CEO Report July 2025

As conference season winds up, the attention of many in the industry turns to hive health and strength coming out of winter. We are hearing many reports of weaker than expected colonies as beekeepers assess hives for almonds and hive shortages across large parts of the east coast. This is creating challenges for many growers and brokers in sourcing quality hives.

Persistent drought conditions across the southeastern parts of Australia have impacted colony strength going into winter. Whilst there have been good rains, prospects for hive recovery is sparse with canola potentially flowering later in many regions and native scrub still being impacted by lack of rainfall.

Floods across northern NSW have impacted hives with some being inundated and hives lost. However good rains in western QLD should provide good forage in the channel country in the future.

State Conferences

The conferences across the country have been exceptionally well attended, with high quality presenters and information being disseminated to attendees. In attending all of the state conferences this year I have observed a shift in the mood of the room. There has been a noticeable move towards acceptance of varroa and willingness to work together and soak up as much information as possible. A sense of industry coming together to support each other has been the general feeling across the conferences this year.

Many of the conferences had excellent local speakers with many international speakers also. This did provide conflicting information at times to the audience, reinforcing that beekeepers should never rely on one source of information.

Lobbying government

A productive workshop with the DAFF staff highlighting the industry issues was held in May. Follow up from this workshop has continued particularly around imported honey and improving border testing. We are confident the department now hear us, and our issues, and is proactively working with AHBIC to improve the situation knowing we are limited as to what can be done.

The first sitting week of the new government has seen a lot of activity in Canberra. I was in Canberra for the week and met with many members and senators updating them, and their staff, on the important issues facing our industry. The continual feedback from many in Canberra is they were under the impression that varroa has passed and we’re just getting on with it as an industry. If you have the opportunity, I encourage you to reach out to your local member of parliament to highlight that the challenges are still ongoing. Keeping the honey bee industry front of mind for MP’s is important as we lobby for support.

Varroa treatments

As always, we continue to seek out varroa treatment manufactures to encourage, and facilitate them in bringing new treatment to the Australian market. Globally there has been some new products hit the market.

In the USA, a Canadian company called Greenlight, has recently been approved in parts of the USA for a product called ‘Norroa’. We have highlighted this product previously as the RNAi technology that inhibits the mite’s ability to reproduce. We have been able to connect the manufacture with Australian researchers to trial the product in Australia and hopefully eventually register it here.

Another interesting product is a European manufacturer that has developed a Metarhizium (fungal control) that targets varroa but also has temperature protection technology. This new product has shown some promising results, prompting funding through Hort Innovation to look at discovering an Australian version of the fungal control. This work has been awarded to Macquarie University and whilst exciting, progress will be slow with commercialisation maybe some time away.

Red Dwarf Honey Bee Incursion in WA

A total of 45 colonies have now been found and destroyed. However, there is still three active foraging sites of concern. All of the current detections are still within 2km of the original IP, but all detections have had Euvarroa present.

Agreement has now been reached regarding the funding of the response moving forward. Through negotiations the National Management Group (NMG) has agreed to an arrangement that sees our industry funding 2.5% of the response. This equates to around $155k for the eradication effort. The AHBIC board has agreed to this cost sharing arrangement, and we look forward to seeing the successful eradication of the pest.

The Month Ahead

With the conference season and AGM behind us we focus back onto progressing the important industry issues.

Levy reform, imported honey and varroa are a big focus over the next few months in addition to delivering AHBIC’s parts of the Transition to Management Program (T2M) as that begins to wind up.

We will continue to advocate to both state and federal governments for additional support post T2M, particularly for continued extension officers on the ground. I expect the next few months to be busy with hopefully some tangible outputs that we can talk about in our next update.

 

Danny LeFeurve

CEO