The bee detective

September 26, 2007, The Weekend Australian Magazine

Bees are disappearing off the face of the earth in their billions and everything from mobile phones to a deadly, blood-sucking mite to a mystery affliction called Colony Collapse Disorder has been blamed. Now [late, 2007] a team of American scientists has pointed the finger at Australian bees.

Denis Anderson is a bee pathologist, the world’s only general bee pathologist. Bearded, unassuming and smiley, his wild research past has taken him from the mountains of Laos to the endless cornfields of Minnesota. He has been chased by killer bees, watched the Giant Honey Bee in Malaysia’s jungles by moonlight, and been captivated by the sweet industrious nature of the Canadian leafcutter bee.

Anderson spends six months of the year in the Entomology department of Australia’s CSIRO in Canberra, sitting in a long quiet room with a large whiteboard and umpteen diagrams and pictures of bees. The other six months he spends on the road, tracking the mites, diseases and conditions that endanger the most important insect on earth. 

Bees are what help keep Planet Earth in food and the most populous bee, responsible for pollinating much of the developed world’s fruit, flower, vegetable and nut crops, is the European honeybee, Apis mellifera. 

We humans are letting these industrious, and hugely important, little creatures down. Photograph by Alfonso Navarro, on Unsplash

But so few of us - from governments to big business to consumers - have bothered to understand this importance that, at the beginning of the 21stcentury, bees are facing a series of deadly threats and setbacks which could change not just their lives but our own. 

Anderson’s own story turns out to be part of a much bigger tale of how we humans have let the bees down.

In 2000, after eight years of working in and out of Papua New Guinea and throughout Asia, Anderson officially identified a vicious little mite, a parasite which had caused havoc around the honeybee world ever since it made its way out of Korea in the Fifties, possibly via Vladivostok and the Trans-Siberian Railway. Anderson named itVarroa destructor.√ Wherever varroa strikes, honeybees die and bee populations dwindle. (In fact, Anderson discovered two types of Varroa destructor, the Korean version and the Japanese; it’s the Korean which has caused most damage.)

“We had tagged the wrong beast”

At one stage of his research, everyone had thought Anderson was crazy. For decades, the world’s scientists had been blaming a completely different species of mite for the honeybee blight. But to their chagrin, Anderson turned out to be right. An American entomologist wrote a year later, “For years… we had tagged the wrong beast. One can imagine the wry response of rough-handed, smoky-smelling beekeepers: ‘What? You didn’t even have the right mite?’”

Varroa destructor hitch-hikes around the galaxy, hooking onto first one honeybee, alighting on a flower,  and then hooking onto another bee until it gets a lift back into the hive where it starts reproducing on the bee with calamitous effects, weakening and deforming it and spreading lethal viruses. 

By the Seventies, the mite had reached Europe. From there, it migrated around the world. To North America by the mid-Eighties, South American and South Africa by the Nineties and into the North Island of New Zealand by 2000. Four years later, it had infiltrated the South Island. New Zealand alone has lost 2000 beekeepers and more than 30,000 hives – that’s about 2,000,000,000 bees.

After decades of progress as unnerving as a plague in a Stephen King novel, Australia with its stretched quarantine services is the only holdout. On a map of the world, coloured in with the places where varroa is entrenched, we stand out like Orphan Annie. 

Now they have another deadly threat to bees overseas which we don’t have: colony collapse disorder or CCD.

Billions of bees were vanishing; no-one knew why but bee pathologist Denis Anderson had one idea. Photograph by Hubert Mousseijne, on Unsplash

Supposedly, it has left hives in the United States this last winter as mysteriously empty as the Marie-Celeste. The hives, reportedly, will be full of honey and larvae, but there will be few or no adult bees. No bodies either. The bees will have just vanished. Again, billions of them.

Mobile phones, high-voltage powerlines and secret military experiments have been blamed. So has a perfect storm of accumulated pesticides, stress, antibiotics, varroa, modern beekeeping practices and genetically modified crops. 

The American edition of Sixty Minutes is running a segment on the new phenomenon. In April, The New York Times quoted one scientist referring to the research into CCD in terms of a hit crime TV series: “This is like C.S.I. for agriculture.” In August, the illustrious weekly magazine, The New Yorker.  weighed in with a coverline: “Where have all the bees gone?” This week’s world bee conference in Melbourne, Apimondia, has received more advance attention from mainstream press than ever.

It’s hard to resist a story about something so inexplicable and devastating, which comes with scientific-sounding terminology and which causes death - if only in bees. Never mind the much spoofed tabloid story of the Seventies: “Ferocious swarms of man-killing bees are buzzing their way toward North America”. What everyone wants to know is – what’s killing our bees?

Now a team of American scientists believe they have the answer, and they’re looking in Australia’s direction.

Anderson thinks they’re wrong again. 

Bees stop us starving

The trouble with bees is that we don’t take them seriously or we forget to think about them at all. What has ensured their survival so far is the bees’ own relentlessness and the passion of a tiny few. Bees exist only to breed. Everything they do for us – producing and storing honey; gathering pollen and pollinating – is just a by-product of that ruthless drive.

Virgil called bees “airy robbers winging booty home” but theirs is no halcyon existence, drifting around flowers, collecting nectar and protein-rich pollen. During their short, intense lives, the female worker bees will also guard, clean, polish, store, feed, nurse, build honeycomb, look after the queen bee so she is free to lay her 2000 plus eggs a day, evict surplus male drone bees and, seemingly, do everything but cook and wash-up dishes. Bees even have a series of dances – the round dance, the waggle dance - which are a kind of bee-language that tells other bees where to find that day’s vital supplies of nectar and pollen for the hive’s food supplies .

At 56, Anderson has seen it all over the course of his long career. Like most bee people, he talks about bees as if they are so many little people he knows. On the border of Thailand and Malaysia, he watched a shirtless, shoeless local shimmy up a 70 metre high tree to sneak honey from the Apis dorsata,the Giant Honey Bee. “A fascinating bee,” he says, sounding like George Clooney moving in on Catherine Zeta-Jones in the film Intolerable Cruelty. 

In Brazil, he opened a car-door, a good 200 metres from a hive of Africanised bees and within a minute, the “killer” bees - which can kill a horse and worse will chase a a horse a kilometer so they can kill it - were upon him. 

Over 20,000 species of bee

Recently, he has been working on a sensitive project to import the Canadian leafcutter bee to pollinate our lucerne. “It has a nice little personality,” he says affectionately. “Industrious and gentle. People who work with them become very attached, let me tell you. I had one person who, when she had to leave the project, actually cried.”

Researching a story on bees is like tapping on what looks like a nondescript door only to find yourself on the set of a fantastical movie. Bees, remarkably, are responsible for every third mouthful of food eaten in the world. There are over 20,000 species of bee in the world, including native bees, but the species best known everywhere is the European honey-bee which itself comes in many races including the three most used here, Italian, Caucasian and Carniolan. 

In Australia where our dutiful honey-bees have been spoiling us since they were introduced in the early 1820s, we have taken them as much for granted as the fact the sun comes up. We’re especially lucky because most of the pollination of Australian crops – clover, avocadoes, stone fruits, apples, pears, pumpkins, canola  - is done for free by so-called “feral” bees. These are European honeybees which escaped into the huge swathes of our nectar-rich bushland years ago where they now happily go about their lives. 

The European honeybee is worth $2 billion and more a year to Australia because of that pollination but even most of our farmers aren’t aware of the bee’s importance to their crops and animal feed. The Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation’s five year research and development plan for the honeybee allocates just $40,000 a year to pollination research. It’s difficult to find commercial beekeeping courses any more, and Anderson himself operates without a technician on his research because he doesn’t have the funding. 

Worldwide, honeybee pollination is valued at between $US31 billion and $US91 billion a year, but the funding situation is no better, even in the United States where the bee is worth $18 billion a year.

Honeybees go to work early. Photograph by Jonathan Faber, on Unsplash

It’s only now, with the honeybee population of the world struggling for its life that scientists and beekeepers are making us aware that bees are what help keep our world alive too. Bees are slowly crawling into the public consciousness.

In Australia, for instance, it’s not a matter of if  varroa destructor will arrive, it’s just a matter of when. And while commercial beekeepers will start dosing their hives with powerful miticides, varroa will wipe out our unprotected feral bee colonies. The free pollination will stop. Anderson quotes a recent CSIRO economic study which showed that this country could spend up to $50 million a yearjust on thwarting varroa and it would still come out ahead on cost benefits. 

In the US, the May issue of American Bee Journal noted that there has been one benefit already from CCD: the introduction of a $75 million research grant bill into the senate. 

Meanwhile, a federal House of Representatives inquiry into the future development of the Australian honeybee industry is heading around the country, hearing representations on everything from what we’re doing about varroa to the controversy over whether or not honeybee hives should be allowed in national parks.

In one submission, Max Whitten, an ex-chief of the CSIRO’s entomology division, argues that governments must start ramping up everything from our quarantine services to pest identification to the provision of more research, more flora resources for bees and more training and education. “The European honeybee is the single most important insect ever introduced to Australia,” he marvels to me later. 

The bee men and the bees they love

On a hot midsummer morning, as the rising sun warms the bushland, opening the sweet flowers on the River Red Gum, the honeybees go to work early. Long before father and son beekeepers Noel and Neil Bingley are up themselves, in their sturdy caravan way out in the countryside, they will be woken by the roar of wings as the bees leave their hives to head out to the blossoms. 

“It’s no wonder they only last six weeks,” says Noel Bingley wonderingly of his hundreds of thousands of busily efficient charges which produce between 300 and 400 tonnes of honey a year for his business. 

The Bingleys, who live at Sutton, an hour from Canberra, on a 470 hectare property first settled by ancestors in 1840, are one of the country’s most prominent beekeeping families. They have been in beekeeping for over 50 years, have almost 2000 hives and three generations are now involved. In spite of the federal department of Education, Science and Training listing beekeeping as a low level training job, beekeepers in fact need to be botanists, veterinarians, truck-drivers, mechanics, meteorologists and accountants. It’s also tough, hard work. 

The male Bingleys, Noel and his sons, Neil and David, are vast men with huge hands and cheeks scrubbed by years in the outdoors. From late August to early April, they take out their trucks, loaded with hives, looking for the best places for their bees. One month it might be to the River Red Gums around Wagga in the Riverina; another month, the Mugga Ironbarks at Temora or there might be a good nectar flow on the Spotted Gums on the South Coast. 

Bright yellow canola will bring out a bee’s bad temper. Photograph by Meric Tuna, on Unsplash

Beekeepers talking knowingly of what their bees like and don’t like. Orange blossom, for instance, makes bees cranky because the nectar will flow copiously for hours and then, frustratingly, stop. Bright yellow canola, a good source of both pollen and nectar, still brings out the bees’ bad temper. Bees also become infuriated by dark colours, wool and fur. It’s clear these are creatures to be handled with dignity and respect. 

Maybe that’s what has gone wrong. 

There are just under 10,000 registered beekeepers with about half a million hives, but only 2000 or so are commercial bee-keepers. Of those, around 250 will own more than 500 hives. Australia produces 20,000 to 30,000 tonnes of pesticide-free honey every year, much of it for export. Everyone knows of everyone else. Nor are there just bee-keepers. There are bee-brokers (who contract hives to farmers for pollination); bee-packagers (who package bees for export); bee-breeders and eventually I even come across a one-time bee-smuggler, a man who once tried to sneak in eight queen bees from Liguria, Italy inside eight ballpoint pens. 

There are just three key bee-packagers in this country, responsible for a growing export trade in queen bees and packaged bees. Warren Taylor√, from NSW’s Blayney√, is the largest with an annual turnover of $2.5 million. It’s an exotic business. In the Eighties, Taylor, an elegant man with white hair and bright blue eyes, set up the biggest bee farm in Saudi Arabia. 

It’s also a highly regulated business, conducted necessarily under suspicious eyes. In 2004, there was a big breakthrough for Australian exported bees though. The US, made desperate by bee losses to varroa, allowed ours in. Last summer alone more than 30,000 two kilo packages of healthy bees, 8000 per package, were exported; a trade worth up to $5 million. 

In the US, pollination is a commercial affair, especially given ferals have also been lost to varroa as well as land-clearing. Some managed hives spend all their time on the road, ferried in massive trucks from one plantation to the next. It’s what is called industrial-style beekeeping. When the almonds, which are totally dependent on bee pollination, are in flower, almost half that country’s hives – just over a million - are trucked to California to the orchards. 

In Australia, the new almond plantations in the south have started contracting hives too but prices are low - $55 a hive for almonds. Our beekeepers mostly stick to honey-producing. In the US though, the prices of hives can go to $150. Or higher. So many almonds are being planted, there may not be enough bees to eventually go around. 

Which brings us back to CCD, the mystery plague. supposedly sweeping through the American bee system and parts of Europe. The poor bee already endures a host of diseases and pests. As well as varroa, there are nosema, American and European foulbrood disease, chalk brood, sac brood disease…

But the CCD stories have an apocalyptic feel. Elizabeth Kolbert in her New Yorker piece wrote of CCD-affected bee samples: “Such was the level of infection that… it was as if an insect version of AIDS were sweeping through the hives.” In a story from The Telegraph in the UK, an American researcher dissected a bee to display blackened kidneys, a swollen and discoloured sting gland, scarred intestines and a rectum packed hard with undigested matter.

“A data-free zone" …”

The craziest explanation for CCD is that it’s a secret plot by Osama bin Laden. The explanation being taken seriously is that bees are overloaded. Capable of standing up to stress, travel, over-work and pesticides, bee colonies collapse when the combination of all takes them over the edge. 

Denis Anderson, in his measured, drily humorous way, blames another factor though. Hysteria. He pads around his office, explaining the science and chuckling to himself as he talks about lecturing students, projecting his PowerPoint slides on CCD and telling them, “You are now entering a data-free zone”. 

For him, the most credible evidence that something unusual was definitely going on was that this year there was a shortage of honeybees for the massive Californian almond orchards. The beekeepers came from different states like Minnesota, Washington and Montana, and all said they’d had above average losses over the 2006-07 winter. 

Scientists see problems through their own specialty, says Denis Anderson, leading to misdiagnoses. Photograph by Revolt, on Unsplash

But a few months earlier, a Pennsylvania beekeeper called David Hackenberg had claimed he had lost two-thirds of his hives after wintering them in Florida. Originally, it was decided Hackenberg’s hives had been poisoned, but once the Californian shortages became known, the Florida bee losses got lumped in with those. 

After that, anecdotes came thick and fast. Anderson starts to sound like a diligent Moses trying to hold back the waters but without God’s help. “Most of the reports were beekeeper hearsay but the popular press took it on board. The incidence of CCD snowballed.”

Mid-year, he visited the States. He is highly skeptical of the “science” which has gathered so many afflicted hives into the one new disorder. “A lot of the findings are coming from beekeepers and they are notoriously unreliable,” he points out. “I saw some of Hackenberg’s hives and they were all marked in chalk, CCD. But when I looked in one, I could see it had chalk brood. In another, there was something wrong with the queen bee. I asked them if they’d tried putting the queen from an afflicted hive into a healthy hive, and if they’d put a healthy colony into a hive with a supposedly afflicted queen, and they hadn’t.”

Anderson says scientists will see things through their own specialty. Bacteriologists blame it on bacteria. Virologists blame it on a virus. And everyone, he says, sees it through the prism of not enough funding. “All the articles you read about CCD come back to getting improved funding for bee research,” he notes. 

Australian bees get the blame

At the time The New Yorker article came out, Anderson was most alarmed at the author’s implication, tucked casually into two sentences, that CCD was something that could be blamed on imported bees. Now that notion is in the open. In early September, the weekly American journal Science published a paper by a team headed by Dr Diana Cox-Foster, an insect immunologist from Pennsylvania State University. It appeared only days before the biennial international bee conference, Apimondia, opened in Melbourne.

The paper claims that, after using DNA sequencing of not just the sampled bees but the mites, viruses and other organisms on them, there is an association between CCD and Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV), and that virus has been found in imported Australian bees.

“The implication is very damaging for Australia,” says Anderson. “But association doesn’t mean cause.” He questions the samples used generally, wondering how the paper’s authors could be sure the bees were from CCD-affected colonies given the case definition for CCD is still so loose. 

 “Also, that particular virus has been found in hives not  suffering from CCD and it wasn’t found in 16 percent of the CCD-suspect samples.”He enlarges, "We believe IAPV is part of the Kashmir Bee Virus complex. As far as we know, all viruses in the complex exist in healthy honeybee colonies everywhere as harmless, inapparent infections. They are also opportunistic and only cause mortality in the presence of a primary pathogen. But if this is the case, then the primary cause of CCD still hasn’t been identified.”

Anderson is most alarmed about the paper’s assertion that unusual colony declines began in the US in 2004, the year Australia started importing honeybees there. “If Aussie bees were responsible for CCD, then why is there no CCD in Australia?” he almost splutters. “And other countries reporting CCD, like Greece, Portugal, Spain and Scotland, haven’t imported honeybees from Australia.

“This is about politics.”

Meanwhile, American Beekeeping Federation president, Danny Weaver√, a tanned Texan visiting for Apimondia, says the worst thing Australia could do now is look as if it has something to hide. There two countries have argued about Australia providing more samples. Australia wants certain protocols observed. Weaver says, “The sample size for the paper is pretty small and it seems a slim reed to hang this argument about Australia on. So we need to sample additional hives in the US and Australia.” The argument continues. 

Industrialised bee farming has taken its toll on bees which naturally forage widely. Photograph by James Pritchett, on Unsplash

There have been puzzling disappearances of American bee colonies before, dating back to 1897 and to the Sixties. Every US winter, colonies have also collapsed, mostly from inadequate beekeeping management and the effects of mites like varroa. It’s called Fall Dwindle. This last winter, with its higher losses, came after a poor summer; bees went into hibernation with low body protein and low stores. Others note American commercial beekeepers habitually feed their bees with sugar syrups; antibiotics, which can eventually lower resistance, are also widely used as are pesticides. If the bees are exposed only to commercial crops, they don’t get the nutrition they might if gathering from more flowers and weeds.

Anderson won’t be convinced CCD really exists until he sees how the American bees fare this coming northern winter. 

An ingenious enemy

Right now, his money is still on varroa as the most serious pathogen of the European honeybee in the US. The world’s honeybee colonies have declined by 25 percent since it arrived, say US department of agriculture figures. In the US, colonies have dropped by almost half, from 5 million to 2.5 million since its arrival in 1987.

Varroa makes a fiercely clever enemy. Anderson is more than a little mesmerised by the itchy, two millimetre wide mite simply because of its extraordinary ability to adapt. The bee-lover in him might fear it, but the scientist in him can’t resist admiring the organism’s ingenuity. Once in the hive, for instance, it dives into a honeycomb cell and heads straight for the food supply at the cell’s bottom, left there for one of the queen bee’s eggs. Bees can smell the mite, so the mite, which has no eyes but uses sensory hairs and organs, dives deep into the food so its scent disappears. It then puts up a kind of periscope. Its reproductive cycle, which takes place in that cell with the larva, is just as complicated and ingenious.

The breakthrough will come when we can breed bees which are varroa-resistant. Anderson says there is a chemical signal on the European honeybee which tells the mite to reproduce. Via careful breeding, he wants to produce a honeybee that emits a signal the mite can’t read. It’s genetic science, and Anderson is now looking around for funding. But he is also thinking of retiring. There is no-one to replace him. 

Oz bees under pressure

The local bee industry seems to be in two minds about its immediate future. On one hand, the arrival of Varroa destructor will bring, well, destruction to the honeybee. Miticides to control it in managed hives will drive up costs by at least thirty percent. It will also end Australia’s desirable status as a pesticide-free honey producer and a varroa-free zone for breeding. 

On the other hand, as varroa decimates the ferals, it will make commercial honeybees more valuable for pollination. 

There is already a plan to set up an industry-driven group – tentatively titled Pollination Australia - to better represent the interests of pollination-dependent businesses and groups. RIRDC has been funded to prepare a business plan.

But the claims in Science will be an emotional blow to the struggling bee industry, insiders agree. People will think – mistakenly – that something has been hidden from them, said one government official. It could affect the bee export trade. There are other problems. Drought has affected nectar flows. Exporter Warren Taylor has had honey producers ringing him, offering to sell their bees to earn cash. Cheap honey is being imported from China and Argentina. Creeping urbanization means less nectar-rich bush. “Once, it was all bush up to the coastline, from Batemans Bay to Eden,” sighs Noel Bingley. 

Some have never forgiven the European honeybee for being an exotic, not a native. In Queensland, Premier Beattie has vowed that by 2024, honeybee hives will be banned from the newly created national parks in the southeast, a loss of 800,000 hectares. All up, says Max Whitten, the premier has promised to eventually lock away nearly two million hectares of bushland, previously available to beekeepers. 

Politicians have gotten involved and many arguments are about where the bees originated from. Photograph by Mladen Borisov, on Unsplash

Some environmentalists say they even look forward to varroa killing off feral honeybees because they rob native fauna, like fruitbats, snakes and native birds, of both nectar and nesting places. Others are devotees of our many delicate native bees (see sidebar below).

Denis Anderson argues the honeybee is now ‘naturalized’: “It’s probably quite true that originally, it caused the extinction of some species, but now it’s in balance. It’s part of the ecosystem.” He wonders what will happen if the honeybee is suddenly pulled out.

Says Whitten, “At the time Beattie made his announcement in 2004, he probably thought it was just a small industry. He thought he could wear the flak.”

Now, instead, with the headlines on varroa and CCD, honeybees are becoming the international science world’s equivalent of Princess Di: threatened, beautiful, under-valued and attacked on all sides. 

One of the other threats to bees everywhere is that beekeepers, bee scientists and specialists in areas like quarantine are simply getting older and retiring. Few are coming up behind them. 

At least actor Jerry Seinfield has perfect timing. His animated film Bee Movie comes out late this year. It’s about a bee who gets tired of making honey – and then discovers the reason bees have to work so hard is that greedy, unconscionable humans have stolen their honey for centuries. 

Whether it’s a plague killing our bees, varroa mites or just our toxic 21stcentury ways, it’s hard not to conclude that what is really killing our honeybees is neglect and indifference.

And lack of respect. 

SIDEBAR - NATIVE BEES TAKE A BOW

There’s another fervent band of beekeepers in Australia. They keep native bees and many of them are hoping that these bees will be able to take a bigger role in pollination.

Tim Heard works for CSIRO where he is a leading expert on the biological control of weeds. His Ph.D though was on native bees and their pollination of macadamias and cashews, and outside work hours, they’re his passion. Specifically, given there are over 1500 native bee species, the social, stingless native bee or Trigona. Most native bees aren’t social. Trigona however, like the European honeybee, gathers in colonies and keeps large stores of nectar and pollen to feed the hive and larvae. 

Heard now has 240 hives scattered around friends and colleagues and keeps up to eight at home. He says an hour with his bees after work is like an hour of therapy. I wonder how this works. After all, it’s not as if you can greet an individual bee the way you can a dog or a cat. Heard explains himself and it all falls into place. It’s not the individual bee; it’s the whole hive that is the being. Each bee is like a cell of that being. 

Heard is as colourful in his descriptions as the late Steve Irwin. He loves his native bees and has high hopes that, if varroa is introduced, Trigona – which is unaffected by  varroa – will come to the aid of the party. True, Trigona labours to produce just a kilo of a lemony sweet sugarbag honey a year compared with the 75 kilos produced by a hive of honeybees but Trigona is a good pollinator for mangos and watermelons as well as macadamias and may be good for strawberries and avocadoes. 

All over Australia there are other native bee enthusiasts barracking for their particular species to be the saviour. 

In South Australia, scientists are working with the blue banded bee which is a buzz-pollinator, excellent for hothouse tomato crops, upping yield by 20 percent over the usual manual pollination, according to University of Adelaide research. At the august Australian Museum on Sydney’s College Street, Michael Batley√, a Macquarie University chemist turned taxonomer, shows me drawer after drawer of bee specimens. They aren’t just beautiful. I can also see where the very first designers got their ideas for stripes and spots. Batley is an expert on the blue banded bee, but he shows me other native bees like the fat teddy-bear bee, covered in light brown fur, the native leafcutter and the metallic green carpenter bees, all of which are solitary rather than social.

While it takes highly specialized skills to look after European honeybees, and tough regulations are in place, almost anyone living in the warm northern half of Australia, from Sydney across and up, can learn to keep a Trigona hive which can be kept in a box the size of a 12 bottle wine carton. Two websites will help you get started: www.aussiebee.com.au or Tim Heard’s own site: www.sugarbag.net

This the correct, and longer, version of a piece which, in its published and edited form, contained several errors. The editing of this article, and the subediting, were among the worst I’ve ever experienced. The process included not just subeditors working on the wrong, earlier version of the story because of a communication failure at the magazine end which I had tried to fix, but finally, a refusal by the magazine editor to run a correction afterwards in the host newspaper in spite of two scientists, who had been among my interviewees, complaining that a statement, inserted during the editing process, was wrong and misleading.

I’ll leave it to The Australian’s Paul Kelly, a former editor-in-chief of that newspaper, to sum up what happened. After I told him, in bemusement, what had befallen my meticulously researched story which he had read at final draft, he said: “So they rewrote bits of your copy, chopped and moved pars around, changed things so they got them wrong, inserted errors, cut out key lines and points - and did this all on the wrong version of your story?”

Paradoxically, this story, in the form above, that is, without errors and in the form in which it should have been published, is one of the stories of which I’m most proud. I am still so grateful to Denis Anderson for all the time he spent with me, over the eight weeks of research, writing and checking. When we last communicated, in December 2017, he was working with bees in the United Arab Emirates. He wrote then: “Yes, the CCD issue now seems like a vague cloud in the offing. And of course while it was here it turned out to be exactly like 'I told you so'. But I'm not smug about it.”