Yes, honey bees are not native, and it is possible that native bees will benefit from their decline. However, to what extent native pollinators can replace honey bees, and the how that will affect forests adapted to honey bee pollination remains unclear. 

There are no native bees that can replace honey bees for pollination in the short term. Our croplands are made up almost entirely of other non-native species, and honey bees have been bred for decades to become efficient pollinators in our agroecosystems. A massive effort will be necessary to breed native bees to fill this gap. If you are interested and are an Australian/New Zealand citizen or permanent resident with a first-class honours or masters, we have a Ph.D. student position available to work on this line of research.

In the short-term managed honey bees will be treated with pesticides to keep Varroa down, as in other countries. This is a labour intensive and expensive option, and the mites can evolve resistance. In parallel, we will need to breed resistant honey bee strains, but that will take many years. In the short term, we will have disruptions to pollination and likely job losses in the beekeeping industry.

When they reach adulthood, honey bee queens go on a single nuptial flight, mating and storing sperm for the rest of their lives. Honey bee males (drones) hang out at specific location waiting to mate with a queen. These are known as drone congregation areas (DCAs). There are often hundreds or thousands of drones attending each DCA. Queens mate with a dozen or more drones in quick succession. DCAs are constant from year to year, and allow queens (and us) to sample genetic diversity from about a 2-3 km radius.

Bees found on a single patch of flowers will often be from the same nest, and we want maximum genetic diversity.

The ANU Bee Lab will provide a queen pheromone bait that that can be tied to a helium balloon suspended from fishing line. See video here. The balloon needs to be sufficiently large, ideally at least 60cm in diameter and can be suspended from fishing line, e.g., with a toy fishing rod. Once drones are attracted, the balloon needs to be lowered quickly and they can be swept up by a butterfly net and put into ethanol.

This may vary seasonally and geographically, but in NSW, drones are most active after 2-4:30PM on clear, warm, not-too-windy days. Generally, the temperature should be below 36C, wind speed less than 15km/h, and no chance of rain. The drone season tapers off into the fall and starts up in the spring.

Drones use a combination of vision and pheromone sensing to locate queens, so they typically found in clearings with a good line of sight. The location of the actual DCA) within a clearing may be limited to just a few square meters within a given clearing (and can shift over the course of a day), and you might need to search for it. The DCAs are located 15-25 meters above the ground, and drones lose attraction to the lure quickly below 10 m. Often, though not always, it is in the centre. Consequently, areas with too much open space, make it difficult to locate the DCA. An ideal space is a sports oval surrounded by natural habitat and away from apiaries. For example, here is a photo of the that’s surrounded by high-quality woodland. 

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Seaforth Oval in Sydney

By contrast, despite hours of searching, we could never locate a DCA in the extensive network of clearings at the nearby Pennant Hills sports complex. There are almost certainly DCAs there, but locating them will be tricky. And sometimes, for reasons known only to the honey bees, drone will simply not be there on a certain day!

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Pennant Hills sports complex

As an alternative to using a balloon, sampling can be done with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV, aka a drone), with the lure suspended about 4 meters below the rotors. The UEV makes it much easier to position the lure, but is more dangerous, so, if you have a drone, please make sure you are following Civil Aviation Safety Authority guidelines for its operation!

Fun fact: the stinger is an evolutionary modification of the ovipositor, used by female insects to lay eggs. So, males don’t have a stinger and can’t sting you. There is a small chance that you might catch a worker or queen bee while out drone hunting, but this is not substantially more likely than if you were to go out and spend time in the oval doing other things.