Robyn Williams: The ABC is, I think you know, celebrating 90 years of broadcasting at this time, and The Science Show is going to join in the reflections and storytelling over the next few weeks with a focus on two essential ingredients of our lives; honey and music. Music is next week and thereafter, showing how physics and maths are thoroughly intertwined with song and symphony. But today we immerse ourselves in honey, how the bees from Europe made agriculture possible for the new settlers exactly 200 years ago, and how the name Isabella must evermore be remembered during your breakfast.

And so to mark this sweet bicentenary we have a new coin to enjoy, and I've got one in front of me right now. You may have spotted one already in your change, a $2 coin showing honeycomb and a bee from far away that has now been with us for so long, pollinating our crops and native plants and joining peacefully, we hope, all those native bees that have served Australia for thousands of years. So that's our Science Show today, I'm Robyn Williams. And, David, let's launch the honey in our usual way.

Well, this is called a little golden wonder and we are talking about this, I have one, and beautiful it is, the honeybee, which landed 200 years ago. There was a slight distraction of course with 21st May, but 20th May is the actual date when the Isabella arrived. We'll try to find out whether we know what happened next 200 years ago, but we are going to be talking to four people who have very fond appreciation of bees in all sorts of ways, scientific and otherwise, and of course Leigh Gordon, who is the CEO of the Royal Australian Mint who is officer commanding the coins, can give us some background. Why did you choose to do this celebration?

Leigh Gordon: Well, it's great to talk to you, Robyn, and to the listeners here. They were certainly an idea with…the Australian Honeybee Industry Council got in touch with us, understanding that there was an anniversary coming up, with the idea of a coin. And the Mint has got a real role to celebrate significant anniversaries and events and organisations through coins, and this just seemed like a perfect fit for us.

When we looked into the significant impact and benefit to Australia of the honeybee industry, we thought, yes, this is a great event to commemorate with a coin, and so we worked with the Honeybee Council to come up with what I think is really quite a beautiful little $2 coin, that you've seen, and hopefully lots of Australians will see too.

Robyn Williams: Yes indeed, it's really terrific. And I must say that some of the money that we've had, the notes for example, at one stage I think almost the majority of the faces on our currency notes were of scientists, and its most encouraging that that should be the case. Howard Florey…I used to talk to my grandson and say, 'Would you like a picture of Howard Florey?' And they would look at me rather strangely, 'For your birthday?' And I would take out a picture, and they'd say, 'Oh yes, yes, yes,' and it's very convincing. An expensive game, but still.

I will introduce you one by one and ask particular things about what you do, starting with Peter Bernhardt who of course is way over in Missouri, the United States, where it's past midnight. Peter, you're a bee scientist and a botanist. Which comes first?

Peter Bernhardt: You might say I often think from the bees' point of view.

Robyn Williams: Right. Now, can you tell me, having worked in the United States as a scientist, you also came here and did a PhD in Melbourne, so you know this place very well and you are very fond of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie and been involved at that kind of level, both popular and deeply scientific. What do you think the relationship was…when the European bee landed, what sort of effect was there in terms of the other insects and the spread and so on? Does anyone know?

Peter Bernhardt: That's an ongoing research topic that a number of people have been studying. It's very difficult to judge the impact on the native fauna. There are those who would say it has been, to a certain extent, deleterious, that in certain cases they have depleted nectar and pollen consumed by a lot of other native animals, both insects and birds and small mammals.

Robyn Williams: But then of course the balance was reached fairly quickly, I would imagine, as they spread across the country. And I'm thinking rather more really of the ways in which maybe the botany of Australia changed, because bees are famous for being fooled, perhaps, in the nicest possible way, by structures on plants that pretend to be something else.

Peter Bernhardt: Well, from what we can see so far, the Eurasian honeybee is much brighter, they do not seem to get fooled as much. I know what you're referring to, a number of the native orchids which are pretending to offer something to consume and do not. The honeybees, at least as I've examined the systems in Victoria and in Western Australia, the honeybees as a rule don't fall for it.

Robyn Williams: How many species of European bees are there?

Peter Bernhardt: In Australia alone there are at least 2,000 native species.

Robyn Williams: Oh, native ones, I'm talking about the European ones.

Peter Bernhardt: The honeybee of Eurasia, the Apis mellifera, is the commercial honeybee, but it's not the only one, there are at least five species in the genus Apis, it gets very debatable at certain points how many there are, and in fact when I lived in the Yunnan in China, the prized bee was Apis cerana. I’ve have had the honey that it makes in Alpine fields in the Hengduan Mountains and it's delicious. The honeybee of commerce in China now is good old Apis mellifera, the semidomesticated Chinese honeybee, that's mostly just for hobby purposes these days.

Robyn Williams: Kingsley Dixon, you're at Curtin University in Western Australia, and I talked to you a couple of years ago about the fact that you are a beekeeper, and I think you have 12 different Australian species in your garden.

Kingsley Dixon: They are my native species, I'm very proud of those, and they are all solitary and they live in very ancient burrows we are now estimating to be 60 to 100 years old, so very stable environments, unlike the honeybee which always swarms. But being a beekeeper as well and being raised in a beekeeping family, I despised keeping honeybees because as a little kid I was always sent in with limited protection to begin the robbing process and suffered the iniquity of endless stings. My father…in the belief that bee stings were good for rheumatism, but I thought, well, I'm a little kid, I don't have rheumatism. But we used to produce many kilos of delicious honey, and that's when I started to discover the miracle of Australian eucalypt honey, which is something we'll talk about a little later.

Robyn Williams: Yes indeed. Over to Anthony Bertini, and I remember getting…I think it was just over a year ago, a note from you saying you would like to launch your book, Just One Bee, with the Governor General in Admiralty House. And Anthony Bertini, I thought you were joking. Now, your background is innovation and all sorts of things like that, which are lateral thinking, but it turned out to be true. And there we were on a wonderful day, and your book, written for children…why did you choose to write that book in that way?

Anthony Bertini: Two reasons. One, I was asked to do a book on climate change for children by my publisher, and secondly it's an issue that is now more and more children are asking about in terms of climate change and getting younger and younger all the time. So when the publisher asked, I said, yes, I'll give it a go. And it was one of those things that I thought if you're going to do climate change you may as well do it about bees, because if there's no bees, there is no climate and there is no food. And one of the things that I am involved in more generally is the repurposing of waste for food, so it sort of made a lot of sense to me to actually write a children's book about climate change with bees as the focus.

Robyn Williams: Now, physically I know a little bit about bees and six legs and lovely wings and so on, and a beautiful depiction actually on the coin, but your bee has a plait, strangely enough rather like Greta Thunberg. Was that especially imagined for, that resemblance?

Anthony Bertini: Yes, that was intentional, and Chris Nielsen, who was the illustrator, it was his gift to the children, his gift to the world, he did a very, very good job on that I think, and yes, it is a salute to Greta.

Robyn Williams: Did you know that David Hurley actually kept bees himself at one stage, the Governor General?

Anthony Bertini: No. An interesting story for everyone is that my co-author Margrete Lamond and I, we went into the Governor General's library when we launched the book and he told a story, he says, 'I keep bees, I'm a beekeeper, and my bees make a thing called Isabella honey, Isabella named after the Isabella, obviously, the ship that first brought honeybees into Australia.' And I said, 'Really?' And so he is a beekeeper, he has his own brand of honey called Isabella, you cannot buy it but I do happen to have one little pot of it in safekeeping. No, he is a beekeeper and he keeps a traditional life.

Robyn Williams: And wasn't it a charming event because everyone was so jolly about it. The one bee, and it was like the solitary person thinking 'what can I do, the world is so big, the problems are so huge'. And then you realise, if one of you gets together with another one and then another one, as the story unfolds, then you can solve a problem. And then the Governor General's wife actually sang for us, didn't she.

Anthony Bertini: Yes, she wrote a special song. Apparently she does end special events with her own song, and she wrote a song about bees and we all have to sing along and she gave us the chorus and that was a lot of fun, it was a hoot, it was probably one of the best receptions we've ever had, that I've ever been to, and what a great place to launch the book, Robyn, you were there as the MC for the day.

Robyn Williams: Now, so much for the generalities, to introduce you all, apart from one person, Annelies McGaw, who of course has written some of the background and done some of the research about what we should know linking to the coin. Why did you choose whatever you did?

Annelies McGaw: When we were approached by both the Australian Honeybee Industry Council and the Mint to discuss what could go around the packaging for the coin, we really talked about what was important about bees, why are they so important, and what does the general public need to know about bees they might not know. And so it was definitely those things like a third of what you eat is pollinated by honeybees, that there are 35 varieties, or there's 35 agricultural crops that rely on pollination by honeybees, that sort of stuff was really what we wanted to communicate around with the coin to make sure that people really understood why it was important that we had honeybees in our landscape.

Robyn Williams: And what you wanted to show is how enormously important they are, looking after our crops, looking after what we eat. They are not just little buzzing things in the garden, which are quite cute really, isn't it nice that they help a bit, they are not incidental, they are vital.

Annelies McGaw: 'Vital' is absolutely the right word for it, Robyn. Like I said, there are 35 crops that rely on honeybees and that's everything from almonds to avocados to pumpkins to watermelon to apples and pears, cherries, and even a lot of the vegetable seed production relies on the European Honeybee and even canola seed production relies on honeybees. So, literally just about every meal you have is likely to have something on there that has had pollination from honeybees.

Robyn Williams: One of the problems with the populations, and I'm thinking of America, you mentioned almonds just now and I was amazed when I was there last to be told that when the almonds need to be pollinated, the flowers, they actually have trucks with hives so that you can release bees which will then come back, because the local bees have been decimated for some reason.

Annelies McGaw: So, bees come from all over Australia, from south-eastern Queensland right through to South Australia all congregate in that southern Riverina area for almond pollination season. It's actually touted as the biggest movement of livestock in Australia because honeybees are considered livestock in our legislation. So it's the biggest movement of livestock, well over a billion bees actually move to pollinate almonds. And it's not so much that bees in the area have been decimated…

Robyn Williams: Well, I was thinking more of in the United States this goes on.

Annelies McGaw: See, I really can't comment on the US, it's a very different system to how we work here. Peter might have some background here about how it works.

Robyn Williams: Peter Bernhardt, what about this picture I had of almonds having to have trucks of bees brought around because the local populations of bees had been decimated? Maybe in California.

Peter Bernhardt: Well, maybe in California. I can only presume that the reason for that would be a heavy use of insecticide in the almond groves, but I've always thought that one of the reasons that honeybees were a necessity for almonds is that they are one of the earliest flowering trees, one of the earliest flowering crop plants. And, let's see, in California they are probably in bloom by February, which is comparable to August in Australia, and I would suspect at that time of the year the native pollinators may not be terribly active.

Robyn Williams: But going to the…40% of the bee population is in peril, Peter, what's the cause?

Peter Bernhardt: There isn't one single cause. There are problems, once again, with the use of certain types of insecticides. There is, as usual, habitat destruction. We have to realise that not all bees, in fact the majority of bees do not live in man-made hives, they need a certain about of space. Some in fact live in soil, they make burrows, some live in twigs and in wood. So, some of it has of course been considered in terms of climate change, there are optimal temperatures for certain bees. The problem with bee diversity is comparable to that of the diversity of certain native birds or other insects.

Robyn Williams: Kingsley, when you are looking at the behaviour now, there's two pictures really. On the one hand you've got bees which are alive, at least if you are a worker or something like that, for a relatively short time, and during that time you've got to work very hard, you've got to go out there and you've got to find out where the flowers are, come back, do a little dance, and the science of that won Von Frisch a Nobel prize something like 30 years ago. And there is a wonderful subtlety, a demonstration of the ways in which they have control over their habit and control over their local area. But I was also told that if you had a hive and the bees went out and you very naughtily moved the hive, say, 10 metres to the left, they would go to where the hive was and miss it. That's true, is it?

Kingsley Dixon: Yes, look, the geo-positioning of these insects astonishes me constantly. So, down on my farm we just had 200 hives there, all perfectly placed, and they were all identical. And some of these were multitiered, they had multiple queens in them, so they were a high rise of hives. And I'm thinking, well, there must be, out of that, 2-3 million bees at any moment going back to exactly the right hole. And you really have to be…you know, we sit around with our Google phones and try to find somebody's address, we get lost and we blame the phone, and here's an insect that lives for three weeks with the most perfect GPS on the planet.

And what's even more intriguing is you can move the hive but if you move the hive even half a metre, they will keep going back to that one spot. And so when you move your hives, if there has been any poor workers that have been left out in the forest or out in the fields that then turn up the next day, they will go precisely…they will geo-position precisely to that spot and mill around and mill around until eventually they die.

And of course as a young beekeeper I used to try to collect them and take them back to the hive, but of course they just keep re-homing, so it's a big issue. But our native bees are really astonishing. So in a square metre we might have 150 little tiny black holes, and the bee always knows which one of those holes is the right hole. So what I was starting to do was to block a hole to see what would happen, and they kept going to the block, and I'm thinking, well, I won't keep doing that. So it's an extraordinarily successful strategy for honeybees, they are probably one of the most successful social animals on the planet. It operates by a monarchy, autocracy, whatever, but there is a form of democracy in the hive and it's all translated to the offspring.

Robyn Williams: Talking about offspring, is there any dalliance that you know of, Kingsley? In other words, with all these 1,500 different species of native bees, with all those European bees around, inevitably surely something might happen?

Kingsley Dixon: No. It's a little like saying we could breed with earthworms. The honeybee, for example, diverged from probably the main group of native bees we have in Australia about 80 million years ago, which is 80 times longer than the whole human evolution. So they have developed extraordinarily refined techniques. And of course the pheromones, the sex hormones and the alarm pheromones, they are all perfectly designed for individual bees. So you can get an alarm pheromone out of a European honeybee, but it won't activate any of the native bees at all. So it's all perfectly compartmentalised, and everybody goes around their business quite blinded to any competitors around, and that's certainly some of the work that we found is that there seems to be a surplus, particularly in Australia, of honey supplies at certain times of the year.

Robyn Williams: Isn't that a contradiction in terms, Annelies, a surplus of honey?

Annelies McGaw: Never, Robyn, there's never a surplus of honey, as far as we're concerned.

Robyn Williams: Never in my house.

Annelies McGaw: No, never in my house either.

Robyn Williams: It disappears. But what sort of range of honeys do we have then that people might notice? Are they that different?

Kingsley Dixon: We are discovering the extraordinary diversity of Australian honeys. We all know yellow box from the east coast, you see that in supermarkets and so on, but we are now discovering the mallee honeys, the desert honeys, the tropical honeys. But when we get to the south-west of the continent, jarrah and marri honey is of course right up there now. Jarrah honey has four times the activity of manuka. This is a great forest giant where you can produce probably up to quarter of a tonne of honey from a hectare of forest. Extraordinarily productive. And of course nectar is one of the cheapest products, it's just carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, it's a bit of water and carbon dioxide and a bit of photosynthesis and you can make this fabulous product that we love, and as long as you get it from eucalyptus you get all these wonderful antimicrobial benefits. And Annelies, you can talk about some of the other fabulous Australian varietal honeys.

Annelies McGaw: Yes, so I completely agree, Kingsley, I think marri and jarrah honey…I think those are some great successes of Australian varietal honeys. The Western Australian beekeepers have done a magnificent job of both understanding the health benefits of those honeys, and then exporting those to the world. We export those particular honeys all over south-eastern Asia, and I think I saw a sign recently, $200 for a kilo of jarrah…no, I think it was 250ml or something ridiculous, because people understand the health benefits of those particular varieties. But the same, like I was saying earlier, Robyn, things like spotted gum as well are coming back with MGO numbers similar, if not greater than manuka honey. So we have some amazing varietal species.

But also, like I was saying, we are doing some work with the University of Technology in Sydney looking at how honey interacts with your stomach and your gastrointestinal system, and it looks like any honey is worthwhile, it's not just single varietal honey, but having a teaspoon of honey in warm water first thing every morning, incredibly beneficial to your gut.

Robyn Williams: Peter Bernhardt, what was the secret of the wonderful honey that you came across in China?

Peter Bernhardt: Probably the fact that the honeybees there had perhaps 20 or 30 native species of Chinese plants on which to forage. The flora of Yunnan at between about 3,000 to 3,900 metres above sea level is absolutely extraordinary, and I probably consumed the honey taken from the nectar of dozens of trees and shrubs and wildflowers. At certain elevations we actually see these areas known as wet meadows, they are getting the run-off from the mountains and the glaciers, it's too wet for trees to grow, so there is virtually this sea of primroses and alfalfa and potentilla, and that's where one finds the Apis.

Robyn Williams: And so when you look back to the Isabella and the first landing exactly 200 years ago, how long do you imagine it took the European bees simply to spot 'there were the gums, there were the flowers of the gums, let's go for it'? Or did they have to do learn that over a trying period?

Robyn Williams: Next morning? How come?

Kingsley Dixon: They are built to collect nectar, and once one bee…when you are robbing your hives, if you leave one little bit of honey outside of your hive, it will take the message back and then literally five minutes later there is 20, and then there will be 500. So, the message gets around.

Robyn Williams: I see. Peter, do you think they adapted just as quickly, as Kingsley was saying?

Peter Bernhardt: Even quicker. I've watched honeybees that have been introduced into Australia, into Central America such as El Salvador and Guatemala. I may be the only person on this panel who has ever eaten the honey from a coffee plantation. Different parts of North America, they are very canny, they know exactly where to go and they pick up on all of the floral signals of odour and colour.

Robyn Williams: Well, to look on the other side of adaptation, I think, Peter, you've written to some extent about when some European bees go feral, when they go off, leave the hive and go bush. How does that happen?

Peter Bernhardt: Very easily. Actually Kingsley is the person who I think should be speaking about that, since he keeps them. What happens when you get new queens and the population of the hive has to make certain decisions, Kingsley?

Kingsley Dixon: Well, I have been seen running behind one of my swarms across a wheat paddock with my net, trying to get the queen back because you lose a third of your animals and potentially that is your good queen. So we all do line breeding of queens, and we use line-bred queens to get passivity, high workability, and great reproductive capacity. And you don't want to lose them.

But every year there is a tussle between the daughter and the ruling monarch, and the ruling queen gets booted out, she takes some of the hive with her, and so you start losing that. And so the thing is you manage that, and you know when they are going to swarm, you see the queen cells and you manage your hives, and so it's a plea actually to all the burgeoning number of honeybee keepers in backyards to keep their hives from swarming, you'll actually get a stronger hive, and go and re-queen them every year or every two years, and there are lots of people who can provide that service, and then you will keep them from going into our bushland, and importantly, Peter, going into the nest hollows of some of our rare parrots and cockatoo species. Commercial beekeepers of course operate very slick operations, they don't want swarming, so they have all sorts of means to combat that problem.

Robyn Williams: What sort of means, what do they do?

Kingsley Dixon: What you do is you just keep an eye on what's happening inside the hive, you grub out any of those, you re-queen to keep them fresh, the queen cells, you get rid of those. Occasionally you can put queen excluders on which will hold the hold the queen inside, and then there's a battle royale inside as the two queens fight to the death, not generally favoured. But it's about good management. And once you get into re-queening and managing your hive, even me as a backyard beekeeper, you actually come to appreciate your hive and then you get these lovely passive, fabulous bees that aren't stinging people and chasing the dog around.

Robyn Williams: Now, we are talking about the little golden wonder and celebrating the release of the coin, the $2 coin with a wonderful depiction of both a honeycomb and of course the bee itself. Our panel, that's Annelies McGaw, Peter Bernhardt in the States, Anthony Bertini, Kingsley Dixon who is in Perth.

Anthony Bertini, you wrote the book about Just One Bee, it was for children, and then what happened? How did the children respond to the story of the bee?

Anthony Bertini: The response has been amazing. We created a story-walk through the Botanic Gardens in Orange, and children just went from panel to panel to panel to panel, school groups went there. I get feedback now, the book is now in its third printing, and I get feedback all the time from parents, and I'll just read this out to you, Robyn, because it's not just about bees, it's about being resilient and not taking no for an answer, it's about children making a difference. And so I get these sorts of responses, eight-year-olds: 'Everything is unique.' 11-year-old: 'You don't need a lot of people to change the world, anyone can do it. You only need one person.' The eight-year-old then says: 'It could be me.'

Now, that's the sort of thing that we want to instil in children, and I think when there's so much crisis around the world, the response has been tremendous, and so we are constantly getting this sort of feedback, so it has obviously worked. Hopefully it will actually encourage more and more people to have small little hives in their backyard. But generally it has been about lifting children's spirits in life, in climate despair, and it's actually working.

Robyn Williams: Well, Anthony Bertini, you are in innovation, you are also in business. But, thirdly you are involved in the 350 Organisation, '350' being the parts per million of carbon dioxide, way back. It's now 420 parts per million and going up. How much do you know would the bees be affected by such climate change?

Anthony Bertini: From what I can gather through my reading, I think bees are running into real problems around the world by climate change, I think we are in a lot of trouble, I think we are in a lot of trouble generally around food. What we have now is we are seeing in terms of the supply chain being broken, the amount of food that's available, our inability to grow as much food as we need to grow over the next probably 30 or 40 years. I think food production needs to increase by something like 65% of what we currently produce. Now, we don't have enough bees to pollinate another 65% more food, so I think we are generally heading into a catastrophe.

Robyn Williams: And Kingsley, what do you think we can do about it?

Kingsley Dixon: Well, quite simply, and the international society that I chair, the Society for Ecological Restoration, we talk about…we have 60 harvests remaining on the planet, given the current climate projections. And it really is about people caring…Peter Bernhardt talked about this…caring about the areas around your crop or your production area to ensure that not only do you keep honeybees happy but you keep and build up your native insects and your native bee diversity. It is a picture of diverse pollinators, with the honeybee being integral to that.

So it's about restoring landscapes, bringing back essentially across the world what Britain did so well which was the hedgerows, which became Britain's great conservation avenues and corridors right through the countryside, that's what we need to do. And it has been shown in California that the moment you maintain wildflower meadows, particularly along road verges, suddenly your crop productivity can go up. So your strawberries are bigger and they are actually more tasty.

In my cherry crop this year…we had a very cold winter and it was too hard for my hives, so I got people to bring in what they call nucleus hives to put on my dwarf cherries. And we got a very handsome crop indeed. I wasn't looking forward to the paintbrush on all the thousands and thousands of cherry blossoms.

Robyn Williams: Well, Kingsley and Annelies, stand by for a couple of questions, one of them is actually from Kay Hayes who is listening: 'Why is honey just from one flower, like leatherwood honey, and not mixed up with other flowers?' Now, of course Peter was talking about the secret of the Chinese honey being from different sources, but what we've got seems to be, she implies, that it's from one source.

Annelies McGaw: So, mono-floral honeys is what we are talking about. I don't know, Kingsley might agree with me on this, it's really hard to have a mono-floral honey. Realistically bees can move up to five kilometres from a hive, they will be looking at all sorts of different things around. The majority of our landscapes are that mixed floral style anyway, so when you talk about yellow box honey, it's most likely that they are probably getting red box, Blakely's red gum, white box as well in there, and that's just the upper story, you've got to talk about the middle and the lower story as well, or the grevilleas or the acacias, all that sort of stuff as well in the middle and lower. So it's quite hard to get a mono-floral honey. Jarrah is a bit different because the jarrah forests tend to be mostly jarrah, and the same with leatherwood. Technically it's quite difficult, wouldn't you agree, Kingsley?

Kingsley Dixon: Yes, I think Australia is the one place…well, there are a couple of other exceptions, there is the famous pine honey of the eastern Mediterranean, and Sidr honey, which is the famous black honey from the Ziziphus tree, they are mono-florals, but that's when people specifically keep their hives only on those particular species. And Eucryphia, which of course is leatherwood, they go in because that has mast flowering, lots of flowers at that time. And honeybees, if there is a canola or a big, fat, juicy yellow box flower, you know where they'll go, they will go to the big, juicy eucalypt every time, and then they go back and tell the other girls, 'hey, there's pretty good pickings over there forget that yellow stuff'. But eventually when that stops they will go on to that. So there is quite a pecking order, and I know the beekeepers in Western Australia now have a very fine-tuned machine for getting probably a whole host of mono-florals based on the massed flowering of those species. And you don't generally get a lot of the species co-flowering.

Robyn Williams: Next question. I'm not quite sure who can handle this one, and neither does the person who asks, Rose Merryman: 'Not sure if panellists have a view on this, but I was reading the other day about scientists developing what they call vegan honey, basically synthesised from plants. How would bees and honey supplies be impacted by something like this?' Any volunteers?

Annelies McGaw: Peter, do you want to talk about this one?

Peter Bernhardt: I've never heard of such a thing. Honey is vegan, it's about as vegan as you can get. I will throw one thing in though. I just heard about nectar from wattles or acacias; there is no such thing. Wattles do not secrete nectar, I worked on this in the early '80s with very talented people from the University of Melbourne, and wattles do not secrete nectar from their florets. In some cases though, certain wattles have nectar glands on their phyllodes and at the base of their leaves, which is usually a reward for ants to keep the wattle clean of sucking pests, but the honeybees definitely do find them, and they are consuming these secretions. But let's make a point about honeybees, it's not just the nectar they want; you can't raise a baby bee on the sugar and water in nectar, you must have fat, you must have protein and that's where the pollen comes in. And acacia pollen in August is extremely important for Australian honeybees.

Robyn Williams: A question for Leigh Gordon: 'When will we be able to find these bee coins in our change?'

Leigh Gordon: So, we've certainly released collectable coins a couple of months ago and they have been very popular, about 60,000 of them. Over the next couple of months we will be releasing a circulating coin version through the banks, so people should be looking for them in their change in the next few months. And it is really a beautiful coin, the gold in the centre and the honeycomb shape really look quite striking, although it is very small, a $2 coin, you need to have your microscope to have a bit of a look. But as the coin wears, that honeycomb is going to come up, I think it's a beautiful coin. So yes, everybody should be looking for them in their change in a few months’ time, and certainly see the beauty that is there in the honeybee coin.

Robyn Williams: And from Steve Fuller: 'Why was a picture of a bumblebee used on the card instead of a picture of a Euro honeybee? Bumblebees are not on the mainland, only in Tasmania.' Now, is this, the one I'm looking at, a bumblebee, on the card?

Annelies McGaw: Can we see a picture of the card?

Kingsley Dixon: Oh dear, yes, bumblebee, hmm, we don't want those.

Robyn Williams: Don't we like them too?

Kingsley Dixon: We like them in Europe but they're not Australian.

Annelies McGaw: Well, they like them a lot in Tasmania, they are very handy in Tasmania for pollination production down there, and I know that greenhouse producers in the mainland of Australia would love to get bumblebees, but we've so far said no which is probably a good thing to do, I would say.

Robyn Williams: Annelies, why would they love them?

Annelies McGaw: So, it's really hard to have European honeybees, they've tried a number of different native bees in greenhouses for tomato production and that sort of stuff, and European honeybees don't work the same way. Kingsley, it's something about being a buzz pollinator, isn't it, the bumblebee?

Kingsley Dixon: Yes, they are not buzz pollinators that you need with tomatoes, that's why people go around with tuning forks or funny little devices that vibrate to do the greenhouse pollination of tomatoes.

Annelies McGaw: Yes, so we recently went up to Guyra in northern New South Wales to have a look at the massive cost of production up there with tomatoes, and the producer there was lamenting the fact that we didn't have the bumblebees.

Robyn Williams: Now, I see on the chat that there has been a question about black honey, which, Kingsley, you answered. What was the answer? What is black honey?

Kingsley Dixon: Well, it's Sidr honey, and it's the honey from Ziziphus spina-christi, which is of course 'the spines of Christ', and this was the tree that was thought to make the crown of thorns at the crucifixion. And I knew about this from my Saudi Arabian colleagues when we were doing some big restoration projects there, and, being a beekeeper, I said I really want to try this famous a black honey, and they said, well, it's very expensive.

And so they took me to a souk and we wandered through these amazing souks full of all the wonderful foods and spices, and then we went to the specialist honey shops. And Middle Eastern cultures revere honey and it is treasured and you don't find it abandoned sitting on the sides of shelves, there was actually special shops. So I went into several shops and I said, 'Do you have Sidr honey?' 'Yes.' And I was trying to get a taste, and I said, 'Where is it?' And they pointed to the big locked cabinets on the wall, they said, 'It's in there.' I said, 'Can I have a look at it?' 'Are you going to buy it?' 'Well, how much a kilogram?' It worked out at US$400 a kilo. And I'm going, 'Hmm, I'd like to taste it first.'

And I finally found one person who opened the cabinet, took the wooden box out, opened the wooden box and inside were the containers of the Sidr honey and he said, 'I'm not supposed to do this but you can have a taste.' And it was this rich, thick, lustrous honey, like burnt orange taste. And then he said, 'You know this comes from special clay hives from very high temperature areas and they get very low productivity, and the tree doesn't flower that often,' and blah, blah, blah, and there's a whole lot of stories around it, but I did get my little taste, but I didn't fork over the $400.

Robyn Williams: By the way, we've had another comment rather than a question, from Brad Halson, he says: 'The honeybee coins are already in circulation. Why are they circulating in Queensland and not elsewhere?' Leigh?

Leigh Gordon: I am surprised that they are in circulation, but certainly what we do is we make the coins and then the banks demand the coins often, they go into the depots and then get circulated out into banks and into people's change through tills and things like that. So certainly if they are in Queensland, I can't disagree with that at the moment, it would mean that they are going out across Australia. Everybody should be using a little bit of cash and keeping an eye on the change that you're getting and you might be surprised by a honeybee coin or indeed any of the other beautiful coins that we make here at the Mint.

Robyn Williams: Indeed. Well, Anthony, you're married to a banker, what's the answer?

Anthony Bertini: I'm not really too sure, Robyn, but I do think one of the issues…I just want to make a point about…we talk about bees and we talk about the production of food, I think we've got to try and look at the interconnectedness of all things. You know, like when we start looking at mono-crops, it's very good that everyone wants to drink almond milk, but almond is a very big use of water. It's very good that everyone wants to eat more soy, but you've got to cut down more of the Amazon to grow more soy.

I think we start to lose sight of this whole interconnectedness, even in terms of governments, when governments say…our own governments say we want to increase the productivity of our farming sector. I've never heard one minister talk about increasing the population of bees, for instance. And I think it's really interesting that people have lost sight of the interconnectedness of the world that we are in in terms of food production. And I actually think bees should be very topical on the lips of everybody in government today, especially the Department of Agriculture. Now we have a new government, we might see a different take on bees I think.

Robyn Williams: I'll ask each of you finally to give a vision for the future. And Anthony, if I were to ask you, what would you say?

Anthony Bertini: A vision for the future? I think the future is going to be a real struggle, Robyn, I'm not as much an optimist as other people. I'd like to think there is. But in the world that I'm in now, I'm now seeing a complete reduction in the availability of food. We are lucky for what we have living in Australia, we see an abundance. I think you've just seen a report that has just come out on a number…I think it's now 800-900 million people will be starving in the next 12 months. I think it's going to be a struggle for us to feed everybody and to continue to grow. I think more innovation in food has to happen.

Robyn Williams: And you'll take the bee as a symbol of peace.

Robyn Williams: Yes. Annelies, what about your vision for the future?

Annelies McGaw: My vision for the future is a lot of what Anthony has said, is that I feel…and maybe I'm a bit more of an optimist than Anthony, but I feel we have the capacity here within Australian agriculture to really meet the goal that we need to achieve to be able to feed not only ourselves but the rest of the world. I think there are massive opportunities within the beekeeping industry at the present time around business opportunities, to get involved in the beekeeping industry and start treating beekeeping as a business, like all parts of the agricultural system struggle with treating their aspect as a business, but I think there are massive opportunities.

We are already being outpaced by the almond situation in Australia with having enough bees to go to almond pollination each year. I think Australians are innovators. I think we have the capacity. We are actually doing something at the Fourth Australian Bee Congress called the Bee Tech Challenge where we are having seven different tech companies who do tech for beekeepers come in and talk about why their bee tech is so good. But also to be mentored by beekeepers to really understand what beekeepers need. And then hopefully we will be able to narrow that down to one or two pieces of tech that we can really push forward across the beekeeping industries. And just finally, we are doing the Bee Tech Challenge thanks to actually Minister Littleproud, our previous Minister who funded that whole activity.

Robyn Williams: Indeed. Well, it's 1 o'clock in the morning where you are, in Missouri, Peter Bernhardt, your vision, if you have some left?

Peter Bernhardt: Thank you. I do agree with the previous two speakers but, you know, I think we can depend on the honeybee because they do very well under extremes. One can expect honeybees working under very hot conditions, one can see them working under cool conditions, at least I have, I have seen them at low elevations and working at high elevations. And I've often wondered in certain cases did human beings select honeybees or did honeybees select human beings?

Robyn Williams: We have said the same about dogs and other creatures, you know, did we domesticate dogs or did they domesticate us? Similarly with insects. Very interesting, thank you. And Kingsley?

Kingsley Dixon: Well, for Australia I think the honeybee industry and the honey industry, I think we've got some exciting opportunities, as Annelies said. Wherever I go talking to beekeepers, their innovation, their creativity, their dedication and their professionalism astounds me, and they thirst for innovation. And I think we are seeing a major revival in people reconnecting to the land. This seems to be this post-Covid environmental awareness for the planet. Maybe that was part of what happened on the elections, people saying the planet is sick, we are sick, we need to do better.

But one of the I think most exciting things that has come into my life as a beekeeper and as a research scientist is a new program that we are rolling out which is around developing an Indigenous-led honey economy, and it's through a program funded by the Australian Research Council which starts on 1st August which is called Healing Country, and it's about restoring 48% of the country that we've degraded, putting back bush, putting back the right species, but at the same time looking at benefits, and one of those is Indigenous people want to have beekeeping. And so we want to train all those Indigenous youth in remote communities to give us their specialist honeys and then, Annelies, we can start getting extraordinary mono-florals that will make manuka look like taking an aspirin.

Robyn Williams: Sorry New Zealanders!

Anthony Bertini: Here's a thought, Robyn, I'll put it to you, what if a good government policy would be to subsidise beekeeping for all farmers in Australia? If every farmer became a beekeeper and had hives on all their properties. Annelies, do you think that would make a significant difference if we could do that?

Annelies McGaw: Well, Anthony, I think it probably would. Look, I'm not for subsidising generally in agriculture. My family has a sheep dairy in the UK, so I'm not big on subsidising agriculture. I really think that the business side of beekeeping is an untapped option for all landholders, users, because you don't have to have land to be a beekeeper. Go and get yourself a permit into a piece of forest, or go and see another land holder. On our place here, come and see us and put some hives out here. Yes, I think there is some real opportunities businesswise, so I would say yes it probably would help but I don't think it's necessary, I think we need to, Kingsley, get better at spruiking our own industry, it's such a great industry, get involved, that's what I say. Leigh, I expect to see a hive in your backyard in six months.

Robyn Williams: Excellent. Well, thank you all. Peter Bernhardt in St Louis, Kingsley Dixon in Perth, Anthony Bertini in Sydney, in Mosman, and Annelies, I'm not quite sure where you are, but thank you as well. And over to you, Leigh Gordon, finally.

Leigh Gordon: Thanks very much for that. It's been a great discussion. I guess I'd like to reflect on the fact that an anniversary and a coin has encouraged us to have a discussion, has encouraged a process of education. And I guess if I was looking at the future, certainly from a Mint point of view, we want to keep considering the stories that we need to tell, and I think there is now the potential for a story where we can talk about the native bees and get some discussions going on that as well. So we are certainly considering that as a program for the future. But I hope everybody today has appreciated that currency can be part of a social fabric, inspire a bit of a discussion, and it's great to commemorate something that is as strong for Australia, the bee industry, as we've all discovered today. So, I really enjoyed everybody's contributions, thanks very much for that.

Robyn Williams: There we heard: Leigh Gordon, CEO of the Royal Australian Mint; Anthony Bertini, whose book about a very special bee was launched with the help of the Governor General at Admiralty House; Professor Peter Bernhardt, botanist and bee researcher speaking in the middle of the night from St Louis, Missouri; Annelies McGaw, manager research for honeybee and pollination, AgriFutures Australia; and Professor Kingsley Dixon, beekeeper in Perth and Curtin University. Our Executive Producer was Mary-Anne Waldren in New Zealand, and you may remember she helped invent the Canberra Science Festival way back, which led to the National Australian Science Fest, coming once again in August.

Here at the ABC, production was by David Fisher and Roi Huberman. Next week, we begin a Science Show series on music. Stay sweet.

The first European honeybees arrived in Australia on 20th May 1822. Four bee experts recount the effects on Australia's native bees, on honey production, on ecology and farming. And a new $2 coin is being released featuring bees, golden honeycomb and Eucalyptus flowers.

Guests Peter Bernhardt Botanist, St Louis Missouri USA

Anthony Bertini Author of Children’s book on climate change Just one Bee

Kingsley Dixon Botanist, former head of Perth Botanical Gardens and bee keeper

Leigh Gordon CEO Royal Australian Mint

Annelies McGaw Manager Research for Honey Bee Pollination, Thoroughbred Horses and Pasture Seeds Programs AgriFutures Australia

Producers David Fisher Mary-Anne Waldren

Technical Producers Emrys Cronin Roi Huberman

Published: WedWed 13 Jul 2022 at 3:14am

Published: WedWed 13 Jul 2022 at 3:14am

Published: WedWed 13 Jul 2022 at 3:14am

Published: WedWed 13 Jul 2022 at 3:14am

We acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Australians and Traditional Custodians of the lands where we live, learn and work.