His Excellency General The Honourable David Hurley AC DSC (Ret'd) Governor of New South Wales
The Governor of NSW, who keeps hives at Government House, will officially open our Conference.
Costa Georgiadis
Planting for Bees
Costa Georgiadis is the much loved host of ABC TV’s weekly show Gardening Australia. He is a landscape architect who has an all-consuming passion for plants and people: he knows how to bring out the best in both, and takes great pleasure in bringing them together.
Costa believes in embracing and celebrating mother nature's cycles and seasons and nurturing her balance, beauty and bounty organically. His holistic approach is all about tending the soil and the soul.
Stuart Anderson
The Flow Hive, Three Years On
Bees have long been a significant part of the lives of Northern Rivers father-son inventing team Stuart and Cedar Anderson. From an early age son Cedar felt bad about crushing bees during the honey harvest, of being stung, and having to spend a whole week harvesting his honey. So for years, Cedar and Stuart tinkered away in a shed to find a simpler way to extract honey. After trialling many methods, Cedar developed an idea to split honey cells horizontally. But it was while working on that invention, that the real “Eureka” moment happened. Cedar recalls: “[Stuart] held his hands together in a way that resembled a honey cell and then moved them so the two halves were offset.” That was the moment the Flow system was born.
The funding campaign they launched for the $100,000 to get moulds made to manufacture the plastic frames soon became the most successful crowdfunding campaign ever launched outside the US. Three years on from the revolutionary hive’s launch, over 51,000 Flow Hives have been sold into 130 countries.
Des Cannon
ABK editor and ex-commercial beekeeper
Turning your Beekeeping Hobby into a Business
Des started keeping bees in 1978 while a high school teacher in Canberra, then progressed to teaching beekeeping as a high school horticultural course. In 1984 his hobby became a full-time career, working as a commercial beekeeper for 25 years. His science background played a role with 11 years on the RIRDC Honeybee R&D Advisory Committee, the last five years as Chair. His passion for education also continued, for over 10 years teaching courses in ‘Beginning in Bees’ and ‘Beekeeping as a Business’ as an education officer for the NSW Department of Agriculture. In 2007 he became editor of the national beekeeping journal, The Australasian Beekeeper.
Dr Mark Greco
Charles Sturt University
Using Diagnostic Radio Entomology to Study Learning and Memory in Bees
Mark has developed innovative methods for studying insects and their behaviour using non-invasive imaging which is now termed Diagnostic Radioentomology (DR). Mark is a NHMRC Expert Peer Reviewer, Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society, Patron of the ANU Apiculture Society and a member of the Australian Entomological Society. He has been involved in the management of Australian stingless bees and European honeybees since 1991.
He has collaborated with the BBC televised program 'metamorphosis', the BBC Earth series and with Sir David Attenborough's three-part series 'Micromonsters'. He has published 21 papers in internationally recognised peer reviewed journals and he currently lectures at various institutions such as London’s Museum of Natural History and the Royal Society. In 2008 Mark received the inaugural Dr Eva Crane award from the International Bee Research Association for best original research paper, where DR was described as an emerging non-invasive technique for behavioural, evolutionary and classical biologists who need to study animals without harming them. Mark has just co-authored a paper in “NATURE - Scientific Reports” showing that the proposed 5G telecommunications network will produce biological effects that might change the way bees and other insects pollinate our crops and native plants.
Professor Simon Haberle
Australian National University, Natural History
Australasian Pollen and Spore Atlas and How Pollen Tells us About Landscapa Changes
Simon completed his PhD at ANU on the environment of the Tari Basin, Papua New Guinea, between 500,000 and one million years ago. While holding postdoctoral positions at the Smithsonian and at the University of Cambridge he continued to pursue his interest in the role of past climate change and human activity on tropical and temperate ecosystems. His research currently focuses on high-resolution palaeoecological analysis to understand the impact of climate variability and human activity on land ecosystems of the Pacific and Indian Oceans since the last ice age. Simon has been developing online research tools such as the Australasian Pollen and Spore Atlas and the PalaeoWorks website. He is currently using his knowledge of Australian pollen to explore the impact of atmospheric pollen and spores on respiratory health.
Dr Romina Rader
University of New England
Latest Research into Crop Pollination
Romina is currently a Senior Lecturer in Community Ecology at UNE.
Romina’s research focuses on two broad areas: how plants and animals interact and respond to changes in landscape structure across both natural and human-modified landscapes; and the role of biodiversity in providing ecosystem services such as crop pollination and pest regulation.
Romina’s group at UNE in Armidale is currently studying which pollinators – bees, flies, beetles, moths, butterflies, and birds, as well as other taxa – visit which crops in different farming systems, and what environmental factors make pollinators less or more effective.
Dr Emily Remnant
University of Sydney
Bee Genetics and Developing Resistance to Viruses
Emily is a geneticist and evolutionary biologist interested in understanding how insect populations adapt to change. Throughout her career she has studied the evolution of resistance mechanisms and how insects respond to environmental stress such as pathogens and chemical insecticides.
Her current work focuses on honeybees, their viruses, and investigating ways to enable virus resistance in honeybees. Emily uses a range of molecular laboratory methods and bioinformatics techniques, including next generation sequencing, to investigate the impact of viruses in honeybees in both field collections and laboratory experiments.