There once was a time when whisky and tea
were securely kept under lock and key,
but now with the demise of the humble bee,
we’ll be hanging onto our honey.
OK, honey doesn’t rhyme, but it’s integral to the story.
Hands up who has honey or fruit with breakfast every morning?
M . i ...olu..ly lo.. i. (I just put my left hand up)
Above the din of the crowd one night, Newham bee keeper Jim Sansom proclaimed “there’s no honey”. I rang him that week seeking an answer. “JIM! NOT FUNNY. WADDYA MEAN ‘NO HONEY’?”
Having harvested around a ton and a half for the previous two years, last year’s crop was nil. With little rain from Aug-Oct, the trees bypassed bud and went straight to leaf.
For the man who bought his first hive in 1956, the strain in his voice was obvious as he explained the plight of the humble bee (not the bumble bee, that’s another story).
The bigger problem is Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) which sees the bees abscond from their colony never to return - an underlying cause of which is the parasitic Varoa Mite.
The mite attaches itself to the bees, and they get weakened and the next thing they’re sick and exhausted and on their little knees, until finally they die !!! Every country in the world has this mite, except Australia. We are the Last Man Standing, and we are now exporting "clean bees" overseas.
The problem if the mite arrives here, will be when it escapes into the environment. Bees like to be busy, and most things in agriculture rely on them for pollination. Busy Busy Bees. If the wild bees get wiped out, we’re in big strife.
And so it's time to be both a Lert and a Larmed and urge our government to get serious about the few sentinel hives, mainly manned by volunteers, which are kept around the ports to detect the mite if it arrives.
Now that’s not a job that any bee wants. They’re like the canaries that get taken into a gas leak. (Vital, but ultimately a dead end job).
And while the bees are battling on two fronts, with the drought and the CCD, the sniffer dogs did their bit recently when somebody tried to smuggle in a few queen bees inside a fountain pen. (How did ... ?)
Jim reckons if we had a bounty we wouldn’t have a problem. I’m not sure if he expects us to shoot the offending bees, or the bloke that imports them.
The sentinel hives need to be properly manned by professional teams, particularly around the northern ports which are susceptible to infestation from near neighbours like Indonesia and PNG. If they're not sponsored with a trip in a biro, then they just hitchhike on the masts of ships. It's not so far to travel across the Coral Sea, y'see, basking in the tropical sun, buzzing busily on their way to the land of milk and ....
If you like to eat and you can write, then maybe have a cuppa with a drop of honey, and pick up your pen.
Jim Sansom. Newham. (03) 5427-0408