Bees are much more than a background buzz

Photo: Brad Collis

As World Bee Day 2025 reminds us, bees do far more than make honey. Their role in sustaining agriculture and food security is vital — and increasingly under threat. 

You may have noticed the landing-page image on the Coretext website is a bee busily foraging inside a flower. The image is a nod to Coretext’s long engagement with agriculture, for which bees (and numerous other insects) are crucial plant pollinators. 

Bees, particularly the European honey bee, but also native bees, are integral to pollinating many of the food crops we take for granted. Aside from many fruits and vegetables, bees are also needed to pollinate broadacre crops such as canola, faba beans, lupins, soybeans and sunflowers.  

The high cost of disappearing bees 

The value of this critical entomological service runs into the billions of dollars—as does the estimated cost of bees being wiped out by careless use of pesticides, and latterly the spread of the parasitic varroa mite. 

This potentially hive-destroying mite breached Australia’s quarantine barriers in 2022, almost 100 years to the day of European honey bees first being brought to Australia. The mite is considered established in NSW and will, inevitably, spread to other eastern states now that eradication has been put into the too-hard basket and ‘management’ has become the official strategy. 

Protecting pollinators through research 

A timely reminder of this latest threat is a new research project being funded by the Grains Research and Development Corporation to improve understanding of the potential effect on food crops of a decimated European honey bee population. It is asking farmers to increase their awareness of bees and monitor any changes they detect in local populations. An article about this project will be in the July edition of  GroundCover, the GRDC publication produced by Coretext. 

Why world bee day matters 

The overarching message on World Bee Day 2025 is that bees are fundamental to the sustainability of agricultural food systems and, by extension, to humanity at large. 

It was safe access to a food and energy source, honey, that allowed a small furry tree dweller to evolve into the planet’s most dominant species. Humans. We owe bees our very existence.