[Pollinator] Text for the Wall Street Journal article

[Kimberly Winter]

Thanks to David Inouye for this text:

Copyright (c) 2005, Dow Jones & Company Inc. Reproduced with permission of 
copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without 
permission.

TASMANIA, Australia -- There had been reports of a bushfire in the mountains 
that night, so before dawn, the beekeepers headed west to check on their 
hives. Like most of the beekeepers in Tasmania, they set up their hives 
along logging roads in the forest, because their bees collect nectar and 
pollen from flowering leatherwood trees.

Leatherwood grows only on this heart-shaped island the size of Ireland, a 
hundred miles south of the Australian mainland and 800 miles west of New 
Zealand. The trees' small, star-shaped flowers blossom into the autumn, 
generating 70% of the 1,200 tons of honey produced in Tasmania each year.

But today, a battle of trees versus bees is unfolding here. For more than 30 
years, timber companies have been energetically converting the forests of 
this Australian state, which have the tallest and oldest flowering trees in 
the world, into sawdust and woodchips, which are shipped primarily to Japan. 
The loggers want the huge eucalyptus, but like dolphins caught in a tuna 
net, the leatherwood, Huon and King Billy pines that grow alongside them are 
harvested as well. The loggers then firebomb the forests to clear out the 
debris, a process that can lead to runaway "regeneration burns" and 
inadvertently destroy nearby leatherwood, and threaten the hives.

If the logging of leatherwood isn't limited, the beekeepers warn, not only 
will their livelihood disappear, but so will the world's only source of 
leatherwood honey, which has a sharp, musky flavor similar to honey from 
chestnuts or thyme.

The wind was sharp with wood smoke as the beekeepers headed inland from 
Hobart. At the wheel of the Subaru Outback was Hedley Hoskinson, 69 years 
old, a wiry semiretired beekeeper who, with his wife, Hazel, manages 100 
hives. The descendant of convicts and the son of a lake- country shepherd, 
he got an early start in the business.

"I got my first hive when I was 9," said Mr. Hoskinson, steering around the 
bodies of wallabies, wombats and bush-tail possums that had risked the 
treacherous trek to the river's edge. A voracious, meat- eating Tasmanian 
devil that had been dining on this smorgasbord was among the road kill. "I'm 
the last of the first," Mr. Hoskinson said.

Also on board was John Duncombe, a rugged, soft-spoken sheep farmer with 
2,000 head of sheep, four kids and 500 hives. At 40, he's one of the 
youngest. "My sons won't be beekeepers," he said. "There won't be enough 
leatherwood left." After decades of lumbering, the forests have retreated, 
and so have the hives. The trees thrive in the protected mountains and 
valleys of the World Heritage area, which are off-limits to loggers and 
inaccessible to beekeepers.

"We're not against forestry, just the way they do it," said Mr. Duncombe. 
"The loggers say, 'we're running a business.' Well, we're running a 
business, too." The 206 commercial beekeepers in Tasmania's apiary industry 
generate between $2 million and $4 million in revenue and pollination 
services that sustain $145 million in crops.

Forestry Tasmania, a trade group representing the $1 billion timber 
industry, says that beekeepers benefit from the logging roads, and that 
plenty of leatherwood is in protected forests. "Where possible, 
leatherwood-rich areas are excluded from harvesting, or are incorporated 
into streamside reserves that are protected from harvesting and regeneration 
burning," said a spokesman in a statement.

After a couple of hours of driving, the beekeepers came to 40 stacks of 
white boxes lined up on the edge of the forest. There was no sign of any 
fire. The bees, all females, will make 168,000 trips to collect a gallon of 
nectar. Each bee will gather nectar steadily for three weeks until, worn 
out, she will drop to the ground and die.

There was fire up ahead. The beekeepers soon arrived at the clear- cut 
hillsides that had been burned the week before. Tree limbs and stumps were 
still smoldering. The area will likely be replanted with eucalyptus -- and 
laced with poison bait to kill wildlife that might try to eat the seedlings. 
In the distance, a helicopter was dropping water on a burning stretch of 
forest.

Down the road, the beekeepers stopped by another set of hives, and followed 
the bees under the canopy of the trees. The eucalyptus created a ceiling 
more than 200 feet high, arching above a hall of myrtle, leatherwood and 
Fagus, a native beech whose tiny leaves turn gold in the fall. Thanks to the 
100 inches of rain dumped annually by trade winds, the trees and fallen logs 
were covered by a dozen types of lichen and moss.

It was time to refuel. At a road junction, they bypassed the golden arches 
of a McDonald's and headed to their preferred venue, Banjo's, a home-grown 
cafe chain.

After tea and scones, they passed north through the midlands, where the 
once-fertile hills are suffering from a mysterious dieback. The disease has 
killed the giant gum trees, leaving their huge white skeletons standing. 
"Nothing but bandicoots can live here now," said Mr. Hoskinson.

The beekeepers believe Tasmania's future lies in tourism, not timber. Last 
year, about 400,000 tourists, mostly Australian, spent about $1 billion 
visiting its wilderness, wineries and snowy highlands. Tourism and 
sustainable industries, including honey, go hand-in-hand, the beekeepers 
say. They've rallied support from farmers, who need the bees to pollinate 
their orchards and crops, as well as wooden-boat builders and furniture 
makers, who complain they can't get enough Huon, myrtle and sassafras for 
their craft.

Dusk was setting in when they reached Blue Hills Honey, a farm in Mawbanna, 
in the far northwest. As two little marsupials -- a pademelon and a potoroo 
-- skipped by, hundreds of white cockatoos flocked to a dead tree to roost. 
Nicola Charles, 38, who runs the farm with her husband, Robbie, 40, set out 
a plate of scones and mugs of tea.

Like other family-run Tasmanian facilities, the farm uses a cool- extraction 
process that produces a mousse-like texture and preserves the honey's odd 
flavor. Pasteurized mass-produced honey, on the other hand, can be syrupy 
and bland. Mrs. Charles, who had been an intensive-care nurse in London 
before returning to her hometown to marry the beekeeper she grew up with, 
hopes that as more foreigners develop a palate for artisanal honey like 
leatherwood, the government will take more steps to protect it.

The beekeepers made little headway complaining about logging until Simon 
Pigot, a beekeeper with a Ph.D. in computer imaging, noticed that the 
government's maps, which are based on aerial photography, underreported 
leatherwood. Because leatherwood grows under taller trees, some people were 
underestimating how much of it was being logged, he said.

Last month, the government said it would finance more logging roads, which 
it said would help create more hive sites, and set aside more forests in 
reserves. But the beekeepers say that will make little difference since the 
reserves include land with little leatherwood.

Just then, a power outage plunged the farm into darkness, but by the 
greenish glow of a laptop, the beekeepers continued to study the NASA 
satellite map of Tasmania's forests that they had downloaded. Said Mr. 
Pigot: "The way things are going, in the south we've got about 10 years of 
commercial production left."




~Kim

Kimberly Winter, Ph.D.
Coordinator, North American Pollinator Protection Campaign
E-mail: NAPPCoordinator at hotmail.com
Internet: www.nappc.org
Ph: (301) 405-2666

Mailing Address:
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