Bee’s Line of Defence
15 ………… “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?’”
16 ………… 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. A tiny parasite aptly named Varroa destructor is a particularly deadly threat that’s spreading fast.
17 ………… The mite invariably kills untreated colonies within one or two years, and is equally dangerous to feral bee populations. When it reached the USA, it rapidly wiped out almost all feral bees across the entire country. Current containment methods include pesticides and selectively breeding bees for a ‘clean gene’ that means they attack the mite. However, once the mite has reached a country, it has so far proven impossible to eradicate it or stop its spread.
18 ………… Australia is the only inhabited continent to escape the mite’s invasion, largely due to our rigorous biosecurity measures. “We’ve got a very good surveillance system run by Plant Health Australia, particularly on board ships before they enter ports,” Ian says. “It has managed to track [and halt] a couple of incursions, one in Townsville and one dead swarm in Melbourne. But with a seaboard as big as ours, there’s an element of luck as well.”
19 ………… Luck, however, isn’t something multibillion-dollar industries like to rely on. Enter the Purple Hive Project. The Purple Hive Project doesn’t actually make purple beehives: instead, the bee-saving element in question is a unit that attaches to the entrance of the beehive and looks a little like a letterbox. Essentially, it takes photos of the bees and uses artificial intelligence (AI) by Vimana Tech to check them for mites. While the human eye finds it very difficult to identify the tiny mites, which are only about 1mm long, AI never gets tired or bored, works 24/7, and is constantly improving its detection.
20 ………… Perhaps the most significant element of the whole project is that it borrows from nature in order to help save nature. “One of my PhD supervisors was a bee vision expert and we discussed bee vision efficiencies at length,” says technology officer Shivy Yohanandan. “So to make this extreme level of computer vision possible, we drew inspiration from nature to build AI that is now helping the bees. There’s a really nice poetic justice there.”
The Vimana Tech team also drew inspiration from the bees themselves. “It’s all designed around them, including the purple colour,” says Joel. “It’s purple because the bees are naturally attracted to that colour.”