When Young beekeeper Steve Ricketts lost half his bees last winter and almost his livelihood he blamed global warming.
He believes beekeepers are the people closest to nature and therefore the first to notice the consequences of climate change.
Preparing to take his bees to pollinate almond crops in South Australia, he discovered he had lost 700 out of 1700 hives. Each hive had about 60,000 bees, which had all died.
Mr Rickets discovered that the virus which attacked his hives had been destroying bees around the world, which led him to theorise that milder winters were making conditions ideal for the disease.
''I don't know how close we are to running out of bees altogether; if we do, mate, we're in the shit. There'll be no fruit, no vegetables.
''People just don't seem to grasp that. I don't want to push global warming down people's throats, but it's here.''
He is rebuilding his hive numbers by splitting them and putting in new queen cells in a bid to save his export business to the United States, which needs Australian bees because Varroa mites have wiped out their own.
A Primary Industries and Resources Committee report on the honey-bee industry, tabled in Parliament this week, recommends spending $50 million a year on biosecurity and industry research.
It recommends establishing a national centre for research into honey bees and pollination.
Dr Denis Anderson, a Canberra-based CSIRO scientist who identified the Varroa destructor mite after 10 years of researching Asian bees, has welcomed the recommendations.
He said the biosecurity issue alone warranted $50 million worth of research.
After his loss, Mr Ricketts was put in contact with Dr Anderson, who had returned from the US, where he had convinced researchers that Australian bees were not responsible for a sudden outbreak of hive losses akin to ''colony collapse disorder'', a phenomenon in which bees inexplicably disappear from apiaries.
Nosema, a parasite responsible for the US losses, was also identified as the culprit in Young.
Dr Anderson said Mr Ricketts's global warming theory could be correct, but he did not have enough evidence to be definite.
Genetically modified crops, radiation from mobile phone networks and insecticides had been blamed for the collapse of bee colonies. ''I tend to go along with something in the global warming area, mainly because this pathogen ... is in a social situation,'' Dr Anderson said.
In winter, bees formed into a cluster, or ball, to survive cold temperatures. One or two bees infected with Nosema came into a hive and fed neighbouring bees, creating a nucleus of infection. ''We need more and more bees for our pollination, there are just not enough bees to go around. That's the long-term issue,'' Dr Anderson said.
''It is not scare tactics. People are saying, 'Oh, you're scaring the hell out of everyone'. But all you've got to do is look around the world.''
Dr Anderson said the honey-bee report's 25 recommendations had widespread support in the beekeeping and plant industries.