Lines of defence
“I HAD MY LITTLE GRANDSON out in the garden with me the other day,” says Ian Cane, a beekeeper whose family has been in the industry for more than 100 years. “I’d planted some carrots, and I was showing him how the bees go from one carrot flower to the next to pollinate them. They don’t go over to the apple tree and mix up the pollen, and that’s why we don’t get something that’s half an apple and half a carrot. And he said to me, ‘That’s almost magic, isn’t it, Pa?’”
Magic, maybe, but a particularly practical kind of magic. “About one-third of the food we consume every day is reliant upon pollination from bees,” says Adam McNamara, executive general manager of Bega Foods. The humble honeybee, it turns out, is an economic powerhouse: Australia’s agricultural and horticultural industries rely on bee pollination to the tune of about $6 billion every year. So any threat to our bee population is one that not only conservationists, but also food producers, are bound to take very seriously. And a is a particularly deadly threat that’s spreading fast.
