IT may seem counter-intuitive, but for a low-stress, meditative task - there might be nothing better than taking a step back into nature with bees.
Perth apiarist Stephen Boylen sees it that way: he loves the calm, methodical and thoughtful process that goes with tending to his three hives - two in his suburban Perth backyard and one on a block at Toodyay.
"It can be so low-tech, you are using a hive that got its basic design 200 years ago, you put on a bee suit for comfort and the tools are very basic,'' Mr Boylen said.
"It is an act of meditation, you just focus on what is happening in the hive, you examine the frames... it can feel really positive.
"And it is a seasonal thing - there is a time for doing things.''
But if there is a sting in Mr Boylen's tale, it's come from an outbreak in New South Wales of the varroa destructor mite - which has sparked a sense of trepidation among apiarists, horticulturalists and farmers across the country.
Australia is the last continent with a beekeeping industry which is free of the extremely mobile mite, a parasite that weakens and kills European honeybee colonies and also carries other honeybee diseases and viruses.
Australia's disease-free status safeguards the nation's billion-dollar beekeeping industry and supports a significant international export market for bees and bee products.
While the outbreak around the NSW Port of Newcastle might seem a long way from Western Australia's commercial and hobbyist apiaries, it has nevertheless sparked alarm on this side of the Nullarbor and offered the opportunity for a renewed focus on safeguarding WA's multi-million-dollar industry.
"The varroa mite incursion in NSW is the beekeeping industry's version of foot and mouth disease,'' said Mikey Cernotta, the chairman of resource and biosecurity at the Bee Industry Council of WA and owner-director of the Pemberton Honey Company.
"It is the worst possible pest you could have come into the country, based on what we have seen happen throughout the rest of the world it has devastating impacts on your beehives every year.''
In the incursion's wake, organisations representing WA beekeepers have upped their efforts over the past month - with the big message to beekeepers to register their hives ASAP, check and test them regularly and ensure traceability by keeping good records of where those hives have travelled.
"I've been banging on about it since this incursion started - registration of beekeepers is absolutely critical and it is a legal requirement to register, with a $3000 fine for non-compliance,'' Mr Cernotta said.
"You don't stand a chance in contact tracing if you don't know as a minimum where all the managed hives are in an area.
"You must know who has bees and who to contact, there is also a legal requirement that all hive movements are recorded."
Mr Boylen, who is president of the WA Apiarist Society which has 1200 hobbyists members, said it was urging its members to improve their education and also pushing for people to register themselves as beekeepers and obtain branding numbers which must be permanently recorded on all their hives.
"There's trepidation and an awareness that an incursion can occur and from an amateur's perspective, it is about learning more,'' Mr Boylen said.
"As an organisation, our responsibility is to get the message out to people to make sure they are a registered beekeeper, which means if there is an outbreak, that people can be contacted.
"Secondly, that being registered that their hives are branded, so in any outbreak, their hives can be identified.
"And thirdly, to keep encouraging good recording keeping of what is happening to their hives and of any movement of hives... even amateurs have hives that move around.''
Safeguarding Australia's bee industry is important: Australia's beekeeping industry is worth about $14.2 billion annually to the national economy, with WA's industry alone valued at $800 million to $1.1b.
According to a 2021 report for AgriFutures, the nation has about 1800 highly skilled commercial beekeepers - and about 530,000 commercially-managed hives - and 28,000 recreational beekeepers.
About 37,000 tonnes of honey is produced by commercial and recreational producers a year, with a gross value of about $147m in 2019, ABARES reports.
Honey bees are also essential pollinators and help to improve crop yield and quality - bees pollinate the seed stock used to grow the lucerne and clover used for livestock fodder and a broad range of fruit and vegetable crops.
In 2019 the almond industry, which is Australia's largest user of paid pollination services, hired 180,000 hives.
The nation also has a growing bee export industry, which trades off its pest and disease-free status - and which sees hundreds, possibly thousands, of packets of surplus bees sent overseas at the end of each season, particularly to rebuild varroa-affected populations in countries such as Canada.
Added to the commercial apiarists is a burgeoning group of amateur beekeepers - interest in the hobby booming around Australia - with hives being set up everywhere from suburban backyards and laneways, to schools, men's sheds, community hubs, bush blocks and State forests and who produce $45.6m worth annually of delicious locally-driven honey.
The number of hobbyists is growing - while commercial beekeepers have declined by 36 per cent since 1962, the AgriFuture report says recreational beekeeping has increased 10-fold.
If varroa became established in Australia, ABARES estimates it could reduce Australia's healthy honey bee population by 90-100pc - which would mean devastating consequences for orchardists and farmers across the country.
Mr Cernotta said verroa mites bred on developing brood in the hive, sucking the fat out of bees until they died, and that no other country had been able to eradicate an infestation.
"Working in their favour, most overseas countries where varroa mite was established had a brood break, where the queen stops laying eggs during cold and protracted winters, we don't see that brood break in WA, which would make management a lot harder,'' he said.
"New Zealand is the only country that gave eradication a crack, but the critical mistake they made was that they allowed the movement of beehives.
"The best way to spread varroa once you have detected it, and it is not contained, is moving beehives around the countryside.
"Eradication is possible, but it requires every single beekeeper to be a team player and do the right thing.
"If your business is marginal before varroa, it will almost certainly be unviable with it.
"Nobody wants to see beekeepers unable to do what they love, so it is really a case of short-term pain for long-term game.
"It is absolutely the unknown and there are lots of examples around the world about what it means, not just for beekeepers, but also a large portion of your horticultural industries.''
Australia has a well-established national early warning detection system, co-ordinated by Plant Health Australia, with a network of surveillance hives at air and sea ports, which are checked every four to six weeks and a network of surveillance hives among recreational keepers near those ports.
In WA, sentinel hives are set up at Derby, Geraldton, Perth, Bunbury, Albany and Esperance.
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The surveillance program also includes remote catch-boxes and State-based bee biosecurity officers.
Australian Honey Bee Industry Council chief executive officer Danny Le Feuvre said the NSW outbreak was detected in a surveillance hive at the Port of Newcastle on June 22, with urgent surveillance work detecting significant mite infestations around the area.
About 25 crews - largely made up of volunteers - were in the field in NSW and had detected at least 40 infected premises - including one each in Narrabri and Trangey - which were directly linked to the port.
A series of exclusions zones were set around the port and bans have been placed on the transport of bees around the State.
Mr Le Feuvre said the high load of mites in some infected hives suggested they had been in the area for "some months'' and work was underway to determine how the mites arrived in NSW.
More urgently, authorities are trying to determine which country the mites came from and their resistance to treatment options, so a treatment and eradication program could be implemented.
"We need to know where it came from as that will influence how we manage the mite,'' Mr LeFeuvre said.
"We still feel like we have it contained.
"It is something we have never wanted but it is also something we have always been told is a case of 'not if, but when' and something as an industry we have discussed a lot and we have some agreed plans in place.''
To enable the almond season to go ahead, the NSW government last week scaled back hive eradication plans and allowed for limited movement of hives outside the eradication zones, which prompted fears that it was no longer possible to eradicate the mite in NSW.
Although, so far there have also been more than 2500 negative test results in NSW, which provides some confidence to the industry that eradication is still possible.
State governments also instituted a permit system last week to allow hives to be moved to Victoria, Queensland and Victoria.
WA's beekeeping industry is largely confined to the south west - west of a line from Kalbarri, to Kalgoorlie, down to Esperance and with the Kimberley, Pilbara and Nullarbor Plain providing a natural biosecurity border.
To safeguard local hives, WA maintains strict import conditions for bees, bee products and hives and bees cannot be moved from the Shire of Broome into the south west.
In response to the NSW outbreak, WA's Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development said it had increased its surveillance of commercial apiaries.
But Mr Cernotta sees a kink in the biosecurity chain for WA, if the NSW outbreak cannot be eradicated - he warned a lack of compliance checks for beekeeping registrations, downgrading of funding and surveillance to the National Bee Surveillance Program and a lack of checkpoints at border crossings which leave the State vulnerable.
"If varroa mite becomes established on the east coast we will have a new and very significant risk point in all the freight which will be coming from the east coast,'' he said.
"In Australia we only have biosecurity monitoring at our ports for varroa, that east-west freight link will become a significant risk for WA beekeepers and we have already started to put a whole heap of thought and are about to start some trials of how we monitor that risk.
"That will become our weak point, more than the ports will.''
Mr Cernoota is among those hoping that NSW's eradication efforts are successful.
He warns that if the mite does become endemic in Australia, it will have significant, ongoing costs.
Significant numbers of commercial bee-keepers would likely leave the industry within the first five years of the incursion due to the difficulties of management.
He said beekeepers would face big decisions on what to use to treat infestations which would could affect the marketability of their honey due to chemical residues or impact their own wellbeing, from using organic, acid-based treatments.
The price premium on Australia honey would also likely suffer, affecting export markets.
Increased management costs would push up the prices of pollination services, which would flow-on to growers' costs and ultimately to how much consumers pay for their produce.
"Ultimately there will be increased management costs of trying to live with varroa if it becomes established in Australia - and those costs get passed on,'' Mr Cernotta said.
"At a time when the costs of living are going through the roof, this will just add to the cost of fruit and veg.''
He said varroa mites would also quickly kill off unmanaged, bush hives, so at the same time as commercial keepers were leaving the industry, the number of managed beehives necessary to support farming and horticulture would have to increase substantially.
"New Zealand showed you have to more than double the number of managed beehives to make up for that shortfall of unmanaged hives in the environment,'' he said.
"You are going to have less and less people wanting to beekeep and more than double the requirement for managed beehives.
"It is not a great equation... you will reach a point of equilibrium, eventually, but there is a lot of pain people will need to go through to reach that.
"So the best thing is to keep varroa out.''
And there's agreement from Mr Boylen, who is one of more than 4500 registered beekeepers now going strong in WA, the bulk of whom are hobbyists.
While he acknowledge that the varroa issues was more significant for commercial apiarists, he said hobbyists would not be immune from an incursion.
In fact, they form an unofficial network of surveillance hives around the country which is needed to help boost the biosecurity effort.
He said to assist, the WA Apiarist Society has information on its website, Facebook page and a YouTube channel and has produced guidelines for responsible beekeeping.
"Through some fantastic work we have some very strong genetic lines of bees in WA, so we have a really good beekeeping industry that we need to protect,'' he said.
"There is a lot of work with a real focus at the moment on education, detection and eradication.
"That is really what we are pushing - not how to live with verroa, but how to find it quickly."
