Original subtitles

There's one animal on the planet

that can make or break our food supply.

Even the shape of our food depends on it.

There's five sectors in apple.

If they're not pollinated evenly

then you don't get a perfectly-round apple.

We rely on bees to pollinate most

of our food crops; and one species in particular.

Of about 1500 species of bees that live in Australia,

this is the most recognizable

and the one we take most for granted:

the European Honeybee.

First introduced nearly 200 years ago,

they've been here long enough

to be considered practically native.

But elsewhere, the honeybee world

is in dire peril.

Each year for the last decade,

about a third of their colonies have died.

It's a mystery known as colony collapse disorder:

a perfect storm of pesticides, habitat loss,

diseases, and a vampire parasite called Varroa.

It's multiple effects; it's not just pesticides

and it's not just Varroa.

This is a story from the front line:

farmers, beekeepers, scientists, and honey lovers

determined to secure a future for bees

and for us.

When it comes to honeybees,

Australia really is the lucky country.

We're the last safe haven because

the Varroa mite isn't here yet.

Yeah, the only continent in the world that hasn't got it.

Well that's incredible. Yeah.

Is that just luck or good management?

Luck.

At a cost of only a couple of hundred

thousand dollars each year, hives like these

stand guard around our major ports

to detect invasions of exotic bees and pests.

Leatherwood honey producer Peter Norris

manages the sentinel hives in Hobart.

He dreads an invasion by Varroa.

We don't want 'em here.

We should do everything we can to keep it out.

Varroa is a genus of mites

that suck the blood of bees and their larvae,

spreading viral diseases.

Compared to the size of its host,

Varroa is one of the largest parasites on the planet.

This worker bee in the UK has a mite attached.

You can see how agitated the bee is,

which prevent it doing the jobs that keep a hive healthy.

Peter has seen the Varroa invastion before.

Well, I've had some experience.

I was in the UK when they discovered it there.

I've been keeping bees for quite a few years there.

Got out to about 150 hives.

And the year they discovered Varroa, it went down to 25.

We lost 80% of the bees in the southeast of England.

In a year?

In that one season, yeah.

What would you expect to see if you had

Varroa in this hive?

You would see adult bees with very deformed abdomens,

deformed wings not capable of flight;

because of that, the food supplies in the hive

diminish very rapidly.

That devastating prospect could be

entering a port right now.

Department of Agriculture officers board ships

to search for foreign insects; particularly Asian honeybees,

the natural host of Varroa mites.

A ship could be docked in an overseas port

and the swarm will come and just by accident

laying on our ship or some cargo.

And that will usually hide under a container or under beams.

Not every ship is inspected but there's risk profiling

that is done on different ships.

It just takes one bee in one container in one ship

in any port for Varroa mite to arrive in Australia.

And that's the challenge for Australian bio-security:

to stop that stowaway bee escaping in the first place.

Foreign swarms are found and destroyed

up to a dozen times a year.

In 2011, a swarm of Asian honeybees brought

their own unwelcome passengers.

We discovered the swarm had more than 150 Varroa mites

associated with it.

So a good one to spot.

It was really important because if it had absconded,

then Varroa mites could have got away.

However, we actually import queen bees

from Varroa-infected countries

in the hope of breeding their genetic defenses

into our bees.

If we ever do get Varroa, hopefully some of the queens

that are now being imported will have resistance to Varroa

so we'll be once step ahead in the battle

against this dreadful parasite.

Ross Rickard runs three months

of quarantine checks on each import

to ensure that not only are the bees clean,

but their packaging as well.

It's not without risk; and for safety's sake,

the bees that arrive here never leave the lab.

The queen spends the rest of her days

laying eggs in a secure hive.

Varroa mites don't just suck blood;

they use the hive to lay their own eggs.

When the queen starts laying eggs,

we examine that brood and make sure that

there's no mites in there.

Beekeepers can douse their hives

with chemicals to control Varroa;

but wild, or feral bees, don't get that help.

These bees have left the hive to strike out on their own.

Unlike the rest of the world,

Australia's still an easy place for honeybees

to survive in the wild.

There's a lot more feral colonies in any environment

than most people realize.

That's not the case in countries with Varroa,

where honeybees can only thrive in managed hives.

This is what makes Australia paradise for the honeybees:

wild hives like this one; our pollination depends on it.

But if the Varroa mite should ever invade Australia,

wild hives like this will be the first to die.

So they would collapse first;

and by collapsing, the Varroa mite populations

will then descend on the commercial populations

and then management becomes more difficult.

Queen bee breeder Tiffane Bates

manages the research hives at the University of WA.

For bees, Varroa mite is the big scary.

And once that arrives here,

we'll have about three to five years before

the massive collapse of potentially commercial beekeeping.

The question is:

can we breed a commercial bee population in Australia

that's resistant to Varroa mite?

Today, male drones from the uni bee yard

end up in the lab as sperm donors.

So here comes the sperm.

Each male has this elaborate apparatus

for docking with the queen in flight.

Known as a suicidal mater,

he blasts a sperm package and his penis into the queen,

an ejaculation so violent, it kills him.

Undaunted, males take flight every afternoon

to search for a queen by following her scent.

To collect drones in the area,

Tiffane baits the net with just a tiny amount

of queen pheromone.

It's enough to have drones from feeding in all the trees

around here and probably the bee farm just over there

flocking in; it doesn't take them very long at all.

It's a remarkable demonstration

of not only their ability to sense incredibly well,

but to navigate really keenly.

So in theory, unless it's only our males,

there should be a bit of a mixture in here.

In Australia, we're still fortunate

to have plenty of healthy wild bees mating with hive bees;

so there's constant genetic exchange.

Amazingly, after mating with up to 15 males in a flight,

the queen somehow selects the sperm she wants to keep.

This tiny organ called the spermatheca

holds the future of the entire colony.

With it, the queen fertilizes up to 2,000 eggs a day

for the rest of her life,

choosing from the sperm stored inside.

One of the questions is of course: what does she want?

And I don't yet know what she wants.

While the male dies after only three weeks,

his sperm lives on in the queen for another seven years.

It's easy in the spring.

Boris Baer is artificially inseminating

virgin queens to find out how they do it.

The secret of long-term sperm storage can be compared

to the fountain of youth.

The female provides a major liquid and that does it.

A single substance that we think is responsible

to kind of turn sperm on like (mumbling) poof.

And the sperm itself triggers changes

in the queen's brain that enable her to control the hive.

Unraveling how the queen manages the genetic diversity

of the colony is crucial to understanding

how bees can resist Varroa.

For example, worker bees help clear the hive of parasites

and diseases by removing dead or diseased individuals.

This hygienic behavior is inherited;

and bees that are good at it have a better chance

of standing up to Varroa.

See, if we can select for these traits,

in particular: hygienic behavior and things like that,

then we can try and breed bees that are more resistant.

But at the same time, we need to really be careful

that we don't breed out the genetic diversity

that's present in bees.

Molecular biologist Mat Welch is delving deep

into the honeybee genome to explore the interplay between

brains, genes, and reproduction.

He studies the biochemical reactions

that switch different genes on and off.

This process, called epigenetics, doesn't change the actual

DNA code, but how genes are expressed.

To extract DNA from queen bees,

you need fresh brains.

So queens have a much smaller brain than workers

because the workers have a lot more sensory information

to process.

This is the part that we're really interested in:

this central portion of the brain.

No larger than the head of a pin,

it could hold the key to switching on

a defense against Varroa.

To find that key, powerful next-generation sequences

can rapidly read billions of genes from honeybee DNA.

So this has really unlocked our ability to hold

genome studies and to really explore genetic regulation

and gene expression.

Varroa mites were able to jump from

their Asian host to European honeybees

by recognizing their chemical messages

as signals to lay eggs in their hives.

It just might be a chink in the mites' armor.

If we can find a way to mask or block

either the receptor that detects that signal

or even the genes that encode that signal in honeybees,

we could potentially make the European honeybee

invisible to Varroa mites again,

effectively eliminating their reproductive cycle.

Like a vaccine.

Yeah, that's right.

That prospect, where honeybees escape

Varroa's life cycle, is an exciting one.

But in the meantime, there are some other

more fundamental mysteries to solve.

Swarms of bees operate in a vast volume of time and space.

But nobody really knows where they go.

Now for the first time, miniaturized technology

offers the opportunity to monitor their environment

from a bee's point of view.

We give each one of those bees a badge

and we follow them.

We give each of those bees a number.

Physicist Paulo De Souza is working with

entomologist Steve Quarrell to attach tiny sensors

to the backs of middle-aged worker bees.

We're trying to get bees that are right on the edge

of starting to fly but we're trying to get the full

flight duration of the bee, so two to three weeks.

The hairier they are, the younger they are;

so we're after bald bees almost. (laughs)

The tags on the bees are like PayPass

on your credit card.

A reader at the entry to the hive clocks them in and out.

It's fiddly painstaking work.

Next spring when we do the full experiment

will be about 50 bees per hive per day

over a four or five-week period.

So in total at the end of the project?

About 5,000.

Their first experiment will see

if neonicotinoid pesticides have any impact

on the bees' activity.

These chemicals have been banned in Europe for two years

because of concerns they affect bees' navigation,

reproduction, and immune responses.

So normally benign viruses and diseases or mites,

say Varroa mite, having a greater impact in the hive

than was previously thought,

basically due to these trace quantities of pesticide.

They plan to put traces of pesticide

in feeder stations with tag readers to detect any changes

in flight time and feeding behavior.

But the swarm sensing should also be able

to tell if pests start turning up.

So we know if a new species arriving

would drive any changes in the hive,

would drive any changes in the ecosystem

and how that will affect our industry.

We can transform the way we do bio-security

and this is what we want to achieve.

John Evans is hosting the research

on his apple orchard.

He hopes to use the information

to position his hives for the best pollination.

There's things about bees that we don't know.

I don't think we probably spend enough time

in understanding where bees are and what they do

because they're so beneficial to us and there goes one now.

The same is true for urban environments.

Doug Perdy keeps high-rise hives in Sydney.

I think having beehives in the city is immensely valuable.

Clearly we don't have a lot of pollinators in the city areas

because of our fear; we tend to remove them;

so putting backyard beehives in has gotta be a good thing.

If people are wondering what they can do personally

to help the bees, what would you recommend?

Look, it's easy for people to help bees.

If you look at what we're planting in the gardens,

people love grass and things that don't flower.

But all they have to do is start planting things that flower

'cause flowers are what bees need.

You've got flowering things, bees will come.

If we wanna keep taking advantage of all the benefits

that bees offer, then it's only fair that we provide

good food, shelter, and healthcare in return

because in the end, if it's good for bees, it's good for us.

There's something about the sound of bees

on a summer afternoon that's just deep contentment.

And I think that that's why I'm here.

Apart from all the: bees are amazing and pollination

and all of those things, I'm in it because

when it works, it works with absolute perfection.

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