Justine Keay (Braddon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As a member of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Agriculture and Water Resources, I welcome this report. The direct value to the Australian economy of honey and other hive products produced by managed honey bees is estimated at $100 million per year. This may not sound like a lot when compared to the contribution made by other industries or sectors; however, what should be taken into account is the indirect contribution honey bees make through the pollination service they provide to other agricultural sectors. Quantifying this value to the Australian economy is not exactly easy; however, the Australian Honey Bee Industry Council estimates that pollination services provide around $4 billion per annum to the agricultural industry. This is why the committee felt that establishing an inquiry into this matter and, in particular, having a focus on the biosecurity of the Australian honey bee industry, was an important economic issue to pursue.

It is a particularly important industry for Tasmania. It employs a number of people in rural areas and provides important economic benefits to local communities. Honey and associated apiary products are an important part of Tasmania's clean and green image, with Blue Hills Honey in Mawbanna, which is in my electorate of Braddon, just one example of Australia's top producers. The varroa mite poses a particular threat to the Australian honey bee industry, which is clearly not immune to risks and faces a range of biosecurity threats. Biosecurity threats to this industry were an important concern to the committee, particularly the threat posed by the varroa mite. Australia is the only bee-carrying landmass where varroa is not yet present—and I stress, not yet. Sadly, it is quite possibly a matter of when, not if.

Varroa infestation can have catastrophic consequences on honey bee colonies, ultimately culminating in the collapse of the hive. Of the two species of Varroa, V. destructor poses the greatest risk to Australia's honey bee and horticultural industries, which is of significant concern for Tasmania. The ongoing risk of bee pests like varroa arriving in Australia is extremely high. Well-known Tasmanian bee industry stalwart, Lindsay Bourke, presenting to the committee as Chairman of the Australian Honeybee Industry Council, indicated that there are between three and four detections of pest bees or bee pests at the border each year. Tasmania as an island state has a biosecurity risk advantage, and therefore fewer pests and diseases are present in our environment in comparison to that of our counterparts in mainland Australia. We therefore need to ensure that biosecurity measures are strictly enforced. However, our island status, and therefore our natural biosecurity barrier, is no match for the varroa mite, as experienced in the enormous impact it has had on the island nation of New Zealand.

Strong quarantine facilities are extremely important, not only for Tasmania but for the whole nation, to protect the viability of the industry and of our agricultural sector. As stated in the report, the best and first line of defence is pre-embarkation. The committee heard that Australia employs a range of strategies to try and prevent biosecurity incidents as related to honey bees. These include activities beyond, at and behind Australian borders. The committee was provided with evidence to demonstrate the work that occurs along the biosecurity defence continuum, and that the key to our biosecurity defence is pre-embarkation inspections. It was important for me to ensure the committee's report included recommendations that strengthened pre-embarkation inspections, and this is reflected in recommendation 4. The committee has recommended the Australian government undertake analysis of pest bee risk gradings for Australian ports including airports, which currently do not have a rating, and include pre-embarkation inspections and processes at various ports, and for this assessment to be completed by the end of this.

Interception at likely entry points into Australia was identified as another key method of dealing with the intrusion of bee pests. It is pleasing to hear about the collaborative approach being undertaken against the significant threat that the arrival of varroa presents to the Australian honey bee and wider agricultural industries. These approaches, such as selective breeding programs, are recommended by the committee to be undertaken with international industry partners; in particular, learning from the experiences of other countries who have had to deal with varroa, such as New Zealand.

The issue of smuggling bees also warrants further investigation. Along with the committee, I wish to see a detailed examination of this issue. The committee stresses the urgency of ensuring the national bee pest surveillance program is assessed, with a request to immediately initiate the necessary research and development required to do this. This is to ensure the program is effective, efficient and optimised, and for particular focus to be given to catch boxes. The committee heard the number of catch boxes and sentinel hives at ports are insufficient in number, and not in strategic and logical locations at port. In fact, some are too far away, which does not allow for an optimum response to an incursion.

Of course, an appropriate response to the risk of a varroa incursion, and thus early interception, requires funding. The committee recommends the Commonwealth appropriately fund model 3 of the surveillance program. This would result in additional ports having the capability to detect an incursion and would be at a cost of approximately $1.9 million per annum, which is relatively small considering the impact varroa would have on our agricultural sector. It is imperative that the Australian government investigate the member for Paterson's suggestion that an easy-to-use smartphone application be developed to help members of the public take part in eradication programs.

The biosecurity of the Australian honey bee industry is a very important issue, and this report goes a long way to resolving some of the key issues facing the industry.

Andrew Gee (Calare, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I wish to thank the committee for the compilation of this report. I think it is a very useful contribution in this field and makes some very interesting points, not least of which is the importance of the honey bee industry in Australia. That industry, worth an estimated $100 million per year, is comparatively small, but its value to Australia's economy is much greater. It has been estimated that pollination services provide $4 billion per annum in value to agricultural industry in Australia. That is a big and important contribution.

I thank all the committee members for their work in this field. It is important to note that without honey bees for pollination many fruit, nut, vegetable, legume and seed crops could not bear fruit or seeds. That is why this area is so important. Although a range of insect species can pollinate plants, honey bees play a vital role in pollinating many horticultural crops. In addition to the pollination of crops, bees can also assist the grazing industry by improving the yield and persistence of common fodder crops such as clover. This can reduce agricultural input costs and may also have environmental benefits by reducing the need for graziers to use fertilisers or other chemicals. This industry does not receive the recognition that it really deserves, and its importance needs to be highlighted when reports such as this are handed down.

I need to mention the wonderful work on honey bees that is being carried out in the electorate of Calare. There are many people working diligently in this field, including those who run Maya Sunny Honey, which produces a 100 per cent raw honey range handcrafted wholly by Andrew Wyszynski. Andrew's passion for bees started at a very young age in the countryside of Poland, where he helped and learned from his parents on their apiarist farm. Maya Sunny Honey has 250 hives, and its products are stocked all over Australia, including at David Jones, Harris Farm and even here in Canberra at the National Gallery of Australia.

I could not discuss honey bees in Calare without mentioning the Mudgee Honey Haven and Frank and Trish Maiolo, who run the honey haven. It is one of the premier tourist attractions in the Mudgee district, established in 1990. Frank and Trish currently have 400 hives. They produce a variety of honey products, including pure honey, creamed honey, gourmet honey, BeePower active honey, health and beauty honey products and mead-honey wine, which is made using a time-tested ancient recipe, fermenting pure Australian honey to create unique flavours and aromas. There are three mead-honey wines in the range: honey mead, spiced mead and honey liqueur. Members of the committee will no doubt be very keen to sample some when they are in the Mudgee area.

Dougal Munro has been beekeeping since the age of five, when his father had a large apiary. When he was not tending to the large family orchard or their massive vegetable garden, he could be found inspecting the bees. Dougal's farm is located at Springside, just south of Orange, and is a little over 120 acres. His parents purchased the property in 1979. It was in addition to their separate and much larger farm closer to Orange, which has been owned and farmed by Dougal's family for almost a century. Dougal currently has 120 hives at the property near Orange, where he also farms garlic, potatoes, artichokes, asparagus, horseradish, apricots, peaches, nectarines, cherries, plums, figs, mulberries, kiwifruit and quinces. There is even one lonely sugar maple that he has for maple syrup. He is another great achiever in the field.

So is Cottesbrook Honey, which is based at Fitzgeralds Mount, between Blayney and Bathurst. Tracey and David Parker operate 600 hives there, and they have been doing that since the 1980s. Cottesbrook Honey specialise in producing premium varieties of honey, honeycomb, creamed honey, beeswax and other beehive products. Not only do they keep hives but they also process and pack their own honey.

I also have to mention the Australian Queen Bee Line, who are based in Orange. Charlie and Brenda Casido run honey production there. They have got a centre. They carefully gather pure honey products from their own bee communities located throughout eastern Australia. Their collection area ranges from southern Queensland right through to Victoria in the south. Charlie and Brenda produce honey and honeycomb products, royal jelly, pollen and beeswax. Their bees are also hired to a number of orchards in our region, to pollinate stone fruit and cherries. We all know how important orcharding and horticulture are to the Calare electorate. Australian Queen Bee Line are currently selling around 10,000 queen bees Australia wide. They are also exporting around 10,000 queen bees to the international market. I caught up with them at last year's Australian National Field Days and was able to gain a greater understanding of what they actually do there. They are doing a wonderful job. It brought home to me that bees are the unsung heroes of horticulture, because, when you listen to all of the work that the Casidos do in terms of pollination at our orchards, it is quite amazing. They are providing bees to Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq, the Philippines and Canada. Charlie and Brenda say that there is a huge demand for queen bees in Canada, of around 65,000. However, they can only supply 10,000 of them, due to seasonal conditions. They have currently got five permanent staff and five casual staff on call.

I also have to mention Goldfields honey, which is situated at Vittoria, between Orange and Bathurst. Grant and Vikki Lockwood have been operating Goldfields honey for approximately 40 years. They have 5,000 hives and, along with producing honey products, also provide pollination services across the central west of New South Wales as well as Victoria and parts of Queensland.

I note that the report makes six recommendations to the government aimed at improving early threat and detection strategies for the biosecurity of Australian honey bees. The government will be responding to the recommendations in due course, but I think it is fair to say the government has not been idle in protecting Australia's biosecurity. The government is aware of the potential for bees to be illegally imported into Australia. A proactive investigation by the Department of Agriculture and Water Resources was launched in February 2015 and remains open. A number of pathways have been examined, and no instances of illegal bee smuggling have been detected to date. However, in 2000, a New South Wales beekeeper was prosecuted after being detected trying to smuggle queen bees into Australia concealed in pens, of all things. So there is a need for constant vigilance in this field.

Australia does have systems in place to increase our protection from introduced bee pests and diseases such as varroa mites, including incursion prevention systems which include the requirement for all vessels arriving into Australia from overseas to provide the department with a pre-arrival report so that a biosecurity risk assessment of the vessel can be undertaken prior to its arrival. Cargo can only be imported to Australia under approved, strict biosecurity conditions that effectively manage pest and disease risks. There are inspections at the border to intercept smuggling and reduce the risk of entry of foreign bees and any pests and diseases they carry. There are also early detection systems in place such as general surveillance activities at airports, seaports and premises under approved arrangements. The National Bee Pest Surveillance Program is also in place, which uses sentinel hives, catch boxes and other methods to detect exotic bees and bee pests. There are emergency response procedures in place as well. So I think the government has been proactive, but there will be a response to the recommendations of the report in due course.

Can I conclude by thanking the committee for their important work in this field. It means a lot to electorates such as Calare that have a heavy investment in horticulture. Can I also conclude by thanking all of those involved in the honey bee industry in the electorate of Calare and across Australia for the important work that they do in our communities and for our regional economies. It is important work. It is work that is not recognised enough, but hopefully, through this report and this process, they will get the credit that they so richly deserve. I thank them in this House today.

Madeleine King (Brand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak today on the report of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Water Resources entitled Safe keeping: inquiry into the biosecurity of Australian honey bees. The importance of honey bees to our lives cannot be understated. The importance of a healthy bee population to this country is critical to how we live and to what we eat. The committee report notes—quite clinically, I think—the significance of the pollination services that honey bees provide. If honey bees were in a position to send us all an invoice for their important work of fertilising flowering plants by the transfer of pollen, the Australian Honey Bee Industry Council tells us we would be up for $4 billion every year. I think the bees are worth much more. I think these beautiful insects are invaluable. We must do all that we can to protect them from disease to allow them to do their good work, which they do for free.

I am a beekeeper. I am not sure if there are any other members of parliament in this place that also keep bees. My husband, Jamie, and I have kept bees for a number of years. We have become keen apiarists. It is the most delightful pastime, if sometimes accidentally painful. In fact Jamie will rob a hive of its summer honey tomorrow while I am here in this place. I am sad to miss out on this exercise because there is nothing quite like gently opening up the lid of a super and hearing the low rumble of a colony of bees getting about their important work. There is a mix of exhilaration and trepidation in invading their home, which is what we are doing, but we are doing it to check on the health of the hive and to rob the hive of its excess of honey. This honey is made up of the teaspoon of honey the worker bees will each produce in their very short, yet very productive, six-week lives. The tone of the buzz of the bees changes as we get about our beekeeping work. We do this work quietly, quickly and gently and, at all times, try to keep our heart rate down, which can be difficult as the modulation of bees changes as you disrupt their day. But, from my experience, it is best to remain calm and purposeful when working with bees—and of course dirty beekeeping clothes help a lot with one's confidence.

Helping harvest the Shoalwater honey later this week will be our cousins, David and Christina Galloway from Cumbria in the north of England, who visited the parliament earlier this week. In fact they also keep and care for bees, and we spoke in this building about their hives that are infected with the destructive varroa mite. We talked about how they have to actively manage this pest that has decimated beehives around the world. They told us how the mite first arrived in the south of the UK, in Devon, in 1992 and progressively made its way through the whole country. There was no stopping this pest, and now all British beekeepers can do is to manage the infestations.

Thankfully the destructive varroa mite is not in Australia, and that is in part due to our isolation. But being an island is not enough, as New Zealand has discovered, as has the remote island of Hawaii. The vigilance of this nation's biosecurity measures and the proactive manner in which authorities seek out potentially devastating pests are the principal reason we remain free from the destructive varroa mite. I commend the committee on its work and support its recommendation that the National Bee Pest Surveillance Program implement an enhanced program to intercept pest bees and infected bees at ports around this country. This they will do through more sentinel hives and catch boxes—very practical, very effective and very efficient means to protect our healthy honey bee population. These traits are hallmarks of the beekeeping community.

I also want to congratulate the committee on taking on board an idea put forward by my friend and colleague the member for Paterson, the thoroughly modern Meryl Swanson. She recommended that the government investigate developing an easy-to-use smartphone application that will enable the public to report pest bees that they spot in their gardens, on their farms and in their towns. The increased popularity of amateur beekeeping will make such an easy-to-use app a very useful weapon in the fight to maintain our biosecurity. Education of the public is critical. The importance of biosecurity in quarantine procedures to protecting the Australian environment and maintaining a healthy bee population, which is the healthiest in the world, will be critical.

The report noted that queen bees have been intercepted—mailed—through the post from overseas. I can assure members, you can receive bees in the post. It is quite an interesting process, but you can only get them from Australia. Seeking to import queen bees from overseas is one of the most reckless things any beekeeper can do. It endangers our whole agricultural industry, and I urge those people who are thinking of doing it to never do it.

There are many people working very hard around this country to prevent bee diseases making it to Australia but, should what beekeepers fear the most and the varroa mite make it to this country, there will be a need for further urgent discussions on how we can quarantine infected sites. Western Australia is separated from the rest of this country for the most part by arid lands and desert. Tasmania is separated by the sea. Should the varroa mite arrive, then the discussion will turn to how we use the landscape of this country to maintain healthy populations as far as possible.

There has been a long history in Western Australia of trying to keep out pests from the east. We have been pretty successful with the Collingwood Football Club but, sadly, not the rabbits—as many will know, there is a rabbit-proof fence that started construction in 1901. That was rabbit-proof fence No. 1. It stretched 1,834 kilometres. Some years later, when that did not seem to work, we built another rabbit-proof fence, rabbit-proof fence No. 2, which stretches 1,166 kilometres. People were trying to do their best but, ultimately, it was an effort in futility, and of course rabbits are everywhere.

We have tried to keep cane toads out of Western Australia. Again, we have failed, although people are trying very hard in the north-west of our state to keep them moving further down from Kununurra. They arrive on trucks out of the Northern Territory and, as I said, all we can do is do our best. But, nonetheless, these pests persist.

Western Australia has strict biosecurity laws. If you come to Western Australia, you will be asked to throw all your fruit and any bee or honey products in a bin. There will be dogs at the airport—cute little beagles—that are seeking to protect Western Australia's agriculture industry by making sure you do not have a stray apple, banana or jar of honey in your luggage. If you arrive at the Perth domestic airport and someone asks you to open your bag and relieve yourself of all your fruit, please do it quickly and quietly. There is never a fuss; we are just trying to keep Western Australia safe from these eastern pests.

Jamie and I brought our first queen bee and starter colony from Ms Tiffane Bates, a queen bee breeder and apiary keeper of the UWA Centre for Integrative Bee Research—known as CIBER. The work of this centre was the star in a remarkably popular documentary called More than Honey. I encourage people to look this up on the web; it is easily accessed. It talks about the devastating effects of colony collapse disorder, which we are seeing around the world.

Ms Baits was awarded a Churchill Fellowship and has undertaken extensive research on how bees can be bred resistant to varroa mites. Ms Baits in her reports for her Churchill Fellowship called Australia the last honeybee oasis. That we are, and this oasis we hope to remain. But it is important for research by Ms Baits, her colleague Professor Boris Baer and others at the UWA centre for bee research to continue. Their focus is on discovering genetic traits in bees or existing bee stock that are able to survive an infestation of the varroa mite and build and maintain healthy working colonies of good temperament while minimising the use of chemicals.

Temperament is an unusual word to hear in relation to bees but, I can tell you, having gone through a few different queens, we have experienced beehives and colonies with a good temperament that were nice and quite gentle to work with, and then there are bees that are a bit more aggressive and they are very difficult to work with. This is where the pain comes in in beekeeping.

I sincerely hope our biosecurity measures hold out against this beehive-destroying pest, the varroa mite, and I am pleased that research is continuing should the worst occur. There are more funds going towards bee research. There is a cooperative research centre for honey bee products, also located in WA and now with a new office out in Yanchep. It will assist efforts in offering pollination security to the agriculture industry of WA and increase the ability of the industry to attract and train professional beekeepers and increase the number of hives. This is of great importance, as I said, to the agricultural industry of Western Australia.

Again, I urge anyone in this House that might also be a beekeeper to get in touch. There are lots of parliamentary friends groups in this place, but I am yet to see one that is for beekeepers. It might be a small group, but nevertheless I think maybe we should start it.

I thank the committee for their very hard work, I support their recommendations and I hope we as a parliament can continue to work together on such committees to look after these beautiful insects, bees, that provide so much to our community and our lives.

Debate adjourned.