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Native bees, above and below, are much smaller than their honey producing cousins.
One of New Zealand’s foremost experts on native bees made a plea to farmers, gardeners and beekeepers to look after our “professional pollinators” at a public meeting in Warkworth this month.
Dr Ngaire Hart is the first Maori woman to receive a PhD in engineering from AUT, after designing a photographic monitoring system to study native bees. She has been monitoring native bees at Mt Parihaka and Mt Tiger in Whangarei for 15 years and discovered that native bees cannot be tracked with radio tags because, unlike honey bees, they groom themselves before flight and remove the tag.
“All bees are important because they are pollinators. Native bees are especially important because they have evolved alongside native plants and are experts at pollinating them,” Dr Hart told the meeting.
Dr Hart suggested farmers could plan their farms around native bee nests to protect them and get bonus pollination for their crops and native plantings.
She added that pesticide use ought to be restricted in the early summer, when baby native bees emerge from their nests.
Meanwhile, large-scale producers of honey, such as Comvita, should be required to undertake studies to check for native bees before putting hives on a particular site, otherwise competition could drive out natives.
Dr Hart said there are 26 species of bee are endemic to New Zealand. They have specialised relationships to native plants including flax, pohutukawa, mānuka and kānuka.
There are three main groups of native bees that are identifiable to the naked eye – hairy colletids, masked bees and sweat bees.
Hairy colletids are black fluffy solitary bees that live in clay banks and are sometimes seen in children’s sandpits.
Masked bees are hairless black bees with yellow markings on their face, somewhat resembling a wasp, and live in cavities in wood. They can be seen blowing bubbles of pollen, which is stored in a pouch on their necks.
Sweat bees are slightly bigger than a sandfly. They are named for their habit of sucking the sweat off humans during summer.
In total, there are 40 different species of bee in New Zealand, 14 of which have been introduced.
