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Australian Native Bees with Clancy Lester
132 Plays1 month ago
Clancy Lester is an Australian Native Bee expert. Forget everything you thought you knew about bees. According to Clancy Lester, environmental educator and native bee researcher, the true heroes of Australia’s pollination story aren’t European honeybees, but thousands of native species that rarely get noticed—or understood.
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Episode Links:
Clancy's Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/beesandblossoms.aus/
Clancy's Website - https://nativebeehotels.com/
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Mykal's Links:
Website - https://thegardenerslodge.co.uk/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thegardenerslodgeuk/ Tik Tok - https://www.tiktok.com/@thegardenerslodge
Growing Media Production ©2025
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:08
Speaker
Step into the gardener's lodge with me, Michael Hoare. Let's explore the fascinating world of gardening, nature and ecology through conversations with experts, thought leaders, passionate enthusiasts, and of course, some real good friends, all from the cozy heart of the lodge.
00:00:25
Speaker
Come on in.
00:00:28
Speaker
The Gardener's Lodge podcast is created on the traditional lands of the Darug and Gundungara people in the Blue Mountains. We pay respect to all First Nations elders, past and present.
Meet the Bee Man
00:00:41
Speaker
My chat today is with Clancy Lester, otherwise known as the Bee Man or beesandblossoms.oz on Instagram. He is an environmental educator. He is a native bee expert, which is exactly why I wanted to get him on. I don't know a whole lot about native bees, and I imagine you don't either.
00:00:59
Speaker
It's a subject that not a huge amount is known about. Clancy is a super interesting guy. Now something really weird has happened since I recorded this episode. It's not weird actually something really cool has happened since recording this episode with Clancy.
00:01:12
Speaker
um He's blown up online. So when I recorded this, it was January. I think he had under a thousand followers. He has gone absolutely berserk um online and I'm sure he actually needs no introduction to you if you are a part of the gardening community or a part of the ecology community online.
00:01:29
Speaker
His content is everywhere at the moment. He runs workshops and incursions with schools on how to build bee hotels and bring wildlife into the home garden and into our cities and parklands.
00:01:44
Speaker
Clancy is actually a 2025 recipient of the ABC Haywire competition, where the ABC likes to help young regional Australians that have an interesting message and a great point of view get their message out there.
00:01:59
Speaker
He has been on a whirlwind tour. He's met the prime minister. He's been to parliament house. He's done countless interviews on ABC radio, other podcasts, and I completely get it. The ABC got this one right. He is a champion.
Rapid Fire Questions
00:02:15
Speaker
I hope you enjoy my chat with Clancy, but first let's do our six rapid fire questions so that you get to know Clancy a little better. Are you ready? Yep. Let's do it. Okay. Favorite plant.
00:02:28
Speaker
Hardenbergia or Wallenbergia. Oh, it's already hard.
00:02:34
Speaker
Favorite way to connect with nature? Sitting under a eucalyptus. Beautiful. Most beautiful garden or natural landscape you've visited? Or the heart garden, Jack Semlar. Nice.
00:02:46
Speaker
Favorite garden tool? Hammer.
00:02:52
Speaker
If you could be one, plant or animal? Animal. When you're looking to research anything, where do you go for the most sound and reliable information?
00:03:02
Speaker
Probably Google Scholar. Perfect.
Interest in Native Bees
00:03:05
Speaker
oh That was actually bit stressful. No, we got there. Good. No, they were good answers. They were really good answers. I love your content. You post a lot of educational videos around native pollinators and particularly native bees.
00:03:18
Speaker
Where did you actually find your passion for native bees? um it's It's sort of only been recently to be to be really fair. Like, I think it was only a ah couple of years ago when I wouldn't have known as much as ah the average person really about native bees. What's really got me to fall in love with them is learning from the indigenous people in Northeast Arnhem Land about their connection to the native stingless sugar bag bees.
00:03:43
Speaker
And then of bringing that love back down here to Melbourne and learning all about the native bees I have in my back doorstep really. So how did you end up in Arnhem Land? Yeah, so that was for my master's research project. So through ah university.
00:03:57
Speaker
um And yeah, when the the day when the supervisors were talking about the research projects for prospective students, I just heard the word Arnhem Land and I just said, what what's this about? Like, I need like, this sounds like an absolute dream. And they said, it's going to be on native stingless bees. So ah thought, yeah, I better start, um like, learning about them. and And then, yeah, got the gig to go to northeast Arnhem Land and and and, yeah, the rest was history. It's just been an absolute dream.
00:04:26
Speaker
At the very top, you briefly mentioned the connection between the indigenous populations and the sugar bag bee in Arnhem Land. What is that connection? The connection to the sugar bag bees or the the stingless bees, it comes from the song lines that appear in Yolngu culture.
00:04:43
Speaker
The Yolngu people themselves are split up into two moaitis, the Dua and the Yidija. And this is like inter intertwined with their marital systems and their totems and everything.
00:04:55
Speaker
And the honey from the different species of sugar bags, so the different genuses, tetragonula and austroplebia, those two themselves are split up into Jua and Yidija.
00:05:06
Speaker
And so some of the honey we managed to find was ah the Jua honey, um which was Niuida.
Research and Cultural Significance
00:05:13
Speaker
And this is like, yeah, something that's really important culturally because, know,
00:05:18
Speaker
Yeah, even the whole marital systems and part of the culture and the totems and everything is all intertwined with sugar bags themselves. And obviously there's like dreamings and song lines or there's the the sugar bag man as well. He's like one of the sort of creator entities that went through the country and there's like a song line associated with him too.
00:05:40
Speaker
So I suppose the bees are then really quite integral to their experience on Earth and their experience of life in general. um Jumping back a bit, obviously, you learnt about all of that beautiful information through um your university studies.
00:05:57
Speaker
But how did it come to be that you ended up studying native bees? And what's your degree? So, yeah, my degree is a Master of Bioscience. It's under the Master of Science. And i started just with a Bachelor of Science doing a ah few different sort of subjects like in chemistry and math and biology because I wasn't really sure where I was going to end up.
00:06:18
Speaker
But I sort of just ended up following... Like my, my passions growing up watching the Steve Irwin and the David Attenborough documentaries and, and yeah, just those sort of subjects always stood out to me getting out into nature and learning about plants and animals. It just has always fascinated me. So I've just sort of ended up following that and it's landed me the awesome gig to get to go up to Arnhem Land and that sort of thing with my research. So I was really lucky.
00:06:45
Speaker
How cool. So how long did you spend up in Arnhem Land? So I got to go up there a few times, actually. We went up there initially with no intentions of doing anything, but just to connect with the people up there, get into the community and and sort of begin that really respectful two-way knowledge exchange so that they knew that we had all the right and intentions before really doing anything. So that was the first initial trip.
00:07:11
Speaker
And then after that, once we'd laid out and sort of planned about how we're going to go about the research and trying to get a good spread of the like bee activity over the the dry season so we went up there a few times in the end to try and get the start the middle and the end of all the flowering period um throughout the dry season yeah Amazing.
00:07:33
Speaker
So I suppose let's take it right back. So could you give me an overview of what native bees are? How many species are there? What makes them unique?
Diversity of Native Bees
00:07:43
Speaker
Yeah. Wow. So it could be here all day after that one. Yeah. Um, yeah so you'll have, you'll have to pull me up, but so yeah, just really, really broadly. There's 1,650 native species that are officially, you know, documented.
00:07:59
Speaker
but okay that they think that there's the estimates are, you know, well over 2000 species. So there's a, there's a massive, massive diversity of native bees in Australia. And so, yeah, a lot, it's a lot more than just the European honeybees, which a lot, a lot of people know them that, but there's so much more than that.
00:08:17
Speaker
There's, there's other honeybees as 11 species that make honey that, they're that stingless bees if people have heard of them or the sugar bag bees. Uh, there's five different families of bees.
00:08:28
Speaker
Um, What else have we got? That's within Australia. there's there So there's five different families within, just on the Australian continent? Yeah, just just on the Australian continent, there's there's five different families. um And some of those families, like one of them, the Stenotritidae, that's like pretty much unique just to Australia. Like there's only 21 species or so in that group. Then there's a seriously, seriously diverse group in Australia that of short-tongued bees, which are the Colletids.
00:08:57
Speaker
And this is sort of unique to Australia, um most likely because of the the diversity of eucalypts, because they seem to have really close relationships with their pollination of the Mertaceae family of flowering plants.
00:09:12
Speaker
okay um And you can see that's one of the most diverse flowering species in Australia. So it makes sense that it's also really diverse of the things that are pollinating it. So that the collated bees. One message I'd like to get across about native bees to the so the average person is that not all bees make honey.
00:09:29
Speaker
So I think that's that's one thing that um people associate bees with is that they make honey. But a lot of those 2000 plus native bee species, only 11 of those actually make honey.
00:09:41
Speaker
So there's so many different native bee species, which are solitary where they live alone. And you could say nearly ever but every female is a queen. Every female um sort of runs a show and builds her own nest and lays her own eggs, collects her own pollen, does everything, does all the work.
00:09:57
Speaker
so So she's a little one woman show. oh absolutely. They, they, ah they just blow my mind. Yeah. That they're so independent and just can do it all. I think maybe if people are familiar with Australian native bees, they're probably familiar with your, you know, blue banded bees or your teddy bear bees, the ones that are kind of hit the media all the time.
00:10:17
Speaker
But what are some of the key identifiers for some of those other species of bees? What, what, what makes them stand out from other insects? There is a lot of similarity in um native bees and that's one of the reasons why they don't really know how many species there are. Once you look under a microscope, there there might be some little difference in the the wing venation or ah like the spurs on their legs or where the hair is on their head.
00:10:44
Speaker
Like there's so many different little things which um make the species different. So that that can be hard. There's a lot of different small little black species that all look very similar.
00:10:56
Speaker
When you have a bee hotel or if if you find where they've been nesting, that's one way to tell different species apart by the materials that they use to plug the hole. So some use resin and they're resin bees. There's some that use um bits of leaf fragment and they're leaf cutter bees.
00:11:12
Speaker
Some that make these sort of like glossy material that can be masked bees. ah Then there's the wasp mimic bees, which um make these sort of spider web looking entrances to their to their nests.
00:11:26
Speaker
ah But there there is a lot of similarity. There is still, like you said, the blue banner bee and the teddy bear bee. There are still those distinct species that you can tell apart by color. once One um really distinct species is the ah carpenter bees, which ah just just by their sheer size is easy to tell them apart.
Resources and Pollination Role
00:11:45
Speaker
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00:12:08
Speaker
The free download also comes with a bunch of extra information on the steps you'll need to make it flourish. If that sounds like something that you'd like to take advantage of, the link to the free download is in the show notes below this episode.
00:12:22
Speaker
Check it out.
00:12:26
Speaker
Genome sequencing or DNA testing is something that has gone berserk in the plant world, you know, with plants being recategorised because ah the DNA has shown that they are different species to what they were once thought to be.
00:12:41
Speaker
I can only imagine something similar is happening with native bees. Yes, absolutely. And that's that's one thing that might even bump those 2000 estimates of the native bee species up even further once we can yeah look at the the DNA between but between different different specimens.
00:13:02
Speaker
Because it can be hard enough just looking under a microscope trying to tell the differences and DNA will probably um help help out that case a lot. Yeah, I bet. Uh, so broadly speaking, what is the life cycle of the native bees? I know there's 2000 different species, but just generally what is the life cycle?
00:13:21
Speaker
So I guess it would start as, so say for a solitary bee, the, the, the female will lay either a the ah fertilized egg, which will become ah female or she'll lay an unfertilized egg, which will become a male.
00:13:39
Speaker
and And she can sort of um pick and choose which a lot of species can pick and choose which gender they they want the eggs to be. So that's how it'll start. they'll find um They'll find a nest like might be a cavity from a wood boring grub or they might dig and dig a hole in the ground in ah in a clay bank or so into some sandy sediments or something.
00:14:01
Speaker
And they lay that egg and then that egg or egg hatches and it will go through like the the larval stage. It'll eat the pollen and nectar um resources that the mother has left for that. And then it'll develop within the the nest until it's morphed into ah a small smaller baby bee.
00:14:25
Speaker
which it'll quite often chew through the seal of the the like chamber that the egg's been laid in, and then it'll um come into the outside world.
00:14:35
Speaker
um And then yeah, start going and visiting flowers and um drinking nectar and collecting pollen for the next generation. So how long do native bees live? Yeah, so this one is up to what species you're looking at because because of the large diversity of native bees.
00:14:54
Speaker
in Australia, there's a very big variation in the lifespan of some of the native bees. So you have things like xylacopas or those big carpenter bees, which some of those females will live over the course of multiple seasons. Like they might live, I don't if it's two, three, four years length.
00:15:14
Speaker
Then you have other species which are much more short-lived. So you might have some, I think like the mast bees or resin bees, which are more so more seasonal and you you'll get turnover throughout the year. What happens in a lot of native bee species is actually the flying around bee morph of the species doesn't exist over winter.
00:15:35
Speaker
And some bee species will exist as grubs in those bee hotels and cavities and in the ground. over winter and then they emerge as the next generation.
00:15:46
Speaker
So quite often, yeah, there's either multiple generations within a season or um and they're shorter lived or yeah, they'll be seasonal or in the rare cases they'll live for more than one or two years.
00:15:58
Speaker
Yeah, right. Oh, wow. Okay. It's quite interesting, really. So, okay. Everyone knows what a European honeybee looks like or your regular honeybees look like, but what are the key differences in behavior, habitat, pollination?
00:16:12
Speaker
So, yeah, the key difference between a lot of um species of native bees versus honeybees is that a lot of native bees ah yeah live solitary lifestyles. So,
00:16:24
Speaker
There's only 11 species of those 2000 species which live in hives and they're they're known as the stingless bees. And we don't have those in Victoria or anywhere south of Sydney really.
00:16:36
Speaker
um Okay. Yeah. And even, even the stingless bees are nothing like the European honeybees because their hives are like this the structure of the brood.
00:16:47
Speaker
It's not like in honeycomb. They do like these really cool spiral structures that look, it just looks like something out of a, like a sci-fi alien movie. And then the the solitary bees. Yeah. They're just that. Yeah. Obviously they don't live in hives. So they don't have that structure of the queen and the workers and things.
00:17:05
Speaker
there's There's just, yeah, females that run the show um by themselves. But there is a few species that um live in a bit of a gray area between social bees and solitary where they might have a few females that they might share the nest entrance, but they they might dig bit.
00:17:25
Speaker
you know, like in a different direction and sort of have their own like little apartment in a, in an underground complex sort of thing. It's almost like share house or something. Yeah, like a share house. Absolutely. So they're still sort of solitary, but just um live with each other or next to each other as neighbours in aggregations.
00:17:45
Speaker
There's also species like reed bees where ah instead of, laying an egg and putting some pollen with it and forgetting about it. They, they actually, so they might have like a bit of a mom club that are feeding, um, babies or like older sisters that are, that have already hatched and going back so that there is like a bit of teamwork, but yeah. Interesting. So yeah, a bit of, there can be a bit of teamwork dynamics, but for the most part, they're, um, a lot of,
00:18:12
Speaker
a lot of the species are solitary. that's yeah That's one of the key distinguishing differences. um Another difference, and this is actually like a really cool, ah sort of connection that that we have to native bees is that when when settlers invaded Australia, the the the first settlers that were setting up the trees and the fruits and the crops and things that they brought over from England and from Europe, they they couldn't work out why you know the the fruits were failing. So they were like, what's what's going on?
00:18:46
Speaker
um Like, why why aren't they getting pollinated or like what's happening? So then they brought over the honeybees with them to fix the issue why that's sort of the case is that honeybees have long tongues so they're they're part of this family apoday which is long tongue bees so that's like a key feature of the honeybees and the blue band of bees in the same family so this is also long tongue okay But what what was happening was because and a lot of the native bee species are short-tongued, and that's that's one thing that's unique to Australia really, is that a lot of the diversity of native bees are short-tongued bees.
00:19:23
Speaker
um So these species, they didn't really care about the European crops that European people were bringing over. They just were happy to pollinate native plants, and that's why it's so good to to plant native plants for native bees.
00:19:38
Speaker
Native bees are just always sort of, you know, specialised and adapted to pollinating native plants. Interesting. So they then, for agricultural purposes, they don't actually serve us humans much in terms of our food cycle. Yeah, I like i like to call it unpaid work because there there still is a lot of yeah unpaid labour from native bees that goes into crops.
00:20:03
Speaker
Okay. But it's obviously not like a preference of them. Native bees, like if they've got eucalyptus in flower or the different indigenous plants to the area, they're obviously going to pick that over pollinating the crops.
00:20:17
Speaker
But there is still a lot of unpaid labor that um native bees are giving agriculture. there There's also a really high efficiency of when, say you get... a flower and you get 10 different native bees to pollinate that flower that's much more efficient than getting 10 honeybees to pollinate that same flower because the difference in the morphology of the native bees and their sizes and how they go about pollinating and the different the different techniques and behaviors of native bees that they create a much more ah yeah efficient pollination so and that's that also yeah goes into
00:20:57
Speaker
our gardens and our crops and things too. So what role do native bees play in Australia's ecosystem? How crucial are they for pollination and biodiversity? There's no understating the importance of bees.
00:21:11
Speaker
in In the world, there's there's hundreds of thousands of different species of flowering plants. which to some extent rely on pollination to create their fruits and their seeds um and continue reproducing.
00:21:25
Speaker
And ah particularly in the australian Australian context, we've got tens of thousands of species of flaring plants. And one thing that I love that I haven't touched on yet is this thing called buzz pollination or sonication.
Threats to Bee Populations
00:21:39
Speaker
And these are, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say tight ass, but the, flowers that are bit tied to us with their pollen. And so they they make it a bit harder to release their pollen. They don't just like display it for any Tom, Dick and Harry to come and collect.
00:21:59
Speaker
So these flowers, and this this includes your herbertia, your solanum, like blueberries, um or the dianella, the flax lilies. yeah And so...
00:22:10
Speaker
These flowers need to be shaken vigorously before they release the pollen so that not any insect can just go and raid their resources. So they they make it hard.
00:22:22
Speaker
And this is ah across the world, about 11 to 12% of flowering plants are buzz pollinated. And this is something that honeybees cannot do. So you need native bees, like the blue-bounded bee is a great example of a buzz pollinator.
00:22:37
Speaker
ah the The teddy bear bee, the carpenter bees, even some small like Lassia glossums and Lipotriches can buzz pollinate. And so what happens here, there's there's two ways which native bees buzz pollinate.
00:22:53
Speaker
The first way is they'll grab onto the anthers of the flower or somewhere where they can get a good hold of it. and they'll vibrate their flight muscles without actually flo flapping their wings.
00:23:04
Speaker
Wow. So you can imagine, in so um um um'm doing it I'm doing it right now, but I'm not on video. so that but But so a native bee, yeah, they'll be they'll be flapping their wings like nuts, but they their move wings don't move. So instead of the their wings moving, their body just shakes like really, really quickly.
00:23:23
Speaker
And so this is what will release the pollen out of the native flowers. And then you've also got a different form of buzz pollination, which is the blue banner bees. And this is why, this is why you might've heard of, um, or been, you've might've heard of blue banner bees, um, being compared to a heavy metal band because their strategy is headbanging.
00:23:46
Speaker
And so they vibrate ah muscles in their thorax, which causes their head to sort of headbutt the flower parts that they're holding onto. And yeah, this ah this vibrates the flowers and releases the pollen.
00:24:01
Speaker
So yeah, that and this is, literally about 300 times a second whoa that i that they do this. So they they're headbanging very quickly. It's just incredible stuff.
00:24:13
Speaker
And so, yeah, well, bringing it back to the question why native bees is important, yeah. If we didn't have native bees, especially the ones which are able a buzz pollinate, there goes the 12% of species of flowering plants in Australia that, yeah, need buzz pollination.
00:24:29
Speaker
Well, then they're critically important. Oh, absolutely. And there's so many of these specialist interactions but as well, because you've got millions of years of flowering plants getting pollinated by native bees.
00:24:43
Speaker
So you can imagine how some of these interactions over time get more and more advanced and efficient. So there's some plant species that will only have really specialized pollinators,
00:24:55
Speaker
that have adapted over those millions of years to pollinating that plant. And same goes for native bees. There's some groups of species, like what I was saying with the short-tongued bees, like ah like the mars bees and ureglosser and yuri glosser and these these sorts of like little groups of general species, they might only have one flowering plant species or one flowering plant genera or family that they look for and that's what they've adapted to pollinating. You disrupt that interaction
00:25:27
Speaker
And then you you lose the other, like they they rely on each other. Yeah, it's like a symbiotic relationship between them where yeah absolutely one will, if if if you lose the native bee, you lose the plant species as well.
00:25:38
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. That is, it's quite fascinating, but also quite scary just with the um kind of direction that Australia is going with deforestation and everything. It's...
Creating Bee-friendly Spaces
00:25:48
Speaker
ah it's quite important to protect them, I suppose.
00:25:52
Speaker
um Oh, absolutely. So speaking of Australia, it's a big, big country, so many different ecosystems. How have bees adapted to the country's diverse and often very harsh conditions?
00:26:06
Speaker
Yeah, that's ah that's a great question. In Australia, um ah we have a lot of ground nesting bee species. I'm not sure if this is because, you know, they the ground's everywhere um versus needing, you know, a dead log or something to find to nest in.
00:26:22
Speaker
But so we've got a lot of ground nesting species. And in some of this Is that fairly unique to Australia? Yeah. ah I think across the world, I think it tends to be more ground nesting bees than cavity nesting.
00:26:35
Speaker
But yeah, in Australia, we have around 60 to 70% of the species will nest in the ground. And some of these bee species will literally dig like over a metre, some up to three metres into the ground.
00:26:48
Speaker
before they create the cells where they're going to lay their eggs. So bees are so small. how do they actually dig? You know, they're three to five millimeters. ah guess they're not like insanely strong compared to mammals and whatnot.
00:27:04
Speaker
How do they dig? Well, I think that the some of the species have a bit more adapted legs for digging. So they they definitely use their legs and you'll see the amigillas or the blue banner bees, they'll be scratching around with their their front legs and then they'll like put it in reverse and go back down the hole um to like to scoop the the dirt out and stuff. but yeah, it does amaze me. You're right. Some of the smaller bees, like three, five millimeters, like the size of one of your fingernails. And they, they're digging these great distances down deep.
00:27:37
Speaker
That's amazing. So it would maybe in like Arnhem land or somewhere where they get like a heavy wet season, are they less ground dwelling bees? No, not necessarily because they, they, they can, um, yeah, ground nesting bees can create like a sort of a cement mixture between like the walls.
00:27:57
Speaker
Um, cause they'll, they'll sort of line on the walls as well on the, on the way down that creates so that, yeah, if it if it rains, this the sand's not just going to like collapse on itself or whatever. Cool.
00:28:08
Speaker
What are the main threats that, uh, native bee populations are facing? So there's quite a range of different threats that native bees are facing in Australia, Michael. um And one of the things in particular, which I could link back to how we were speaking of on before, the different specialist interactions between native bees and the plants they pollinate.
00:28:28
Speaker
And when you have these interactions which have formed over millions and millions of years, and you have these bees which are sort of active at those similar times of years when those flowers are expected to be flowering,
00:28:42
Speaker
And then climate change has sort of come in and thrown a lot of these interactions out of whack a little bit, especially for those specialist species which rely on flowers to occur at a particular time of year.
00:28:54
Speaker
And this is one thing that we've seen with the stingless sugar bag bees in the Northern Territory, which they love the stringy barks of the good acres in the area. And in the last few years, there's been some really unexpected flowering of the good acres. And this is something that's been happening later and later each year.
00:29:11
Speaker
So these stingless bees are emerging when they should um typically expect to find the the stringy barks and then they haven't been flowering yet. And this has put a massive ah pressure on the limited time where stingless bees are able to go out and forage for nectar and pollen to raise the next generation and create honey and and contribute to the hive's overall health and wellbeing. and This has put a lot of pressure.
00:29:36
Speaker
And so this is just one of the one of the threats. Another one which has been really, really um devastating, especially in recent decades. The last 30 years or so, you can see a massive decline in insects as a whole, really, across the world.
00:29:50
Speaker
About 40% of the abundance we've lost right across the world in all insects. A study's come out that, yeah, since the country has been settled in Australia, we've lost about 9,000 species of invertebrates um to extinction completely.
00:30:05
Speaker
And, yeah, lots of this has come through, like land clearing for agriculture and housing development but more recently pesticides and insecticides and herbicides and all of the chemicals and pollutants that we use for large-scale agriculture and monoculture um has been just devastating you have these things like neonicotinoids and neonics which are just absolutely devastating the insects right across australia
00:30:36
Speaker
um because obviously they're very, very effective pesticides to treat the different insects and things that might get into the crops. ah But obviously they don't they don't discriminate and they're more than happy to kill bee populations and the ones that are leaching into the waterways um and they're they're getting into the soils and they're they're creating much longer lasting effects than just the specific target species that they're intended for.
00:31:04
Speaker
um So yeah, that's that's one thing that's really devastating. the The lifespan of these chemicals can be you know years. Some chemicals will like ah you know be undetectable in the soil in a day or two, but some of the really strong ones can last in soil for for years to come.
00:31:20
Speaker
So I can see how that is a pretty scary fate for like our burrowing bees and whatnot. Absolutely. and And that's one thing that one of the questions that people come up with straight away is how are they allowed to use these pesticides or insecticides?
00:31:35
Speaker
And quite often they are They appear to be potentially harmless in the short term. ah And once they accumulate or they might be causing behavioral um effects or they might be causing multi-generational effects, that were not ah not they're not instantly killing the the um insect species. But this is something we find out in retrospect.
00:32:00
Speaker
So that's why a lot of these things get the green light straight away. And it takes us a little while to realize how bad they are. Yeah, we'll put profits up first and then we'll work out how to deal with the issues down the track, you know.
00:32:15
Speaker
Unfortunately. Just about everything in human life is it's easier to put band-aids on problems down the track than actually do the correct testing to make sure that these things are actually safe. um Even for us as people, you know, like they are still going into our bodies as well.
00:32:30
Speaker
So, okay. What type of habitats do native bees actually prefer and how can gardeners kind of recreate that bee friendly space at home? Yeah, so that's one thing that I like to encourage is that you want to be trying to simulate as best you can the sort of environments and habitats where native bees would nest in if they're in a completely natural remnant habitat.
00:32:53
Speaker
And this is things like the ah holes from wood boring grubs in bits of dead wood and ah old eucalyptus trees. This is pithy stems and hollow stems of native wildflowers and grasses. This is fern fronds. This is ah clay and sandy banks on the sides of rivers.
00:33:14
Speaker
And so the ways that we can simulate this to to create a native bee haven in our own backyards is we can drill into native hardwood with drill bits to make these tunnels, which wood boring grubs and beetles would make for native bees.
00:33:31
Speaker
Another way is to to not prune off all the dead flowers and throw that in the green waste, but to to leave those flower stems um and you know the the dead the dead blades of grass and and sedges and things.
00:33:46
Speaker
um And instead of clearing all this away, because we have this thing about how tidy we want our gardens to look, but a little bit of mess can be that habitat that's crucial to native bees.
00:33:57
Speaker
And then the last sort of side of things is to make your garden friendly for ground nesting bees. um And one way you can do this is don't have seriously thick layers of mulch.
00:34:09
Speaker
Mm-hmm. And you also want to leave bare patches of soils and clay and sand where it possible, because this is going to leave it open for the ground nesting bees to to dig into.
00:34:24
Speaker
You want to not be completely immaculate with your garden. Let a little bit of mess come in. I suppose that it be a little bit wild to have a little bit of bare soil. um for your ground nesting bees and you don't want to be using any pesticides or... Yes, exactly right....weed killer or anything like that through the space because, I mean, that's just, you know, counterproductive.
00:34:49
Speaker
Yeah, exactly right. And the alternative to this is you want to best try and create a ah balance in your ecosystem. You want the predatory wasps and the parasitic wasps. You want different flies.
00:35:02
Speaker
You want beetles. You want everything to sort of create that balance. There is some really ah damaging pests that people have in their garden. So there's there's things like the mites and the aphids and the caterpillars and these things.
00:35:15
Speaker
um And so this is why you want to try and create that ecosystem balance. But alternatives I have seen to pesticides and insecticides, which seem really promising, I've seen lately, is the use of, ah they call them like bugs for bugs, or you can literally order in or buy pesticides.
00:35:35
Speaker
predatory insects that you can deploy into your, into your garden. So if you have aphids, you can order online lady beetles, which get sent to your door that you can release into your garden to, to be like a, a, a,
00:35:50
Speaker
ah biological control. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. I've actually used that with my, in my home garden, but also in my landscape clients gardens as well. And yeah you know, it's not an surefire thing all the time, but if you put in the time to it of making sure that when you get those bugs that they have somewhere to feed and creating the habitat for them, then they actually are really long lasting, beautiful, safe way to go.
00:36:20
Speaker
I know people get a bit scared. Yeah, that's just brilliant, isn't it I think they're great. I think they're really good. Actually, the Bugs for Bugs website is and a fantastic resource even just to have a look and see what bugs you want to attract to your garden to fight garden other garden pests that you don't want.
00:36:35
Speaker
I suppose if we're going down that track too, there's a heap of safe mechanical methods. Like with aphids, you can squish them between your fingers. You can you hit them off with a ah hose, things like that, because you actually, i think to create a beautiful ecosystem, you do want those pests there because if you just get rid of them constantly, you're not going to be attracting any of those ladybugs or anything that is going to be beneficial in the long run for bigger pest problems.
00:37:03
Speaker
um Exactly right. yeah You're right. It's all about balance. It's like people say, you know, I hate wasps. But then at the same time, they say, I hate caterpillars.
00:37:14
Speaker
So the same caterpillars that are tearing apart your silver beets, there's a wasp that's out there that's native to Australia that's going to come in and parasitize those caterpillars and look after your silverbeets.
00:37:27
Speaker
And so there's like heaps of these these different things that are intertwined that you don't really want to take out you know, that part of the food chain, because like so something's going to support something, even and if it is a pest or, you know, when, when you get that ecosystem control in your garden, it's not one of those pests, isn't going to flare up and create real problems like it would if there wasn't that balance.
00:37:55
Speaker
That's it. I have like a saying that I tell my clients, which is like, you're generally the biggest pest in your garden. You know, they yeah might want you to come in and, um, and spray everything and make sure there's no bugs anywhere or no spiders or whatever it is. And you're like, well, no, because they have a job to do, you know?
00:38:14
Speaker
And by you doing that, you're just creating bigger problems down the road. um But yeah, anyway, we kind of got a little bit off track there, but that's okay. You are a massive advocate for creating bee hotels at home. I think you've got some resources online for a free download. Is that right? On how to create native bee hotels.
00:38:33
Speaker
Why don't you run us through some really simple, simple, simple ways that we can make some pollinator hotels?
Research Discoveries
00:38:40
Speaker
that's That's my whole outlook, trying to make it as simple as possible because I'm not someone that loves to read a whole lot. I've always been a picture story kind of guy.
00:38:50
Speaker
and i've I've tried to make it yeah as simple as possible, but still at the same time, really optimize how the quality of habitat actually is for the potential inhabitants.
00:39:02
Speaker
And so I've got three main ways that I create B-hotels or three three sort of designs really. And these are about trying best to simulate the natural environment.
00:39:13
Speaker
And so the first one of these designs is by getting bits of hardwood, just simple like sort of logs that you might use for fire or um you know laying branches that have fallen off a tree, anything like that.
00:39:26
Speaker
And simply just drilling different sized diameters of holes to make the little tunnels that wood boring grubs would typically make in dead wood that native bees would find the nest in.
00:39:38
Speaker
And I use drill bits from three mils to about eight or nine mils, that's about as big as you'll need. And ill get extra long drill bits because then they've got more room inside the tunnels to to lay the eggs and create the cells.
00:39:52
Speaker
um And I would use, you could use even smaller than three mils. You think that's a tiny little drill bit, but I promise you there are native bees out there small enough to use these holes. I would use even smaller drill bits, but I get too angry when I keep snapping them. So I find that three mils is about where they start to get a little bit strong.
00:40:09
Speaker
yeah And so that's the that's the first design. The second design is to create bundles of things like, you know, fern fronds,
00:40:21
Speaker
hollow stems, if you have lantana laying around or blueberries ah or reeds or bamboo, anything that's sort of hollow or pithy that you can just create bundles of and yeah, but you can maybe put it inside a vessel like some PVC pipe or a tin can.
00:40:41
Speaker
um And these same again, about at least 100 mills of length to give it plenty of room for the bees to nest in. And yet in a similar fashion to the first design of drilling the hardwood, it's good to leave these two off the ground where there's going to be some native bee traffic. So maybe in a nice flaring patch or near some eucalypts or something in a good spot.
00:41:05
Speaker
And then you'll want to face the ends of the holes to the north or the northeast. It's very important that they get morning sun um okay and they're not scorched by the afternoon heat. And at the same time, they're not facing the south because that's where the ah the mold and the mildew will want to collect in the moisture.
00:41:22
Speaker
um And they're little insects, they they love the sunlight when they're when they're waking up and the flowers are going to be full of nectar and pollen. That's when they want to start attacking the day, seizing the day. So face them to the north, northeast when you do set them up.
00:41:38
Speaker
And lastly, the third design, And this can sort of depend on how much room you have in the garden or if you are set on having mulch everywhere because you can simply just leave bare patches of clay and sand soil for the bees to find and dig into because this last design is for specialized for ground nesting bees like the blue banded bees. That's a lot of people's favorites as well as 70% of those 2000 native bee species.
00:42:07
Speaker
that will live in the ground. um But sometimes people can actually make a B-hotel out of um mixing clay and sand. I like to mix the sand in there as well because you've seen what happens when um clay hardens. It turns into like pretty much concrete or ceramics. So,
00:42:25
Speaker
It's good to have that little bit of sand in there that they'll have a bit of grit so they can dig one when it does dry out. And similar again, in a nice little patch of the garden, we'll receive receive some sunlight um that might have a little bit of shelter.
00:42:36
Speaker
So that's the the three designs. You don't put in the holes yourself and you wait for the bees to do that themselves in that last one? It sort of depends because yeah sometimes the the different ground nesting bee species will come and find it anyway, whereas The blue band of bees, you can give a bit of a head start by just poking like a centimeter or two of the tip of a pencil or something.
00:42:58
Speaker
But yeah, ground nesting bees will find ah themselves and dig their own nests and chambers and things into it. But you can give them a head start with a pencil or whatever. So I will link that in the show notes below to your guide to do that.
00:43:12
Speaker
um So people can build it for themselves, which is very fun. Yep. And i was just going to say, and as like an added bonus or like extra design, not specifically for bees, but how we're talking before about um you can like leave a little bit of mess in your garden or don't go extra hard on pruning the dead flowers or whatever.
00:43:32
Speaker
um One thing that I've seen, which is a really good idea, is creating like these little bug hubs. And this is simply when people have like a bunch of cuttings or little branches or anything, just have like a little corner of your garden somewhere where you just have a pile of it and stack it stack it up.
00:43:51
Speaker
And that that can just be like just a nice little habitat out of the way, like out of sight, out of mind, where different invertebrates and insects can use as habitats. Because you'll see people like you've seen when you know you're composting or yeah you have yeah your piles of leaves that you've raked away or whatever.
00:44:10
Speaker
And you if you leave it be for a few weeks, when you go to move it, there's there's stuff crawling out of it everywhere. Gotcha. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so sometimes it's good to just have like a little designated thing. And this is this is where that...
00:44:24
Speaker
ah where that um creating the ecosystem that's balanced in your garden can come from by just having that little bit extra habitat or catering for just a little bit more of a diversity in your garden.
00:44:38
Speaker
It goes a long way. Yeah, absolutely. It's actually a really simple way to go then. Just touching back on your research, what are some of your most exciting discoveries that you have found about native bees?
00:44:52
Speaker
I think, well, potentially the the most exciting, which isn't hasn't been quite confirmed yet, is the fact that I've discovered species which have been potentially undescribed.
00:45:03
Speaker
Because one thing in native bee taxonomy is that a lot of the yeah like the taxonomy and classifications of of records of native bees is really outdated. So there's the species that are sitting in museum drawers, which haven't been formally identified and things like this. And so I brought back a couple of interesting specimens where when we're trying to identify them, we were thinking, yeah, this is really difficult to identify. Like there's not really anything that's matching with this.
00:45:30
Speaker
And when we've said to experts in the bee taxonomy world, they've said, I, well, you've probably found new species there. So if that does eventually become confirmed, that would be super, super exciting.
00:45:43
Speaker
That would be amazing. what do you Do you get to name it? ah Potentially. So there was one there was one bee which was extra shiny and we consulted with the indigenous people in the area, the Yolngu, because it was really shiny. So we asked them what is shiny in in their local Yolngu Martha, um which was malinkedan.
00:46:05
Speaker
um So i'd I'd love to try and sneak that into the formal classification if if that one does turn out to be a new species. But yeah, we'd love to, if we had any sounder names, it wouldn't be the Clancy Leicester bee. No way. would be definitely trying to incorporate the indigenous recognition of the reason why I got to even do my research in the first place.
00:46:28
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
Conclusion and Social Media
00:46:29
Speaker
Oh, that's great. So my my other really cool finding is just the fact that what we've been doing is we've been collecting the bees and we've been taking the pollen off each of the bees legs or abdomens, wherever their scoper is holding onto the pollen.
00:46:47
Speaker
And we've been running the DNA on the pollen. And we've been able to track each of the bees based on what flowers they've been visiting, based on the pollen that they carry.
00:47:00
Speaker
So this bee that we have, and it has the pollen from you know this flower and this flower and this flower, and we can make like this massive, massive network of all the different flowers that these bees are visiting and all of the different bees that visit each one of the flowers and that it just blows my mind how from this dna meta barcoding that we're doing on the pollen we can create these networks it's just incredible that's fascinating does that mean you're kind of seeing almost like a pattern of where they're going and how far they're able to go
00:47:33
Speaker
Yes, yeah exactly right. So we're we're able to look at the native bee communities in each of the locations where we've um done the sampling to see if they've got different preferences in the the flowers that they're collecting pollen from. And then we can also look at yeah whether or not those bees are typically, say we've collected a bee that's been getting pollen from a range of different flowers.
00:47:57
Speaker
And then we look into the the information behind that bee and think, oh, this bee meant to be only look only sort of getting pollen from this. So we're we can expand like what's known about the host taxa plants of these bees because we have so much of this knowledge at our fingertips now with DNA.
00:48:18
Speaker
The records used to be based off... the the plant species where the bees were captured from because that was the only sure way of knowing what plant species that bee species had visited.
00:48:31
Speaker
But now we can just, yeah, go, we can pick up a bee, grab the the DNA from the pollen and go, yep, it goes to this flower, this flower, this flower, collects all the pollen. Just like that. That's amazing. That is incredible. And I suppose you're really just at the you know tip of the iceberg on trying to work out all of that.
00:48:47
Speaker
very Yeah, very early stages. yeah Does that mean there's not actually that many people in your field? Is it a pretty limited field? There's absolutely stuff. or yeah So with native bee taxonomy, I think there's in Australia currently, there's six native bee taxonomists.
00:49:05
Speaker
And I think out of those six, I think there's only two or three who are actually getting paid. So they theyre the the other ones are volunteers that have retired. that are just doing it because I love bees. Like there seems to be a lot of, lot of money and research getting invested into pollination, particularly for crops and things.
00:49:24
Speaker
um But yeah, it's, it's definitely ah a bit of a dying art at the moment. You can turn that around for everyone. At least single handedly. That's what I'm trying to starts with raising awareness, starts with that's right the, yeah, the the public consensus and,
00:49:42
Speaker
when when people like when the people that are higher up with all the with all the with all the money and resources realize how much people care about bees and how important they are and this sort of thing that's that's when the investments will work and the resources will change will actually start to happen absolutely So I guess on that note, this question might be a little redundant, but are there many community projects going on um revolving around the conservation of native bees?
00:50:18
Speaker
So i see i see a bit of this happening, yeah. that There's definitely... on smaller scales in like community groups, because there seems to be, now there's like a lot of this public available information about how to make bee hotels and how to make a gardener haven for pollinators.
00:50:33
Speaker
It seems to be on like the grass, grassroots level really. um But I've seen a few things with a few like sort of projects, which I really love. There's the Melbourne Pollinator Corridor or the the Ween Bee Foundation, which makes like catered pollinator planting guides based on your postcode.
00:50:52
Speaker
um There's like things like binaturalist projects, like the ground nesting bee project. There's different organisations that go to schools that run um workshops like the planting seeds and the B&B highway.
00:51:07
Speaker
On that note, you are launching your own pollinator environmental education program. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Yeah, so it's it's something that I really got really passionate about towards the end of last year after this yet yeah sort of dipping my toes into the waters of environmental education and inspiring the next generation.
00:51:29
Speaker
of kids to really fall in love with native bees and insects and pollinators. So I'd yeah started going to schools as a part of a project for native bee conservation. And yeah, this is something that I've i've been doing this year as now a ABC Trailblazer.
00:51:45
Speaker
And yeah, I've been going to schools, especially rural and regional schools that might not have the opportunity to get people like scientists to come in and and learn from. And it's yeah it's been so it's been super awesome. Tell me about the trial the ABC Trailblazer.
00:52:01
Speaker
Yeah, so the ABC Trailblazers is this thing ran by Haywire, which is part of the ABC, and it's for kids which have grown up in rural and regional areas which have, you know, just done cool stuff.
00:52:17
Speaker
So there's some people that get involved in arts and some people that get involved in in music or activism music or the environmental climate change.
00:52:28
Speaker
um And they they've gone off and started these amazing projects that they have a passion for. um And so you go to parliament for a week and you go through a summit um and talk about sort of the problem that you might be in love with or what you're doing to create change.
00:52:46
Speaker
And then you go on this journey as a trailblazer. to yeah to create change and to just really focus on what you're passionate about and ah and they have these all these resources and media opportunities and things to provide to you to continuously grow and reach new heights with what the project that you're passionate about.
00:53:12
Speaker
ah Well, you certainly have an incredibly bright future ahead of you. um Where can people find you online and learn about a little bit more about what you do? See, I post um prolifically nowadays on my Instagram, which is beesandblossoms.oz, as well as my TikTok. So they've got the same handle, beesandblossoms.oz.
00:53:32
Speaker
And then I've also got my website, nativebeehotels.com. I really would recommend everyone go out there and follow Clancy on Instagram and TikTok because the content is world-class. It's amazing. You make really good informational stuff.
00:53:47
Speaker
Thanks, Michael. I love it. And i um' I'm tipping that most of the people listening to this have already got the gardener's lodge because I'd i'd recommend the same straight back at you. Oh, thank very much. Get on to the Gardner's Lodge, everybody.
00:54:00
Speaker
ah Clancy Lester, thank you so much for being on the show today. i really, really, really appreciate it. Thanks very much for having me, Michael. It's been an absolute honor.
00:54:10
Speaker
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00:54:21
Speaker
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