may get there and the next one just disappears. And the tracking is hit and miss, too.”
Bees are critical to Australia’s agriculture sector. Almonds, avocados, blueberries and a range of other crops all depend on beehives for pollination. While native bees do their bit, European honeybees make up most of Australia’s bee population and are responsible for most of the agricultural work.
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Sims used to be happy to send queen bees all over Australia, but he has stopped sending them for now, unless it’s a local delivery.
Australia Post has been facing large Covid-related backlogs. It says lockdowns have led to more online deliveries, while hundreds of staff are forced to isolate every day, and fewer passenger flights means a reduced air freight capacity.
“Given bees are prepared and packaged a specific way, they are able to be easily identified by our people and are pushed to the front of the queue,” a spokesperson said.
Sims says time is critical when it comes to queen bees.
“After a while a queen’s egg-laying drops off … without enough eggs, the hives dwindle,” Sims said. “It can take 30 days if they have to make their own queen.”
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That’s where queen bee breeders come in. “We pack them into little cages … we put a plug of (toffee-like) candy in there. The queen can’t feed herself but she has attendants who eat the candy and feed it to the queen.”
On arrival, the queen is introduced to the hive. But if she doesn’t turn up, the hive falters and becomes susceptible to pests.
Sims is flabbergasted that in some cases a queen has survived the trip from the Netherlands but is then put in danger with trips from major cities in Australia taking up to 10 days.
Dutch bees are resistant to a mite that threatens bee populations, and are imported to strengthen the genetic pool in Australia.
And Sims says while he is optimistic for the future of the industry, they are still struggling to get over the bushfires and the droughts.
However, honeybees are just part of the bee equation in Australia. There are about 2,000 native bee species, which might be threatened by the European intruders.
Entomologist Dr Katja Hogendoorn, from the University of Adelaide, says honeybees are the most common bees Australians see, that they’re on the increase, and that “there’s starting to be reasonable evidence that they’re displacing native bees”.
She says honeybees are semi-domesticated and were not the ones dying out in much-feared colony collapses.
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According to Hogendoorn, the full picture of Australia’s bees has not yet been revealed, leaving many people confused. Meanwhile, she is concerned the beekeeping industry has been using concerns over bees to prop up their own industry.
“Honeybees are really important for crop pollination and we need them and we need to treat them well,” she said. “But they come at the cost of native bees that are in urban areas.”
Her advice to people is not to keep bees in urban areas, but to buy honey from farmers’ markets instead.
In the Netherlands, as well as having mite-resistant bees, the Dutch treat bees to bus stop roofs covered with native plants, bee hotels, and a “honey highway”, with wildflowers planted along highways and railways – treating them like royalty.
