The first step is to pour gasoline into the beehive. Then it’s waiting. The job is done when the hive is burned the next day.
As of last week, the cycle has been repeating itself near a port in eastern Australia, as part of a government effort to protect the country’s multimillion-dollar honey industry.
Millions of bees have been destroyed to stem the spread of the deadly Varroa mite, which appeared in the country near Newcastle harbour last week.
“Australia is the only major honey-producing country free of Varroa mite,” said Satendra Kumar, the chief plant protection officer for the state of New South Wales, where the plague was discovered Friday. If the varroa mite were to settle in Australia, he said it could cost the country’s honey industry more than $70 million a year, in addition to the effect on crops that rely on bee pollination.
The global agricultural industry is already reeling from higher fertilizer, fuel and machinery prices, as well as supply chain problems caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The war in Ukraine is an additional blow.
Authorities have ordered a virtual shutdown of beehives in the affected part of the state. Normally, beehives are moved from place to place, a process critical to the $15 billion Australian horticultural industry as they are used to pollinate crops.
The mites, which are reddish-brown and about the size of a sesame seed, can spread from bee to bee and through beekeeping equipment, including combs that have been extracted. If left untreated, the mites can kill an entire colony of honeybees, the government has said.
Controlling the mite is not easy, and even the New South Wales government agency responsible for the eradication efforts admits that “it is generally accepted that it is inevitable that Varroa mites will eventually establish themselves in Australia.”
Still, the government is doing its best to delay the inevitable. Previous incursions, in 2016, 2019 and 2020, are considered successful, according to the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries.
According to Danny Le Feuvre, the acting head of the Australian Honey Bee Industrial Council, one of the biggest challenges in current containment efforts is figuring out the location of infected hives and mapping their distribution over a vast area. It is necessary to keep Newcastle harbor and the beehives within a 50km radius, he said.
The port is a major shipping destination and one of the world’s busiest coal export hubs.
Mr Feuvre and his team are working with at least 300 beekeepers to visit farms and assist the authorities with their inspection drives. They wash the hives with alcohol and check with adhesive mats whether the bees are infected with the mites.
So far, at least 600 beehives, each containing about 30,000 bees, have been destroyed in the area, he said.
But authorities have found at least nine more sites of infections — one up to 235 miles away, near the town of Dubbo. Many more bees are at risk of being destroyed in the coming days, Dugald Saunders, the state’s agriculture secretary, said at a news conference Thursday.
“The beekeepers are very nervous at the moment,” said Mr Feuvre.
He said he was confident the country could contain the spread, given the history of previous bee mite eradication efforts and strict controls at all airports banning passengers from bringing live plants, soil, fruits and vegetables into Australia. .
“We’ve been wiping them out for so long,” he said. “We are going to do our best.”
