Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to add a few comments to complete the report that was tabled last night about the future of the Australian honey bee and pollination industries. The humble honey bee is an amazing creature: a hard worker and homely but also fascinating and terribly important to humans. We need to know more about their habits and their industrious work. You cannot think of them as single. A hive of bees is an entity and works like a body. Every bee has its role within the body. There is a series of different roles each bee plays. They communicate between each other, describing their food sources—where they are—in some detail, warning of danger, telling each other when there is damage to their hive, calling for protection of their young bees and sending many other complex messages.

The queen is like the head, and the main part of the hive consists of the workers. They act as foragers, as nurses for the young and the queen and as soldiers to protect the hive. Within that, there are other roles such as cleaning the hive and grooming and feeding the queen. The young nurse bees make royal jelly. It is a secretion from glands on the top of their heads. For two or three days, royal jelly is the only food given to the young larvae in their maturation process, while, for the queen, larvae is the most specific food for her whole life period. During the three days in which the worker bee larvae are fed on royal jelly, they reach their maximum development. Their weight multiplies about 250 times. The queen, fed only on royal jelly for her entire life, reaches maturity five days earlier than the worker bees and, when she is fully grown, her weight is double that of the worker bee.

The span of the worker bee life is about 35 to 40 days, while the queen lives five or six years and is extremely prolific. She is fertilised once and from that moment can lay as many as 3,000 eggs a day during the season. As incredible as this may seem, she can lay that many eggs for five years. Any creature that has that amount of energy and vitality has to be respected.

Other social insects, including the termite and the ant, have a similar holistic structure, and the equivalent in the sea, of course, is coral. We can learn a lot more about these entities. Nature is fascinating to work with. (Time expired)