Buzzing with Hope

Australia's First Natural Beekeeping Summit

August 2025, marked a significant moment for Australia’s beekeeping community. The inaugural Natural Beekeeping Summit brought together beekeepers, researchers, and bee enthusiasts from across the country to share knowledge, build connections, and collectively address the challenges facing our precious pollinators. With varroa destructor mite now spreading through the Australian bee population the timing couldn’t have been more perfect.

The event featured an impressive lineup of speakers, including international guests Les Crowder and Nathalie B from Bee Mindful Honey in the United States, alongside local experts like Willow Hankinson (from BeeAlive), Dr. Kelly Whittaker, Professor Marc Cohen and Adrian Iodice. Each brought unique perspectives on working with bees in ways that honor their natural intelligence and resilience.

After the summit concluded, I sat down with several participants to understand what made this gathering so special and what insights emerged that might shape the future of beekeeping in Australia.

A Deeper Understanding

When I caught up with Adrian in the weeks following the summit, his enthusiasm remained undimmed. What struck him most wasn’t just the coming together of like-minded beekeepers, but the depth and breadth of knowledge shared over the summit weekend.

“The presenters weren’t just talking about beekeeping techniques,” Adrian explained. “They were diving into entomology, plant science, forest ecosystems, beneficial bacteria, fungi – all the interconnected elements that support healthy bee colonies. Every presentation came from a place of genuine care for the bees’ wellbeing.”

The summit created an environment where participants who had known of each other for years but never met could finally connect face-to-face. Ideas flowed freely, relationships formed, and a new community began to take shape.

Australia’s Hidden Advantage

Among the many revelations from the summit, the research that Dr. Kelly Whittaker presented on bee populations in Australian forests stood out as particularly significant. She revealed that some Australian forests contain between 50 and 150 wild honeybee colonies per square kilometre – a significant contrast to forests in the United States, where typically only 1.4 wild colonies exist per square kilometre.

This substantial density of wild colonies gives Australia a powerful advantage in the face of varroa: genetic diversity. With more than 100 times more genetic material to draw from, our bee populations have a much stronger foundation for developing natural resistance than the bees in the US had when varroa first arrived there.

For Adrian and many at the summit, this scientific confirmation transformed anxiety into genuine hope. “The diverse genetic pool of Australian bees offers a natural resilience that could make all the difference in how our populations cope with the varroa challenge”.

Lessons from Across the Pacific

Les Crowder and Nathalie B brought invaluable perspectives from their decades of treatment-free beekeeping internationally and in the United States, where varroa has been present for 30-40 years.

Nathalie’s experience was particularly eye-opening. She began beekeeping years after varroa had already established itself in the US. Despite constant warnings that untreated colonies would inevitably perish, her first hive thrived for eight years without a single treatment. This success directly contradicted the dominant advice promoted by beekeeping associations, government agencies, and treatment manufacturers.

Les Crowder, who worked as an apiary inspector during the initial varroa invasion, witnessed the widespread colony collapse followed by a remarkable recovery among many untreated survivors. His essential insight – that breeding bees means simultaneously breeding mites – fundamentally reframes how we should approach varroa management.

The principle is straightforward: treating colonies with chemicals creates selective pressure for stronger, more resistant mites while artificially supporting genetically vulnerable bees.

Allowing natural selection to operate means that highly virulent mites (which kill their hosts too quickly) die along with susceptible bees, leaving behind balanced host-parasite relationships that can coexist sustainably.

The Intelligence of the Hive

Willow Hankinson’s presentation shed light on the natural defense mechanisms bees develop against varroa. During our conversation after the summit, he described witnessing a bee performing a distinctive waggle dance in a Newcastle hive. Willow recognised this dance as an adapted distress signal, as it prompted other worker bees to locate and remove a varroa mite from the dancing bee’s body.

This is just one of several adaptive traits bees can develop to deal with varroa infestation. Other examples Willow mentioned include larvae emitting chemical distress signals when infested and colonies uncapping and recapping cells to disrupt the varroa reproductive cycle.

Willow emphasized the critical role of genetic diversity within colonies. A queen may mate with dozens of drones, creating multiple patrilines within a single hive. This genetic variety is essential for varroa resistance, as the right combination of traits emerges from this diverse genetic mixing.

He noted that conventional beekeeping practices often work against this natural defense by limiting drone production through worker-only foundation, effectively reducing the genetic diversity that could help colonies develop resistance.

The historical perspective Willow shared offered additional reassurance: when varroa initially jumped to European honeybees in Russia, it wiped out approximately 99% of colonies. However, within just a couple of years, the surviving colonies had reproduced so prolifically that bee populations rebounded dramatically. This pattern has repeated in other regions – initial devastation followed by remarkable recovery as resistant genetics spread through wild populations.

Beyond Beekeeping

Professor Marc Cohen expanded the summit’s horizons by exploring the evolutionary relationship between humans and bees. His presentation suggested that honey may have played a crucial role in human cognitive development and the advancement of our culture, technology, economics, and medicine over millennia.

Dr. Cohen shared the good news about his custom blended range of Extremely Alive oxymels—a health tonic crafted from pure honey and probiotic kombucha vinegar. These formulations are designed to balance gut bacteria, support optimal digestive function, and strengthen the immune system. He’s genuinely passionate about honey and its fantastic health properties, a sentiment shared by many at the summit.

In our conversation, Dr. Cohen observed that the summit reflected a particular ethos – one familiar from natural medicine conferences: a gathering of independent thinkers who question authority, conduct their own research, and resist centralized control and chemical interventions to biological challenges.

“Natural beekeepers, like natural medicine practitioners, understand that resilience comes not from eliminating challenges but from supporting the inherent intelligence of living systems,” he reflected.

The summit crystallized this philosophy through several memorable statements that captured the essence of natural beekeeping. Bianca Walker reminded attendees that “bees are the best beekeepers,” emphasizing trust in the insects’ evolved wisdom. Les Crowder reinforced this approach by declaring that “we can’t poison our way to a better future,” challenging the chemical-dependent mindset of conventional apiculture. Perhaps most provocatively, Nathalie B urged beekeepers to “be grateful for mites,” explaining that while “bees are going to die, this will strengthen them”.

A Community Takes Shape

Perhaps the most beautiful aspect of the summit was the sense of kinship that developed among participants. By the closing session, Adrian noted, the group had evolved into something resembling a colony itself – co-creating, sharing openly, and supporting one another in ways that mirrored the cooperative nature of bees.

In a lovely synchronicity, bees themselves seemed drawn to the gathering, appearing throughout the venue in unusual numbers – buzzing around faces, landing on shoulders, and clustering at windows. At times, it felt as though the summit was taking place within a living hive.

Maybe the bees themselves had somehow orchestrated the event, bringing together the right people at the right time.

Nature’s Wisdom

The overarching message from the summit was one of trust in natural processes. As Willow expressed, the most effective approach to varroa might be to “do as much of nothing as possible” – recognizing that our well-intentioned interventions often cause more harm than good because of our limited understanding of the complex systems at work in bee colonies.

For Australian beekeepers contemplating the varroa challenge, the summit offered an encouraging perspective. While losses are inevitable, Australia’s wild populations possess remarkable genetic diversity that gives them more than a fighting chance. If we can resist the impulse to interfere excessively, the bees that emerge on the other side of this challenge may ultimately be stronger and more resilient than before.

In a world increasingly dominated by technological solutions and chemical interventions, the Natural Beekeeping Summit reminded us of a simpler truth: sometimes the wisest action is to step back and allow natural intelligence to find its own balance.

As Dr. Cohen suggested in his closing thoughts, perhaps we need to shift our thinking: “There is a case to suggest we don’t need to save the bees, rather the bees will save us.”