Beescapes

05/08/2024

Fieldwork season is here 🌞 Yolŋu ranger Hamish Gondarra and I have started stingless bee surveys in Northeast Arnhem Land, along with Clancy Lester, who's now my UniMelb research assistant, and Sean, an expert bee finder. Hamish and Sean are also learning how to survey plants and trap cavity-nesting bees on the homelands. This year is already so different to the last, with little bee activity due to most of the gadayka (stringybark) still not flowering 🍃

The Griffith Uni team are investigating insect visitors to lychee and avocado in Far North Qld, led by PhD student Matthias Reese (Matze). There's so many different lychee cultivars up north compared to Southeast Queensland. Matze will look at the nutritional and chemical properties of different flowers to see how/if these influence visitation 🌸

Later this month or perhaps in September we'll also be down around Childers/Bundaberg to finish another year of data collection on pollen movement by honeybees in avocado 🥑

And my first PhD student, Nidhi Chakma, is off to start her new job in the Northern Rivers, NSW, working in macadamia. Congrats Nidhi! We'll miss you on campus but I'll see you on Zoom 🌳

19/05/2024

happy international bee day! here's a guide to plants for pollinators in my region that i made for the wheen bee foundation a few years back. you can find more plants for different regions on their website (search for "powerful pollinators wheen bee")

18/10/2023

Wanna support bee conservation and Indigenous Rangers in Arnhem Land? Vote for my project proposal in this free online event on Nov 1st: https://science.unimelb.edu.au/engage/big-science-pitch

Rachele Wilson is a molecular ecologist in the School of BioSciences. She has a PhD in Terrestrial Ecology and a first-class Honours degree in Land, Parks an...

28/07/2023

Learning how to find guku (stingless bee honey and pollen) with Yolŋu at Barrkira and teaching them how to sweep net solitary bees.

Now is the time for burning the dry grass, as the temperatures are cooler and the fire stays low to the ground. We saw lots of wallabies and kangaroos enjoying the fresh grass shoots afterwards.

This country has so many secrets, so much beauty to offer.

18/11/2022

My pollinator research started with birds in 2013. For my final course in undergrad, I was dropped off on K'gari (Fraser Island) with another student, Ilee, to study plant-pollinator networks in the heathland for the summer. When we got there, the heath had finished and the only plants flowering were Banksia robur and the tree Corymbia tessellaris (Cadaghi). So it was decided that Ilee would write-up the insect visits to Cadaghi and I'd write-up what happened on the Banksia. Watching these little White-cheeked Honeyeaters (Philydonyris nigra) feeding on nectar all day was adorable, but it did mean a few encounters with dingos! Sweep-netting the Cadaghi tree canopy was challenging as we didn't have extension nets, so our German friend Marvin did a Macgyver and hobbled our nets together to make a giant. Incredibly, we ended up catching 181 species of insects including 56 species of bees just from this one tree species! When I returned 5 years later with Brittany for her Honours project, this time a month earlier, the heath was buzzing! It was so beautiful. Brittany finally described the network using our pollen DNA metabarcoding technique and found high niche overlap between honeybees, stingless bees and Braunsapis reed bees.

From bees and birds in national parks, to bees in farms, and now birds and bats in urban areas, studying pollinators has been life changing (literally, my baby girl pictured is now 15!). But it doesn't have to be challenging, you can help by observing visitors to flowers for just 10 minutes and recording your data on the website. Do the quiz first, download your guide then start counting. This is the last weekend to collect data 🐝🐦🦇🦋🐞

16/11/2022

After several delays due to covid, we finally presented at the Australian Macadamia Society Conference in the young researchers session. On the left is Ryan Newis who found that splitting hives before deploying them in flowering macadamia orchards actually reduces their pollen foraging as they prioritise resin instead. On the right is Anushika de Silva who used paternity testing on Macadamia nuts to identify the pollen parent ie the father. She found that most macadamia nuts are actually the result of cross pollination between cultivars - not self pollination.

My favourite session was on Regenerative Farming, where researchers are making amazing progress increasing above and below ground diversity in orchards, reducing the inputs required by growers. We always say that stingless bees do well in Macadamia ie there's a lot of demand and we know they're good pollinators, but they're actually a very small part of the industry. There are still many myths floating around about pollination in this crop and a lot of new growers that are unaware of native bees.

10/07/2022

Do you have a log hive? Is it healthy and in a safe place? Then let it be 🐝

I wrote this opinion piece for the Cross-Pollinator which ANBA has posted on their website. This was in response to the examples I regularly see of unnecessary risks placed on stingless bee colonies safely and naturally housed in logs.
https://www.anba.org.au/bee-tips/keep-the-bees-in-the-log/

14/10/2021

Bee hotel goodie bags for tonights presentation in

09/08/2021

My article "How to Make a Bee Hotel (3 Methods)" now has pictures! Thanks to the amazing volunteers at Wiki 👏🎨

https://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Bee-Hotel

Bee hotels, also known as trap nests or Fabre's hives, are human-made nesting substrates that can be used as supplementary habitats for solitary bees. It's estimated that there are over 20,000 bee species worldwide and most of these are...

06/08/2021

Just some of the solitary bees and wasps I found in bee hotels during this study: https://msha.ke/beescapes -hotel-communities

04/08/2021

Do you live near a bushfire-affected area? Do you really want to save the bees? Not honeybees of course, Australian native bees! Many of Australia's bees were affected by the devastating 2019-2020 bushfires that destroyed their habitats.

You can help by building bee hotels to supplement habitats in bushfire-affected areas. Follow the link below to sign up, build your hotel and upload your observations to the citizen science project.

https://msha.ke/beescapes/

Authorised by the Australian Native Bee Association (sponsor), lead researcher Dr Kit Prendergast and research assistant Rachele Wilson. Funded by the Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment (Grant Award GA158517).

Do you really want to save the bees? Not honeybees of course, Australian native bees! Many of Australia's bees were affected by the devastating 2019-2020 bushfires that destroyed their habitats. You can help by building bee hotels to supplement habitats in bushfire-affected areas. Follow the links b...