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reddish-brown parasitic varroa mite
hitches a ride on a honeybee. Australia
is the only country still relatively varroafree,
and now scientists, beekeepers and
industry are joining forces to help keep
it that way.
SCIENTIFIC NAMES: Apis mellifera; Varroa destructor
Magic, maybe, but a particularly practical kind of magic. “About one-third of the food we consume every day is reliant upon pollination from bees,” says Adam McNamara, executive general manager of Bega Foods. The humble honeybee, it turns out, is an economic powerhouse: Australia’s agricultural and horticultural industries rely on bee pollination to the tune of about $6 billion every year. So any threat to our bee population is one that not only conservationists, but also food producers, are bound to take very seriously. And a tiny parasite aptly named Varroa destructor is a particularly deadly threat that’s spreading fast.
“If you look at the rest of the world, this mite has gradually invaded various continents and countries,” Ian explains. “It was in Europe around the late 1960s, and then Brazil and South America during the ’70s. It arrived in the USA and Canada in the late ’80s and New Zealand towards 2000. It has a devastating impact on honey production and all the crops that are dependent on honey bee pollination.”
The mite invariably kills untreated colonies within one or two years, and is equally dangerous to feral bee populations. When it reached the ▶
Australia is the only inhabited continent to escape the mite’s invasion, largely due to our rigorous biosecurity measures. “We’ve got a very good surveillance system run by Plant Health Australia, particularly on board ships before they enter ports,” Ian says. “It has managed to track [and halt] a couple of incursions, one in Townsville and one dead swarm in Melbourne. But with a seaboard as big as ours, there’s an element of luck as well.”
Luck, however, isn’t something multibillion-dollar industries like to rely on. Enter the Purple Hive Project. Created by Bega Cheese Limited, and funded by its newly launched product, B honey, the project is a groundbreaking collaboration between one of Australia’s biggest food companies, two start-up tech companies, “and one old beekeeper”, says Ian with a smile. It’s hoped it will save Australia’s bees from the varroa mite.
THE PURPLE HIVE PROJECT doesn’t actually make purple beehives: instead, the bee-saving element in question is a unit that attaches to the entrance of the beehive and looks a little like a letterbox. Essentially, it takes photos of the bees and uses artificial intelligence (AI) to check them for mites.
“It has cameras top and bottom that cover 360 degrees of the bees as they enter and exit the hive over a glass platform,” explains Joel Kuperholz, CEO and co-founder of Vimana Tech, the company that created the unit. “From here, an image is captured to the onboard processor – that’s a mini-computer that has more power than the first spaceship that went to the moon.”
While Vimana Tech created the body of the unit, Xailient, another Australian tech start-up, created its brains. Its software homes in to identify a bee, and then looks for the mite. If there is one, it sends an alert over 4G wireless communications to the relevant authorities.
While the human eye finds it very difficult to identify the tiny mites, which are only about 1mm long, AI never gets tired or bored, works 24/7, and is constantly improving its detection.
The company was particularly well qualified: its co-founder and chief technology officer Shivy Yohanandan is a neuroscientist and bioengineer who has a PhD in AI and worked on Australia’s first bionic eye.
Lars explains: “The challenge of Purple Hive is to be able to see the bees and the mites as they come in and out of the hive. And to do that we needed an artificial intelligence that’s trained on specifically that problem. That didn’t exist anywhere in the world.”
Not only did the Xailient team create the AI from scratch, it also devised a unit that uses as little energy as possible so it can operate on a solarpowered 12-volt car battery, the most reliable and efficient power source in the remote areas where bees are often kept. The unit also has to work with limited internet access, so that if it does detect a mite, it can send urgent alerts to beekeepers in real time (speed is vital in tackling a mite infestation).
“If you’ve ever tried streaming Netflix on your phone in the middle of the outback, you know that’s just not gonna work,” Lars says. So he and Shivy worked to keep the unit’s use of data as low as possible. “All of these things combined meant that no artificial intelligence anywhere in the world would fit the purpose yet for what Bega needed,” Lars says. “We’re really running AI vision on the extreme, tiny edge here,” Shivy chimes in.
ALL OTHER PHOTOS COURTESY BEGA CHEESE LIMITED
The project was already complicated enough, and then COVID-19 happened. Like so many other businesses around the world, the teams were forced to work remotely, with all the lag times and ineficiencies that that can entail. When it came time to test the unit’s powers of detection on real mites, lockdown meant the Vimana Tech team had to scrap their original plan of flying to New Zealand (the closest country infected with the mite) with their prototype unit and working on it in situ. Instead, they built a second unit and sent it over the ditch.
Perhaps the most significant element of the whole project is that it borrows from nature in order to help save nature.
“One of my PhD supervisors was a bee vision expert and we discussed bee vision eficiencies at length,” says Shivy. “So to make this extreme level of computer vision possible, we drew inspiration from nature to build AI that is now helping the bees. There’s a really nice poetic justice there.”
The Vimana Tech team also drew inspiration from the bees themselves. “It’s all designed around them, including the purple colour,” says Joel. “It’s purple because the bees are naturally attracted to that colour.”
of the premier detection methods.
It’s a game-changer.”
Adam’s vision of an interconnected, country-wide network of hives constantly on the alert for the invasion of mites is exciting to both conservationists and food producers alike.
But according to beekeeper Ian, “to assume that the mite will never get here, I think, would be naive – and the industry accepts that”.
If and when the mites do eventually invade, however, the Purple Hives can serve not only as an early-warning system, but also as a monitoring system to track their spread. In the future, this technology may even support a yet-to-be-invented method of eradicating the mites completely. But that’s a way off.
From Ian’s perspective as a veteran beekeeper, the project is a vital piece in the bee-protection puzzle. “As always with prevention strategies, we need a multitude of tools in our kit,” he says. “I believe that this will become one of the premier detection methods. It’s a game-changer.” But he has a warning, too. “We’ve made mistakes in the past around public land management issues. We need to be really mindful that healthy ecosystems for our bees are also so important for our food crops – and if we did get varroa, those ecosystems would be even more important, because it will be so difficult to keep healthy bees.”
And it’s not just the survival of ecosystems that concerns Ian. He’s also mindful of the vital role bees play in ensuring the survival of human beings.
“In the past 50 or 60 years we have underestimated how important food security is to a nation and the world,” Ian says. “Perhaps we have just seen a tiny snippet of that with COVID-19 and how quickly shelves can be cleared out at supermarkets. That’s why this whole program is so important. It is a great step for humanity in providing food security for our future generations.”
SCIENTIFIC MAGAZINE, USED WITH PERMISSION
Beauty on the brink
IT’S JUST AFTER lunchtime, the morning rains have finally cleared and the sun begins breaking through the clouds. Max Breckenridge, a captive release project officer with BirdLife Australia (BLA) is slowly walking along a dirt road that cuts through a patch of untouched spotted gum–ironbark forest in the Lower Hunter Valley in New South Wales.
Our new conservation superpower
There were expectations it would reveal much about the evolution of this continent’s largely unique mammal fauna, and it has. But to most scientists working in Australian wildlife conservation, it didn’t seem to have a lot of practical relevance.
Lifeblood of the nation
Below the modern Brewarrina Weir in north-western New South Wales, a 2km bend holds the remains of this ancient structure, a complex of dry-stone walls and a site of engineering brilliance. Displaying advanced knowledge of river hydrology and fish ecology, the traps were designed to catch Murray cod, golden and silver perch and other fish, but allow breeding stock to pass through.
When a city rises
THAT FEBRUARY 2011 earthquake, which struck during the city’s lunch hour, was the most destructive in a series. It was the one that broke so many of the Central Business District’s verticals and horizontals – its buildings and the roads, sewers, water and gas pipes. It was shallow and ferocious. Its peak vertical ground acceleration of 2.2G (more than twice the acceleration of gravity) momentarily lifted parts of Christchurch to the sort of face-distorting speeds astronauts experience when they ascend into space.
Grantham’s road to recovery
IT WAS 10 JANUARY 2011 and once again it was pouring with rain. Queensland had already endured its wettest spring and December on record, and yet still the rain kept coming. I was working at the time as a freelance photographer for Queensland’s main newspaper, The Courier Mail. And weary of capturing “wet weather photos”, I’d decided to stay dry inside my Toowoomba office.