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[Music plays]
(Narrator) Honey bees
are the great unsung hero of the Australian landscape.
While they busily go about their business of foraging,
collecting pollen and producing honey,
they're also helping to produce the foods we eat every day.
In fact one third of what goes into our mouths
relies on pollination,
service these winged insects provide for free.
(Peter Norris) Bees are just so important to our wellbeing.
Things that are immediately obvious are pome fruits,
and stone fruits, and berries,
and things like that. But things that aren't so immediately obvious
are beef because they need Lucerne and clover,
and all those crops need pollinating with bees as well.
(Narrator) Sadly, honey bee populations around the world
have crashed.
(Dr. Geoff Allen) In the case of bees
there's a number of different issues going on around the world.
A particular one is around Colony Collapse Disorder
and the issues around also biosecurity,
and pathogens, and varroa mite in bees.
(Narrator) Currently Australia is free from Colony Collapse Disorder
and varroa mite,
but the risk of them arriving is very real.
(Peter Norris) Oh, catastrophic -- absolutely catastrophic.
I was in the U.K. when varroa arrived there,
and I had 150 hives as a hobby,
and I went down to 25 hives
in the first year. We lost 80% of the bees in the U.K.
in the first year it was discovered.
(Narrator) A new CSIRO led research program
is looking into how to maintain honey bee productivity on farms
in the event of a bee population crash,
as well as learn about
what is driving the global collapse in wild populations.
And to do that requires technology on a miniature scale.
These tags measure just a quarter of a centimetre in length
and are being fitted to the backs of wild bees
to monitor their movement in the landscape.
(Dr. Paulo de Souza) We can have sensors
in thousands of bees at the same time,
and we will be able to monitor what each bee is doing
in the environment.
And this absolutely new,
we can really review a completely new world about the bees,
and how they behave, and what they can do.
(Narrator) The sensors act like an e-tag on your car
and record when the insect passes a data logger.
That information is sent remotely to a central location
where researchers can then model the insect's behaviour
and how it interacts with its environment.
Five thousand of the sensors are being fitted to Tasmanian bees
as part of the research program,
which includes the University of Tasmania,
Tasmanian Beekeepers Association, and fruit growers, like John Evans.
(John Evans) Well without bees we don't have apples,
and we've seen in the footage before
where the bees are not being active
because of bad weather and there's no apples there.
So the bee is very important.
(Dr. Paulo de Souza) So we work with the industry to bring the impact
and to solve the problems they have.
We're not building sensors; we're building the future of Australia.
(Narrator) Honey bees are just the starting point for this technology.
(Dr Stephen Quarell) And we could use it to
observe say pest movement,
so fruit flies, moths, like coddling moth in orchards,
but also disease vectors like malaria carrying mosquitoes,
or the sky is the limit really. Anything that moves we can tag it.
(Dr. Paul De Barro) Oh, these are game changers.
Being able to gather real time information
about where insects are and how they're
reacting or interacting with their environment
will just change the way that we
understand insects' behaviour and ecology.
It'd be hard pressed to think of any area of biology
and ecology that won't benefit from this sort of technology.
[Music plays]