Bee refugees: Auckland a sanctuary for pollinating insects

Sarah Smuts-Kennedy from For the Love of Bees with beehives kept in the grounds of the heritage Highwic House in Newmarket. Photo / Doug Sherring

Bees and pollinating insects are dying in pesticide-dusted, country pastures and that is turning our cities into unlikely wildlife sanctuaries, researchers say.

It's meant Auckland community gardens and schools where students were growing food had increasingly become hot spots for so-called pollinators to buzz about.

And this is not just a big deal for the environment, but also our stomachs.

Insects were estimated to pollinate between 70 and 84 per cent of the foods arriving on our dinner plates.

Now Auckland Council researchers have stepped up efforts to identify new pockets of city land where community gardens and flowers can be grown to ensure pollinators can find food-habitats right across the city.

"If new food growing sites prioritise crops and flowers that attract pollinators, they would strengthen Auckland as a nest for pollinators' biodiversity to thrive, while potentially encouraging the social value of raising food-growing awareness," council researcher Barbara Ribeiro said.

To do this Auckland Council, in a December research paper, mapped publicly owned land in the inner city Waitematā Local Board where new food sites could be started, and began discussing which schools could start bee-keeping.

They cited growing international research arguing cities were becoming insect refuges from large-scale use of chemical pesticides and fertilisers in the countryside.

Beehives in the Bay of Islands. New Zealand has 28 native species of bees but honey bees aren't one of them. Photo / 123rf

Black and yellow honeybees and fluffy bumblebees were often held up as ambassadors for pollinators.

They produce the honey we love and live in communal hives that allow us to keep them and get to know more intimately than we can with other insects, Sarah Smuts-Kennedy, from community group For the Love of Bees, said.

Bee keeping had also become increasingly hip in Auckland.

For the Love of Bees alone keeps seven colonies in the city, which they use to draw families into their urban farms and get them excited about nature.

Yet Smuts-Kennedy cautioned against setting up droves of hives across the city.

For one thing, every honey bee colony required one billion flowers a year to survive, she said.

And neither honey nor bumblebees were native. Yet their numbers had exploded in the manuka honey gold rush.

"In the commercial world, with everyone wanting manuka honey, you can get hundreds of thousands of honey bee colonies being taken to wherever manuka can be found," she said.

Manuka honey might be considered 'Kiwi as' by most people but honey bees aren't native. Photo / File

"And that puts enormous pressure on that ecosystem."

It meant that while there were more honey bees, their colonies might not be as healthy as they could be, due to the limited food available to them, she said.

It often also meant New Zealand's native pollinators were being pushed out.

"There are 28 different native bee species that emerge for just three months of the year and require native flowers to survive," Smuts-Kennedy said.

The bees time their arrival with the manuka and pohutakawa blooms because they were evolved to pollinate them.

As a result, Smuts-Kennedy said it would be better if Aucklanders planted the flowers and foods that attracted bees to their gardens rather than kept large numbers of hives.

She also hoped to see more urban farms set up around the country, which grew organic, pesticide and herbicide free food more intensively than community gardens.

This was because urban farms that were regularly grown, harvested and regenerated were great at taking carbon out of the atmosphere and offsetting climate change.

Beehives are becoming popular again with the craze for manuka honey, but environmentalists hope to also see more habitats created for native bees and insects. Photo / 123rf

"While planting trees is a really great strategy it is a slow strategy - it takes 20-30 years," she said.

"Regenerative agriculture is much faster as it constantly cycles carbon out of the atmosphere, and if it is done right builds soil systems that store vast amounts of carbon."

Smuts-Kennedy hoped Aucklanders would become busy bees supporting the growth of more organic food and native habitats.

"Pollinators generally are under threat, but what I would be telling Aucklanders is that biodiversity is under threat," she said.