Conference Season
Text of the article
The heart of winter is a time for beekeepers to do other things. Sometimes it’s long hours in the shed making and repairing equipment,
wiring frames until the madness sets in. Sometimes it’s running a separate winter-based business (firewood?).
I’ve often thought of it as “travelling season,” as I’ve always loved both travelling and not being in Southern Victoria when the daily highs are barely ten. For those so enmeshed in the industry that they cannot avoid going to multiple conferences it’s also “conference season.” This year I found that included me.
Don’t get me wrong, I really recommend going to at least one conference a year, presumably your own state’s convention. As a professional you’ll have the opportunity to discuss your common problems and issues with your industry colleagues, as a hobbyist you’ll hear inspiring ideas and see some great equipment displayed.
I had attended my first state conference, California’s, up at the snowy ski resort area of Lake Tahoe, California, back in 2008. At that time I was by far the youngest person in attendance (at 26, but I think there’s actually more young people represented these days), and alarmingly I noticed a few of the old timers were missing fingers because when they had started in the truly ancient times they had had to saw up their own hives from scratch, often with dangerously dodgy equipment! From then till now I’ve usually but not always attended my state conference every year if I happen to be around, and have found it worthwhile. This year, however, newly minted as the editor of a national magazine and realising I had no particular contacts or knowledge about beekeeping in places such as Tasmania and Western Australia, I decided what I really ought to do is attend their conferences! “Conveniently” they all lined up one after another! On the down side I’ve still got a magazine to put together so off I went to Tasmania with a stack of printed papers to read through on the way over.
Tasmania - Friday May 31st - Saturday June 1st
The Tasmanian Beekeepers Association (TBA) alternates between Launceston, the north-west, and Hobart, and this was a Launceston year. It was held in the very elegant Launceston Grand Chancellory Hotel. Membership of the TBA is only 36 (membership is $500), but representatives from local beekeeping clubs represented many more Tasmanian beekeepers. Partners and visiting attendees brought attendance up to 60-70. Considering I went in knowing nearly no one there, I almost immediately felt I was
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ARTICLE BY KRIS FRICKE
in a room full of friends.
Tasmania has 1867 registered beekeepers, 1800 recreational and 67 commercial, altogether accounting for 42,613 registered hives. Obviously at all three of these conferences Varroa was the topic on everyone’s minds and I was interested to compare the feeling in the different states. In Tasmania they’re understandably feeling a bit safer with their very large moat, though with SHB showing up last year in what might have been two separate incursions by ferry (two detections three months apart with lots of surveillance finding nothing in between), there’s certainly reason to worry Varroa could also ride the ferry (yes they certainly have sentinel hives around the Devonport ferry depot, which is how they found the SHB & successfully prevented it from being established). There’s also concern that someone might smuggle a queen in with varroa on it, though they’ve now imprinted sniffer dogs at the airport to smell for bees. In the mean time there was a lot of discussion of increasing local queen breeding in Tasmania as for now they’re cut offfrom their traditional
Author is attacked by a varroa mite! (accurately scaled in
relation to a human as to actual mites and bees)
Lindsay Bourke in front of the beautiful mural on his
Launceston depot.
sources of queens in NSW.
Other major topics of discussion were continued access to logging roads, which are very important to them to access leatherwood forests, and promotion of leatherwood itself. The TBA has contracted a marketing consultant to help draft a major promotional campaign to bring their unique leatherwood honey to the attention of foreign markets.
Here I first learned that though bees suffering from Deformed Wing Virus have not been detected here in Australia, which has important ramifications for Varroa, it has been detected in honey. But what isn’t proven is whether the virus found in the honey was still “alive” and could be transmitted to bees. The really big ramification for this is, if proven it would be a very compelling reason to ban foreign honey imports, which there was great interest in at all three conferences I attended. I’m hoping to have an article about DWV for next month because this is an extremely intriguing topic.
TBA also formally voted motions to AHBIC to ban honey imports unless it is proven it doesn’t have DWV and meets Australian quality standards.
Jon Lockwood from AHBIC presented about the activities of the AHBIC subcommittee on honey imports, which is famously “multi-pronged.” As Jon explained, our hands are relatively tied up by free trade agreements designed to make it very difficult to throw up any obstacles to imports, but they’re investigating “anti dumping” (the selling here of honey for a lower price than in its home country), and more significant testing of honey imports (only 5% of incoming honey is currently tested, they want to increase this to at least 10%), among other things. (all the conferences received this multi pronged presentation).
Another particularly interesting presentation, Hobart area beekeeper Anita Long has organised a very good Tasmanian Junior Beekeepers program teaching kids about beekeeping in a very practical manner actually working with hives and extraction, etc. Two of their students actually travelled to the International Meeting of Young Beekeepers in Slovenia and one of them Reuben Wherrett (16) even won silver! I am also hoping for a future article about this very interesting topic.
Lindsay Bourke was re-elected as TBA president for the 13th year in a row. I was able to sit down with this amiable and fascinating man for an interview that resulted in ten pages of notes and a hand cramp but look for some articles about notable Australian beekeepers in the coming months.
In general the Tasmanians have had a decent year with what they call “brown top gum” (Eucalyptus obliqua, what we call messmate in Victoria) and the usual leatherwood.
One correction I need to make from last month. In a news item I had said they use bumble bees for pollination
in Tasmania – I was surprised to learn that while they do have a thoroughly established bumble bee population and they are generally considered the best pollinators of some greenhouse crops, it is not actually permitted to use them for pollination in Tasmania.
Like all conferences this one ended with an awards dinner. There were various categories of award but the preeminence of leatherwood among the Tasmanians was made clear by the fact that the leatherwood honey award was clearly the most coveted prize, being a very large awards cup with names of past winners engraved on it. Also, mead, a sometimes obscure category in other jurisdictions was the one other award with a physical trophy.
Victoria - Tuesday June 4th - Thursday June 6th
The Victorian Apiarist Association (VAA) conference this year was held in Wonthaggi, not far from Wilson’s Prom in Victoria’s south-east. It seemed about it’s usual size, with 125 attendees and six to eight exhibitors lining the sides of the venue (Wonthaggi Working Man’s Club). There are 11,075 registered beekeepers in Victoria with 131,386 registered bee hives. In years past I’ve felt the annual VAA conference was dominated by commercial beekeepers but this time I had the feeling most of those in attendance were more miscellaneous, sideliners and serious hobbyists, though still with a definite presence of commercial beekeepers as well. This may have been due to the distance from the heartland of Victorian commercial beekeeping in the Ballarat-Bendigo triangle (VAA also rotates around its meeting locations).
The general feel of the room at the VAA conference was much more that Varroa is an immediate concern that everyone needs to learn how to manage immediately. There is a more-or-less pervasive feeling that it will be in the Victorian side of the almonds this September and spreading in Victoria from there. It seems there are no plans to have any containment zones within Victoria.
Many of the VAA speakers were experts with experience in aspects of Varroa, joining us by video from New Zealand or the United States. This gave attendees some excellent perspectives from experts who have been dealing directly with Varroa for many years. One thing they all mentioned and I don’t think can be mentioned too much is rotate-rotaterotate treatments to prevent mites building up resistance. It’s easy to find one treatment you know how to use and like but it’s really imperative to rotate treatments (by mode of action!). In addition many the industry updates I mentioned at Tasmania were also given here.
It was mentioned that there’s expected to be 70,000 hectares in almonds in the next 3 years.
I love putting actual numbers to things so numbers can be crunched. One of the NZ presenters mentioned that previous to Varroa 1 beekeeper could manage about 800 hives, but because of the added labour of mite treatment it now takes one person per 400 hives, and costs about $55 per hive to treat for varroa, so keep figures on that scale in mind for your future business planning (and on that note AgVic and I’m sure the other states are running business resilience workshops exactly to help beekeepers plan for these wild changes to their business environment).
One anticipated event was the announcement of the 12 Varroa Development Officers (VDOs). It not being announced until the end, even the VDOs only having suspicions who
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the other ones were had to greet each other cautiously like we were in a secret society, which was funny. I’m one of the two Senior VDOs for Victoria, which I think will benefit from my role as ABK editor – it’s in everyone’s interest to get everyone thoroughly educated on Varroa management (though for the record and importantly, I am not speaking in my official capacity as SVDO when writing in the magazine).
VAA proposed a logo change which was accepted by the body. Also as is longstanding tradition at VAA conferences to have some tedious procedural wrangling, there was a dispute about whether they could proceed to “any other business” which lasted much longer than it took to determine once there that there was in fact no “any other business” to consider (this shouldn’t be taken to reflect poorly on the leadership, who handled the inane objection very professionally).
And then there was the usual final dinner at which everyone had a grand old time.
Western Australa / Asian Apiculture Association -
Victorian Apiarist Association’s old and new logo. The new logo consists of the letters VAA in the general shape of Victoria in black and yellow.
June 12th - 14th
This year the Western Australian conference was held in conjunction with the Asian Apiculture Association’s 17th biannual conference. It was held in the elegant Esplanade Hotel in Fremantle, and over the three days had 300 attendees from 7 countries. In particular among the exhibitors Chinese equipment manufacturers were well represented.
The first day was dedicated to apitherapy. I learned that apparently bee venom is one of the few treatments for Lyme Disease, and that stinging is apparently also efficacious against Parkinson’s Disease, and that royal jelly has insulin-like properties that make it useful against type 2 diabetes.
The second day was dedicated to more general
Most beekeeper conversations tended to focus around Varroa controls with one supplier in the vendors hall providing information and equipment for alternative treatments not yet registered. Honey sommelier class at the WA conference.
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beekeeping, and then Friday was more focused on Varroa and biosecurity. I got the feeling in WA, even moreso than had been in Tasmania, that while Varroa is a threat they’re seriously concerned about it’s still a distant threat and they not without reason feel they have some time before it arrives. I think their apiary officers are a little anxious about the vast amount of territory they must watch against Varroa coming in. They also have a small hive beetle infestation in the north and a small infestation of red dwarf (Apis florea) bees on the Dampier Peninsula. The infestation does not seem to be spreading from a tiny area of a two kilometre radius but has thus far proved difficult to entirely eradicate due to these bees living in rough terrain and frequently moving. I was very alarmed to learn that Euvarroa, A.florea’s native mite, has also been known to jump to A.mellifera and reproduce even more successfully than Varroa, so now I have yet another thing to fear – I rather propose if that happens the prefix be changed to Dysvarroa.
Noted Varroa expert Randy Oliver, whose articles we regularly carry, spoke to the conference live via video and took questions and I think that was very greatly appreciated by the attendees. Rather than the usual seated final dinner, the awards banquet was a sort of elegant stand-up soiree, with some seating and tables for those who really didn’t want to stand but mainly it was a stand-and-mingle sort of event which was actually a nice change of pace.
The next day there was a technical tour up to a plantation of manuka (Leptospermum nitens, which is not the famous L scoparium but one of the many other Australian species with similar properties) – 600 hectares of a planned 1100 have been planted thus far, entirely for the honey crop. As I’m not sure I’d seen this famous shrub previously I was interested to see it first-hand.
And finally my marathon of conferences was over! Each one was very interesting and I met many people and made some friends, especially among the other people who were also attending most of the conferences themselves. In fact, one of them, Mike Allerton, the Amateur Beekeepers Australia biosecurity officer, I was able to convince to add to this list of conference summaries with his impressions of the New South Wales conference I didn’t’ attend:
New South Wales - (as reported by Mike Allerton)
The NSWAA was held in Wagga Wagga 23/24 May and the Crop Pollinator’s Association conference the day before. It was a busy week in Wagga Wagga with Tocal also running two all day Varroa Workshops 21/22 May. All events were well attended.
A group of South Australian beekeepers were there to get a head start on the Varroa situation before Varroa reaches them. They’re hopeful that they’ll have another season mite free, but resigned to the inevitable. They also hope that more treatment options will be available by then.
WA conference closing banquet
From the stage, there were excellent presentations from a variety of scientists updating us about their research. An interesting talk by Tim Jackson, CEO of the Almond Board Australia hinted at the development of self-pollinating almonds.
Keynote speakers from New Zealand, Jason Marshall - commercial beekeeper and Rae Butler - VSH queen breeder told their stories of adjusting to life after Varroa. Their messages were inspirational, highlighting that it is possible for businesses to thrive with this latest pest.
And thus “conference season” more or less comes to an end, though the Queensland conference is still ahead, though I won’t be there. Now it’s time to catch up on this magazine issue and get stuck in to my new job!
The author with some L nitens manuka plants.
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