# Australian Bees



## brac (Sep 30, 2009)

sounds like someone need to talk to congress..


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## Bud Dingler (Feb 8, 2008)

it gets worse

these bees have no resistance to chalkbrood, tracheal and varrora. in a time when we are trying to build hygenic and mite resistance in our bees here in the USA these genetics are worthless. 

my limited understanding is now that we opened the door its become a international trade issue and its not as easy as it may sound now to close the door.


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## ACBEES (Mar 13, 2009)

Aussies will continue to send them to the U.S. as long as people keep buying them. Quit buying them, the market dries up and they quit sending them.

Weaver's fancy new website touts the fact they are neck deep in the Aussie bee importation business.

Congress doesn't need to get involved, U.S. beeks need to quit buying Aussie bees. Me personally, I wouldn't spend a nickle on bees I knew nothing about.


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## beemandan (Dec 5, 2005)

Imagine trying to export bees to Australia. They have an inbound quarantine that...if applied to our imports would put a stop to the entire process.


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## KQ6AR (May 13, 2008)

They'll be begging us for queens soon, when the varroa gets out of control there.


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## doc25 (Mar 9, 2007)

It's not just bees we need to stop importing! All disease goes at incredible speed through the airlines. It's time to shut down international travel and freight period!


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## beemandan (Dec 5, 2005)

doc25 said:


> It's time to shut down international travel and freight period!


What do you suppose the odds are of that happening?


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## Ravenseye (Apr 2, 2006)

To bring this thread back on topic, I would add that he ability to screen for problems is paramount to the health of our bees. We import a bunch of bees from Australia so all due caution is important. The world is a mighty small place nowadays. It's unlikely that imports will cease so screening and spot prohibitions become the proactive safety mechanisms.


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## Michael Johnston (Nov 25, 2007)

Senator Schumer from New York has made statements in the past year or so that bee imports from Australia should be banned. I don't know how all of this works but is an Act of Congress needed? Couldn't the Secretary of Agriculture just close the door based on an immanent threat to agriculture? I don't see any point to the Australian bees anyway. They were originally brought in as packages for almond pollination. It wouldn't seem like a start up package would be strong enough for pollination.


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## ACBEES (Mar 13, 2009)

I just read a thread posted on BEE-L by Randy Oliver. He said a number of bee importers/exporters were present at the convention in Orlando. These folks made it known they feel they are providing an important service to the American bee industry. He also said a number of american beeks have placed new orders for Aussie bees to fill almond contracts.

There in lies the problem. We keep buying them....they'll keep sending them. In the end when some new devastating parasite or disease arrives....we have no one to blame but ourselves.

I can't believe beeks in this country don't have the where with all or intelligence to produce enough bees to fill all our own pollination needs. I can't believe our industry has to resort to importing bees from other countries which harbor known diseases and parasites. 

Just like the white settlers introduced small pox which ravaged the American Indians because they had no immunity, by continually importing bees we are setting ourselves up for a cataclysmic event in our industry....WAKE UP!!


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## wfuavenger (Dec 11, 2009)

I cannot believe US customs is allowing a foreign animal across our borders without a quarentine!!!!


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## ACBEES (Mar 13, 2009)

Another reason to stop the uncontrolled importation of bees from other countries into the U.S......do a little research on a nasty bee called the Cape bee. In a nut shell, it is a parasitic bee that causes colonies it takes over to collapse. Makes varroa, tracheal mites etc. look like a sunday picnic.


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## beemandan (Dec 5, 2005)

ACBEES said:


> I can't believe beeks in this country don't have the where with all or intelligence to produce enough bees to fill all our own pollination needs.


The Aussies have one significant advantage when it comes to almond pollination. They can produce package bees in the middle of our winter. If almonds bloomed in May, domestic package producers would likely meet the demand. Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t support importing bees from anywhere without some significant controls but I understand the unique advantage that Australia has. It doesn’t have as much to do with US package suppliers’ wherewithal or intelligence.


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## ACBEES (Mar 13, 2009)

Beeman...So the gulf coast states and california aren't warm enough or big enough to produce enough bees to cover almond pollination in February?? I might be new, but I'm not buying that argument. I've read many a thread on this site from Cali and Fla beeks ready to go on almonds and I'm guessing they didn't buy all their bees from the aussies.


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## KQ6AR (May 13, 2008)

I would think Hawaii could handle it.


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## ACBEES (Mar 13, 2009)

KQ6AR...good point. I didn't even think about Hawaii. There's an island/U.S. state with a tropical climate you can get bees from. And you don't have to go to the other side of the world to buy bees whose genetics are inferior to our bees or worry about what new critters/diseases they are carrying.


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## Keith Jarrett (Dec 10, 2006)

ACBEES said:


> He said a number of bee importers/exporters were present at the convention in Orlando. These folks made it known they feel they are providing an important service to the American bee industry. He also said a number of american beeks have placed new orders for Aussie bees to fill almond contracts.
> !!


Well, only the PPB are the ones buying them & putting everyone else at risk.


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## wildbranch2007 (Dec 3, 2008)

as I posted here at one time, some very good beeks are buying bees from Australia becuase they have worked with the breeders over there to import specific genetics into australia (that can't bee imported into usa). they then raise queens off of these genetics and ship them to specific beeks over here.
a way around having to go through all the hoops that they would have to go through with the government. one example, is they imported bees from Italy that are reported to be varro resistent, raised queens and shipped them in with nucs to the beeks requesting them. good or bad?? who knows.


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## ACBEES (Mar 13, 2009)

I wasn't aware Australia allowed the importation of much of anything live. I recently read they even spray commercial airliners coming from other countries with insecticides when they land. 

I know from working in the purebred cattle business for years Australia had near impossible restrictions on anything coming into the country. You couldn't even export frozen bovine semen or embryos to Australia unless the donor animals were in a quarantine facility in the U.S. and testing negative for nearly a year for all kinds of things. Then samples of the frozen semen and embryos had to be tested. Forget the importations of live cattle from the U.S.

I would like to see some documentation the aussies were allowing importations of live bees.opcorn:


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## pahvantpiper (Apr 25, 2006)

I made the big mistake of purchasing 200 Australian queens a few years ago. 80% of them got chalk brood so bad mummies were piled up 1 inch thick on the bottom board. Over half of them died before the first winter. I've tried many queens from many different breeders and these were far and away the poorest I've ever tried.


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## ACBEES (Mar 13, 2009)

Interesting reading on this topic:

I am sure that the Aussie beekeepers and officials mean well and are diligent in their efforts. I'm not suggesting they are careless either. 

But people are imperfect and I see no crisis in our industry that would justify the importation of bees from outside our country. The system was in place since the 1920's to keep bees out and it still did not keep varroa out so why should anyone think that we are going to succeed with this arrangement? 

Furthermore the facts are the Aussie bees have no resistance to Tracheal, Varroa or chalkbrood. 

Many universities and beekeepers are spending inordinate amounts of time and money to develop bees that are resistant (hygenic and VSH) to the various issues our industry faces. We appear to be on the cusp of disseminating these useful genetics nationwide. We have the Russian bees also that are successful. Why would we want to import more bees that have no resistance? 

In my view the importation of these bees is a slap in the face to the work of Spivak, Harbo, Rinderer and others. 

Where is the crisis that justifies the risk? 

p.s. I wonder if Australian beekeepers would be excited about importing queens from the big Island Hawaii right now? We can guarantee there are no bees within 100 miles with varroa mites. Trust me......


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## camero7 (Sep 21, 2009)

interesting thread on this on bee line:
http://community.lsoft.com/SCRIPTS/WA-LSOFTDONATIONS.EXE?A2=BEE-L;9bbe00bf.1001c

http://community.lsoft.com/SCRIPTS/WA-LSOFTDONATIONS.EXE?A2=BEE-L;d1657eb7.1001c


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## ACBEES (Mar 13, 2009)

another interesting opinion

“That is why we have a surveillance and eradication program in place. To get rid of them. Australia has a good track record in eradication of pests that other in the world have failed to eradicate and said couldn't be eradicated. “

Yes, here in America we too tried to trap and “eradicate” as many AHB’s swarms as possible, moving up from Mexico, in a tight surveillance, I in fact live in one of those states where we have DNA-confirmed AHB’s since 2003, but they are now found in nearly all southern states because even the Almighty cannot seal up the air through which they travel. No man-made barrier, biological, chemical, or otherwise, will stop insects flying in the air. Australia has, it appears so far, good luck in fending off Apis Cerana and mites, trafficking on their own, but the word choice “eradication” is unscientific and unrealistic. It is just a matter of when, not if.

Australia has not been able to “eradicate” European rabbits and Cane toads, to name just a few, with all the state-of-the-art scientific know-hows, such as making a species sterile and then let it mate? (It may have been much easier to eradicate the aborigines since they can’t fly in the air) I too would like to hear that Australia has completely eradicated Apis Cerana and mites, too, but that is a wishful thinking. How can you quarantine the sky? How can you quarantine flying insects? How can you detect and not miss one swarm infiltrating into a virgin territory? Some mites stay on the bloom, probably not on the bees necessarily (especially so are hummingbird mites that hitchhike onto the next host).

“Firstly it [Australian imports] would give you clean bees to start with, e.g. on almond pollination, and secondly you can then later requeen with your resistant queens that you are breeding. This overcomes the shortage of bees you have. However if you do not have a shortage of bees, then there will be no market for Australian packages.”

Ah, here comes the sales pitch. For almond pollination, nearly or close to half of the entire American colonies will congregate around a small area in California, a government-sponsored germ bed for free bee disease-exchange; the clean bees, therefore, will exacerbate and magnify the bee pathogens because they have never encountered many new pathogens brought on by migratory beekeepers, much less having developed any resistance against any. Worse, requeening thousands colonies is not always feasible, granted we get the new queens for free (you wish), thus proving impractical. As for the supply and demand side of almond pollination, I am not sure we are having shortage of bees every year. There seems to be a pattern that each year we go through this rumor of bee shortages; however, when the season actually arrives, the out-of-state beekeepers cannot find any takers at a dirt-cheap rate. I am also aware that many almond growers themselves are giving up almonds due to water scarcity and decreasing profit margins, thus alleviating the alleged bee-shortage even further.

Importing bees, at best, is a stop-gap measure, a myopic policy that ignores the long-term survival of bees and bee biology. American bees have been fighting mites for nearly twenty years now, having just barely established a toe-hold against mites in certain regions, in particular in the advent of AHB’s, among other known and unknown factors. By bringing in “pure” bees from Australia, are we not regressing and retarding our bees back to twenty years ago? Why? Isn’t this an act of animal cruelty? You have just rescued the bees from the gas chamber and then you put them right back in it because “they have never been in there”? Can we not simply say, “been there and done that,” and move on into a new era of beekeeping? Why would anyone like to make a nightmare last longer? 

Granted that Aussie breeders use selective Italian stocks known to be mite and other pathogen resistant in Italy, that is not the same thing as actually using bees in America saturated with cut-throat competition here and right now. That is not even a field study. Nature “red in tooth and claw” forged our bees to come to terms with all the pathogens we humans have introduced to them here in America. Why do we want to set the clock back to Stone Age? Why do we want to open up yet more opportunities for yet other bee disasters, invariably associated with global trafficking of bees?

Why do we have to become the world’s largest parking lot for all sorts of pathogens? No one has ever suffered death from not eating an almond or an orange. There are other fruits and vegetables that contain higher nutritional values than these two special crops offer. Sure, I too like to eat them once in a while, but importing bees from outside to fatten a few growers’ bank accounts ignores the long-term, unforeseen consequences. Isn’t this how we ended up with mites, SHB, and AHB in the first place? The greed of the few will subject all of us into serfdom once unknown bee pathogens and enemies come to roost in this world’s largest parking lot. Are we ever going to learn anything? You sure we Americans are not suckers?

Yoon


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## wildbranch2007 (Dec 3, 2008)

camero7 said:


> interesting thread on this on bee line:


thanks for doing the bee-l search for me, that was one of the people I was refereing to. thanks


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## camero7 (Sep 21, 2009)

Hi Yoon,

Nice post. I'm being shut out on B-Line. Won't put my posts past the moderators. guess I'm too controversial because I raised this point earlier there. Glad you're posting here too.


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## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

Keith Jarrett said:


> Well, only the PPB are the ones buying them & putting everyone else at risk.


PPB? I'm out of the loop on that abbreviation.


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## camero7 (Sep 21, 2009)

Piss Poor Beekeeping


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## wildbranch2007 (Dec 3, 2008)

Keith Jarrett said:


> Well, only the PPB are the ones buying them & putting everyone else at risk.


I'm having trouble copying the link so I copied the post from bee-l.



>So I think the list can see that the Aussie bees I use are very tolerant of

> varroa & tracheal mites.
>

Bob, could you please clarify? I found Terry's bees to be excellent
producers, but a bit nippy. However, I didn't see any tolerance to varroa,
but could have been given a different line.

Thanks,
Randy Oliver


Rany Oliver seems to have Aussie bees, and I don't consider him a PPB.

if i remember correctly from previous posts he is evaluating them for Terry.


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## KQ6AR (May 13, 2008)

I talked to Randy last spring. If I'm not mistaken someone gave him a couple aussie hives. He hadn't overwintered any at that time.

It was more a curiosity experiment than an endorsement for Aussie bees, Ask him.


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## high rate of speed (Jan 4, 2008)

The only tollerence is either babysittinng,or striking a match.:doh:


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## Keith Jarrett (Dec 10, 2006)

wildbranch2007 said:


> Rany Oliver seems to have Aussie bees, and I don't consider him a PPB..


This was for a study project, Randy did not buy them, I'm thinking P.R. from the supplyer.

apples & watermelons.


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