Thanks to the thriving beehives at Australia’s Parliament House and surrounding foreign embassies, local and international communities are learning that you can take positive action for the environment and thoroughly enjoy it.
When it comes to policy discussions and consensus-building, politicians could learn a lot from honeybees. The way they figure out where to build a new home, for example, is a masterclass in collaborative decision-making.
A healthy honeybee colony will keep growing until the hive is bursting at the seams. At this point, about two-thirds of the colony will break away and cluster at a temporary site, such as a tree or a balcony – a process known as swarming. Scout bees are sent on fact-finding missions ranging over 70 square kilometres, and return with candidate sites for new permanent lodgings.
Scouts present their findings to the other bees by performing what’s known as the ‘waggle dance’. Human politics be more engaging if verbal debate were replaced with a dance-off, but it’s the next step in the decision-making process that is truly remarkable.
Hours and sometimes days of dancing – or “frank debate,” as American animal behaviourist Thomas Seeley puts it in his book ‘Honeybee Democracy’ – ensues. Over this period, scouts visit sites advertised by other scouts, and cast their votes back at the swarm by joining the dance for a particular candidate site. Eventually, a quorum is reached, and the swarm takes flight, headed for their new chosen home. This democratic process couldn’t be further from the adversarial dynamic of human parliaments. And what’s more, Seeley found that the bee system almost always selects the optimal site based on the available information.
Bees were not behind the decision to move to the grounds of Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, a few years ago, however. The three hives were originally housed nearby at Aurecon, an environmental engineering company, and at the Australian National University (ANU) Apiculture Society. When Aurecon moved offices in 2017, there was no room for the bees, and ANU found itself in a similar predicament.
“Parliament had just finished a major Senate inquiry … which highlighted that there was a need to have more beekeepers, to encourage beekeeping as a profession,” says environmental scientist Cormac Farrell, who was the beekeeper at Aurecon at the time. He approached the Department of Parliamentary Services, which saw the potential of Parliamentary beehives as an awareness-raising sustainability initiative, and agreed to grant them residency.
It was a humble start to an initiative that has since expanded to a number of foreign embassies, including those of Slovakia, Slovenia and Sweden. It’s opened up conversations about sustainability and food security on local and global scales, and has engaged people in honey-tasting, citizen science, and making their local environments more bee-friendly.
Diplomatic bees
Today, Farrell proudly wears the title of head beekeeper at Parliament House, a voluntary role. There are six hives of various designs, including one that houses stingless bees (Tetranogula carbonaria), a species of Australian native bee. The honey they produce is given to foreign dignitaries as a gift and used to make honey vodka and mead, which is sold at the Parliament House gift shop.
Farrell and another experienced beekeeper Sarah AsIs Sha’Non, another experienced beekeeper, lead a team of around six volunteers – MPs and other workers at Parliament House – who tend to the hives. This small operation acts as a hub for a network of beekeepers with ties to many nations. It was after the Slovenian Ambassador to Australia contacted Farrell that bee-friendly gardens and beehives started popping up in foreign embassies around Canberra, including those of Slovakia, Sweden, Italy and Switzerland.
Slovenia has an especially long history of beekeeping, and in 2017, the country successfully lobbied the United Nations to institute World Bee Day on May 20, the birthday of Slovenia’s first modern-era beekeeper, Anton Jansa. The Slovenian Embassy staff in Canberra had no beekeeping experience, so turned to Farrell for guidance. It has proven to be a fruitful relationship.
In 2018, close to 1,500 people attended inaugural World Bee Day events in Canberra. The program of events started with a honey-tasting in the Great Hall at Parliament House, hosted by the Embassy of Slovenia. Visitors sampled 40 varieties of honey from locations around the globe, including the Swedish Royal Palace and the deep forests of Malaysia, which are populated with giant honeybees (Apis dorsata).
As part of the event, ACT for Bees, an Australian environmental group, launched a new series of teaching resources aligned with the Australian School curriculum for Years 9 and 10. ‘Love Food? Love Bees!’ units explore food security and sustainability, for example, and equip students to take action in their community.
“The beekeeping at our Embassy helps us create long-lasting ties with the Australian people, especially with those who are also engaged in beekeeping and sustainable development,” says the Ambassador of the Republic of Slovenia in Canberra, Jurij Rifelj. “In this context, I am very proud that our Embassy can bring closer together the individuals from both countries, not only as the citizens of their respective countries, but as the citizens of the world who deeply care about the only planet that we can call home.”
Indeed, embassies have become the focal point of World Bee Day celebrations in Canberra. “They’ve all taken a different tack to how they celebrate World Bee Day, which has been really fascinating to see,” says Farrell. “So, the Swiss, they run film nights highlighting sustainability issues around bees every year.”
“And the Swedish have a different approach altogether. They focus more on the link to sustainability in food supply. They’re linking through to the UN Sustainable Development goals and they’re talking through the science of how bees create food and the importance of bees in the sustainable system.”
This is all incorporated into a family-friendly food fair held on the grounds of the Embassy, with hands-on kids activities, such as making ‘hotels’ for native bees.
Ambassador of the Slovak Republic to Australia, Tomas Ferko, also learned beekeeping basics from Farrell. For him, the rationale for ‘beeplomacy’ is clear: “We as diplomats have a task and mission to use various topics in order to promote mutual cooperation between our countries or to spread important messages,” he says. “This is about … beekeeping in connection with biodiversity and ecological topics.”
To bee or not to bee
The idea of bottling honey from your own backyard is an irresistible drawcard to many. But Farrell cautions would-be beekeepers to consider whether they’d be better off keeping native bees instead of honeybees.
For a start, the interaction between a beekeeper and their honeybees is akin to that of a farmer and livestock – ensuring your bees have enough food is part of that responsibility. As Farrell puts it, “you wouldn’t keep sheep in your backyard and expect to do no maintenance on them and not care for them at all.” It takes around two million flowers to make one kilogram of honey, and the average hive needs some 100 kilograms of honey to survive each year.
Native bees, of which there are more than 2,000 species, are far more efficient with resources. Their colonies are much smaller and many species hibernate in winter, reducing the amount of food they need to store.
Another concern is that bee swarms on the lookout for a new home are colonising tree hollows, squeezing out native animals such as possums, birds and frogs that rely on that habitat for survival. “Hollow trees are probably the most limited ecological resource in Australia right now,” Farrell explains. “For some animals, that’s the key limiting factor for their breeding success.”
It takes careful management by experienced beekeepers to split a hive before it swarms and starts to compete with native animals for shelter.
The bottom line? “Not everyone should be a beekeeper for honeybees, but everyone can be a beekeeper for native bees,” says Farrell.
From experience to understanding – to action
So, what does Farrell hope people will take away from tasting the honey of giant Malaysian bees, seeing a Twitter post about drunk bees at Parliament House, or going to a talk about bee-friendly gardens? “I want people to understand that you can take positive action and have fun,” he says.
For example, that might mean planting beautiful, colourful flowers to help support bee colonies, or taking part in citizen-science ‘head-counts’ of native bee colonies to help create a population baseline that can inform conservation and management programs. “It’s [about] taking an interest in buying different types of honey and realising that there’s literally thousands of different varieties,” says Farrell.
If people start to see their urban environment as an ecosystem, they can better understand the connections between food and the environment, and the environmental impact of decisions they make, like not using pesticides in their garden. “People have this concept that the city’s the city, and ‘nature’ is outside the city,” says Farrell. “My vision is to have people think of their city as part of the wider landscape.”
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Article by Kate Arneman
Photo Credit: Photo supplied