Beekeeper Ken Tanson is playing a deadly numbers game on this flourishing canola crop at Harden.
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He's building up his bee numbers even though the pollen and nectar that worker bees bring back to their hives from the brilliant yellow flowers are killing his queen bees.
If he were to remain here long enough he'd lose all his bees, a situation he blames on chemicals used to treat canola seeds which linger in the pollen.
''Thirty years ago queen bees used to last for about three years,'' Mr Tanson, a sixth-generation beekeeper, said. ''Most of the time you'd get two years out of the queen without any problems. Today you are lucky to get eight months.''
Department of Primary Industries bee scientist Dr Doug Somerville said the shorter lifespan of queen bees could be the result of a whole range of reasons.
''Chemicals have the limelight I suppose because they are the current nasty ... there's work in the United States that indicates chemicals, particularly nicatoids, are significantly knocking bees around.
''There is not a lot of evidence in Australia that it is doing the same because the amount of exposure to nicatoids in Australia is a fraction of what their American cousins have with their bees.''
Dr Somerville said a new disease in Australia over the past decade had halved the life of queens and was one of several threats to the insects.
Mr Tanson said bees were as vulnerable as frogs to the slightest hiccup in their environment.
The 52-year-old apiarist said in his 40 years in the industry he had found that the more farmers used chemicals, the more he encountered problems with bees.
''We signed our own death warrant as the human race when we allowed chemicals to be used on farms.''
He has split bee hives in the past, putting some on canola, and others off the crop, and found queens exposed to pollen and nectar from canola died as early as eight to 10 weeks later.
He will move his hives on to Paterson's curse as quickly as possible and says canola, although a problem, was better than using supplementary feeding.
In the 1970s, before canola's refinement when it was known as rape, it never created problems, according to Mr Tanson.
When it began to flourish as canola, it was a boon for the honey industry, creating superb honey flows. Now it was useful only in building up bee numbers.
Scientists in NSW and Queensland told The Canberra Times more research was done overseas where honey producers relied on agricultural crops and had more problems than Australian produces, including verroa mite and colony collapse. Eighty per cent of Australian honey was produced from eucalyptus trees.
Mr Tanson, who flew to Thailand earlier this year to learn about Asian bee risks, said billion-dollar law suits against chemical companies for damages overseas was in stark contrast to the lack of research in Australia.