Advocates of natural beekeeping believe Australia has a fantastic opportunity to learn from the mistakes of other countries where varroa mite has infected their bee population.
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On Sunday night, June 26, the NSW Department of Primary Industries instigated a statewide ban on moving and touching hives following the detection of the varroa mite in monitor hives at a Newcastle port, in the NSW Hunter region.
In an emergency lockdown to try to control the spread, the NSW government also began euthanizing bees in the Newcastle area, within a 10km radius of the port's "sentinel" hives.
Also known as varroa destructor, the parasite will begin destroying the hive as soon as it enters, killing bees and their larvae and breaking down the hive until it dies out.
In 2018, NSW Far South Coast resident and natural beekeeping teacher Robin Burbidge was invited to speak at a natural beekeeping conference in The Netherlands.
"We learnt a lot about varroa mite and how not to treat it," Mr Burbidge told ACM.
He acknowledged natural beekeeping could be quite controversial.
"It is a very different philosophy and has much less hands-on management practices," Mr Burbidge said.
"We let bees be bees instead of being slaves to the honey and pollination industries."
Some countries have been dealing with varroa mite for around 30 years.
Mr Burbidge said there was a growing movement away from chemicals to non-treatment beekeeping.
Some world-leading entomologists such as Cornell University's Professor Thomas Seeley were saying the same thing, said Mr Burbidge.
"We should not be using these miticides in the hive. It completely destroys the bees' own immune system."
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As a result, beekeepers in the US must use litres of sugar syrup loaded with antibiotics to keep their bees alive during the winter.
The lessons from other countries leads Mr Burbidge to advocate letting nature take its course. A Russian variant, for example, has become mite resistant by learning to brush the mite off each other's legs, he said.
"We can wait a few years for Australian bees to become mite-resistant instead of interfering and making the beekeeping industry dependent on chemicals and antibiotics."
The alternative, killing millions and millions of bees and treating hives with miticides, also risks wiping out Australia's native bees.
Mr Burbidge said "let them be and develop their own resistance".
