There was a bloke cutting down trees on the river and carting the timber away, whose truck looked a trifle large for me to arrest. Then New Boy got lost for half a day, which had everyone running around whistling and yelling for him — but he just sauntered up around lunchtime looking guilty, if otherwise pleased with himself. And some hose under the kitchen sink started leaking.
When The Boss arrived home, he was in no mood to deal with any of it: his plane couldn’t land in Melbourne on account of the fog and had diverted to Sydney, where he and 250 of his closest friends sat on the tarmac for two hours waiting for someone to notice.
He grumbled that he could barely get one bar on his phone, so he couldn’t do anything useful, like book an early flight to Melbourne.
And I had to tell him that, while he wasn’t minding the shop, there was another outbreak of varroa destructor at Euston along the Murray, which I knew wasn’t going to cheer him up. He likes his bees happy — it makes them easy to handle and they produce more honey. The varroa mite could change all that.
You might remember this nasty little critter was detected in sentinel hives at the port of Newcastle in June last year and, within days, varroa infestations were found in hives at Narrabri, around 350km from Newcastle.
The authorities destroyed a lot of hives and appeared to contain the outbreak, but The Boss knew the beekeepers were nervous ahead of the almond pollination this year: it brings a vast number of bees into close proximity.
He’s heard commercial beekeepers saying it is inevitable the mite becomes endemic here, like it has in the rest of the world. Once inside a hive, the mites breed up in the egg cells, feed on the blood of the worker bees and eventually kill the hive.
That will be a real headache for bees and beekeepers; treating hives with miticide will be time-consuming and expensive. Used improperly, miticide can contaminate the honey. In the meantime, many hives will be destroyed: millions of bees have been euthanised already.
The disappointment for the beekeepers about this latest outbreak is that a fellow beekeeper has taken hives to the almond district without testing his or her hives for the mite before taking them there.
It looks like they came from the Kempsey area. The Boss tells me the mite might have now got away. Three more outbreaks have since been discovered near Narrandera, near Griffith and at Balranald.
The NSW Department of Primary Industry is already deciding whether to move from eradication to management of the mite, and The Boss reckons we’ll soon know if they’ve run up the white flag.
The Boss isn’t sure what it means for the huge annual effort to pollinate the almond crop in July and August each year. It’s critical for the almond crop, and the growers pay the beekeepers handsomely for helping out.
The hives now have to stay in Sunraysia while the department figures out what to do — just as the pollen is running out. A lack of food means hive-robbing by feral bees, likely swarming and a lot of unhappy bees. And you don’t want unhappy bees. Woof!
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