Keeping the buzz alive

UNE PhD candidate Carolyn Sonter first discovered her love of bees when she was just six years old. Years later, she’s still caught up in the buzz.

“It's impossible not to love an insect that comes in so many colours, shapes, sizes and temperaments and is responsible for pollinating most of our food crops,” says Carolyn, who is also an avid beekeeper.

“People should care about protecting bees, especially native bees, because they are vital to maintaining biodiversity in wild ecosystems, and without them our diet would be very boring.”

Carolyn researches honey bee ecotoxicology and pollination, and is exploring the impacts of environmental contaminants and agricultural practices on the European honey bee.

On days like World Bee Day (Friday 20 May), she says it’s an opportunity to better understand the threats bees and pollinators are facing, and to think about what can be done to improve policies and practices that will protect them.

“Anything that negatively impacts bees, threatens food security,” she says.

“With the impact of climate change, preserving wild ecosystems and protecting food security has never been more important.”

Postdoctoral researcher, Lena Schmidt, is working to better understand how this can be done, specifically through the diversification of flowering plants in agricultural landscapes.

“The combination of a broad range of plant species can provide diverse, high-quality resources and can help cater for the needs of various bees and other pollinators, across different life stages, year-round,” she says.

“Understanding the quality and quantity of floral rewards (nectar and pollen) offered by different crops, both native and exotic plant species, can help us improve floral resource supply to pollinators in agroecosystems, for example through targeted plantings of flowering plants.”

It's not just bees that rely on these diverse landscapes to help us keep our food on the table though; it turns out flies do too.

Postdoctoral researcher Blake Dawson and PhD candidate Abby Davis are looking at how these pesky insects could fill a gap in the pollination process.

They say World Bee Day is a chance to open up the conversation about the key role all pollinators play in our ecosystems.

“With the current decline in bee population worldwide, researchers are often looking for alternative pollination methods to maintain crop outputs,” says Blake.

“Flies are surprisingly very good pollinators in the wild, and with more research, they could be incorporated into farming practices to increase pollination rates.”

Abby says her and Blake’s research could lead to a reduced reliance on honey bees in the future, which are the only species affected by colony collapse disorder. By exploring the effectiveness of flies, it could boost the resilience of the Australian horticultural industry.

“Honey bees are needed to pollinate large cropping systems, however, less may be needed when wild pollinators are around,” she says.

“As bees are generally less active in cold weather than flies, flies may be able to pollinate when bees are unable to, maximizing the pollinator visitation rates to flowers and supplementing bee pollination in Australian horticultural crops.”

Most importantly though, pollinators play an irreplaceable part in keeping our ecosystem healthy.

“When you protect bee and fly pollinators, you will also benefit from the free ecosystem services they provide.

“Flies that pollinate as adults typically provide another ecosystem service as larvae. For example, many flower flies live on plants as larvae, predating on aphids and other small, soft-bodied insects. A healthy community of natural enemies, decomposers and pollinators will in turn create a healthy ecosystem with diverse communities of insects and other animals!”

You can read more about the work of the Radar Community Ecology Lab here.