 to the masterclass series in agriculture and environment from the University of Western Australia. We're actually in Perth, Australia. Lucky for us, it is sunny here. My name is Kirstie Brooks and I'm so excited to host this series. We'll be hearing from a number of experts in the coming weeks on how they're tackling global, regional and local issues in our natural environment. And I'm gonna start with a traditional welcome to country that we do in Australia. I'd like to acknowledge that the University of Western Australia is situated in Perth along the Bill Yar Mali or the Swan River. This area is Noongar land and we recognise that the Noongar people will remain the spiritual and cultural custodians of their land and can practice their values, languages, beliefs and knowledge. Now, let me introduce you to our speakers to welcome Liz Barba and Dr. Brian Moroff who will take us, talk to us today about how Co-operative Research Centre of Honey Bee Products is authenticating honey from the apary site to the shelf. So Liz Barba, who you can see there is the CEO of the CRC for Honey Bee Products. Within the centre, Liz oversees 30 projects focused in four programs of apary site, honey chemistry, Honey Bee Health as well as traceability and marketing. A major deliverable to the industry is the establishment of the Honey Assurance System that links the Australian flora to the Honey Bee product on the shelf. And this is what you'll be hearing about today. I'll also introduce Brian now as well who is an environmental geographer here at the University of Western Australia. Dr. Moroff has expertise in the application of geographic information systems and remote sensing to arrange environmental management issues whereby he has contributed to the advancements in technologies in these areas for the fields of population health, planning, international development and environmental science. All right, so that's all the formalities out the way. I'm gonna pass you over to Liz and we'll hear from Liz first and then Brian and then we'll come back together and we'll have some great question and answer time. Over to you, Liz. Great, thanks Kirsty. Thanks for working with us all and welcome to all of you all around the world. Just really thrilled to be able to tell you something about our Honey Bees here in Western Australia and across Australia. So, as you know, we're actually based in Western Australia but the Cobbler Research Centre actually covers right the way across Australia. Today, because this project has sort of been, I'd say sort of tested here in Western Australia, there will be a bit more of a focus what's going on in this state. And so this picture, which you will see in front of you is some of our Honey Bees. I was actually out with our beekeeper last week and this is actually this picture that we've talked and as you see here in Western Australia, we have mainly the Italian and the Golden Bee and as you can see, it's actually really pretty to see. You can see that we use it because it's actually very docile. You can see there they're both drones and they're workers and of course I hope you can see the new babies just coming out. So it was actually a very exciting day watching that. So we also do have a bit of the Corsican and also the Coniolian bee here but they're mainly the feral bees that come in. So you can see them quite distinctly. I guess just to give you background, what we do here is we sort of did a survey of when diseases arrived here. So really, we've only had Honey Bees in Western Australia since, I hope you can see that, it's a bit too small. So it's 1841 and basically what I wanted to point out is that we don't have some major diseases here. We don't have borough with one of the very lucky places. The whole of Australia doesn't have borough so we're actually very lucky for that. And we don't have European fowl brood and we don't have the hive beetle Sydney down in the Southwest, which is the main production area of honey. So a result of this is that we really don't use antibiotics here and we don't use modest science. So our honey production here is pretty is chemical free. And if we keep to the forests, we really don't get exposed either to any pesticides or any insecticides at all. So it's one of those sort of things that we're actually very proud of the honey. We actually have produced a very clean product. So on top of that, we really want to know more about in terms of what have we got? You know, so just to show you about the forest, so we are very dependent on our forests and we move, the beekeepers here move constantly. We are one of the few places that actually can keep our bees producing right throughout the year. So by moving great distances, our beekeepers never ever have to actually feed their bees. So there's no real overwintering. They go up north where the temperatures are warmer, we've got flowering. So they keep moving and keeping their bees going. So on average, across Australia, we, whoops, sorry, I hope we go on the next one. Let me just go on the next one. So over and around Australia, this is our honey production. It is on the decline. There is, of course, there's a few issues that are coming into play. And these issues are, of course, we've been also hit by climate change as everybody else in the world. We have had a massive increase of beekeepers and especially hobby beekeepers. We've actually increased in our numbers. Literally, we were about 500 beekeepers in 2008 and we're already up to over nearly 4,000 beekeepers at the moment. We're literally getting about 40 to 50 new beekeepers every month. So beekeeping is extremely popular here in Western Australia. The other thing that's changing is that from honey production is a big change going from beekeepers focusing on honey production to moving more on to pollination services. We've just had some enormous plantations of avocados come into the area. We've had some other almonds, of course, are coming in and especially on the East Coast almonds are actually becoming quite a major crop that needs pollination. There's also land use change. We've had forestry, mining and, of course, development have certainly taken away some of our areas. And unfortunately, like has been happening many places of the world, we're also suffering with fire and, of course, the control of that fire through prescribed burning. So we are having a bit of our resource affected as we go along. So there is a slight reduction in honey, but what it means is that the honey that we produce is actually becoming rarer and it's becoming more valuable. And then that we've actually got, so our native honeys that we've got, we've got some really iconic honeys that actually come from Australia. Most famous, of course, is the Manuka honey. As you know, there's one species of Lictus bermum produced that produces honey in New Zealand. We are just, we're very lucky that we've actually just got so many species here. We've got more than 80 species here. And most half of those actually produce the DHA active ingredient. So we're actually getting very excited. The main, there's three regions that really produce that Australian Manuka and that's sort of New South Wales Queensland and, of course, down at Tasmania, which is where the Scoparium is based mainly. And then, of course, we've got a very unusual species here in Western Australia, which is out in the Eespans region. But of course, the other many other iconic ones, Leatherwood is very well known from Tasmania. And then, of course, we in the West have actually been pushing the Jarrah honey, which is a very high-bioactive honey as well. So to do all this, to show that we have got, so this traceability is actually becoming very important to us, not only because of food assurance, but also because we want to trace where the product comes from. So we've actually joined forces with Beequal Australia, which is an industry-owned quality assurance system. So our umbrella body, which is the Australian Honey Bee Industry Council of Western Australia, actually set up the Beequal Australia. And the first thing that they really wanted to do was to make sure that a safe, wholesome quality food was produced. So if you see a beekeeper, it has got their Beequal registration, they're actually audited to show that that it's from a known forage source, that all the paperwork in terms of agriculture and veterinary chemicals is documented and known. The management and hygiene of the hives is monitored and also about their processing plants. So they do have some, they follow HACCP. So the management and hygiene also includes all the biosecurity. And we've actually been adding a lot more about the biosecurity aspect into the Beequal system. So our role that we've been doing with Beequal Australia is actually to digitize this Beequal. When we first started working with the Beequal Australia, all of this was actually in paper. And we've partnered with them to get this all digitized. And so the reasons for this is courses, easy proof of product quality and source. So when the beekeeper arrives at the packer, they can literally download whatever information the packer needs about their product. For the beekeeper, it's a continuous improvement system. The most important thing in the industry is that then they can benchmark and between each other see how they're going in terms of their systems, productivity, whatever they need to compare. The other thing is that it's building up of industry knowledge. You know, often we ask questions about our industry at this point in time, we actually can't answer. So this is actually will be the system where we can actually defend the or give information about what our practices are in our industry and how well we're doing things. The best thing about this also is that it adds, you can add on to other systems. So whether you're doing sensors and hides and or whether you are actually adding on sort of better business models on the other end, either which way it actually would help. So now we've done that. So basically the April site to pack a traceability system, if a beekeeper belongs to Beequal Australia and follows their system, they're actually providing that at the moment. What isn't actually happening at the moment is that we haven't actually got that honey assurance. And as most of you know, is that you can't control a bee. You put the bee hive wherever it is. The bee does its wonderful waggle dance. And then of course it sets off and it goes to between both the nectar and the pollen. But what we have here in Sydney in Western Australia is that there is a 3K radius for an April site. And for all the things that we, the literature that we've been looking at and everything that we've been trying to find how far our bees actually move. We see that within a forest, it's only about 0.7 of a kilometer. And when you get to open woodlands, it goes to up to about 1.7. So there's plenty of space around that hive, you know that hive April site. And basically this was set up for biosecurity purposes. This was to stop the movement of American file group and as you know, it's actually, it transmits between bees going between hives. So that radius was actually put in place. But what it does is that it just gives us some sort of idea of the area the bees will actually be moving into. So in the honey assurance program, what we're really focusing on is two things. One is whether we have got a pure honey. And the second thing is, and the more difficult one is whether it's authentically Australian. So to do this, what we, well, the definition of honey. So first off is, as we know, it's that sweet natural substance. So this is the codex standard that actually is or codex definition of honey. And this is the basis of everything that we do in terms of how we do the chemistry, how we do the tracing happens is that actually we go back to this. So it's really got to be a nectar or something from a plant. And that actually is taken up by the bee. It's that transfer of those, the enzymes that goes into the honey. And it's that maturing of the honey, the drying out of the honey from the 80% moisture down to whatever it can be for that ripening. That's actually really critical to give all those qualities that we keep saying are so important to honey. So this is very crucial, this whole statement. So in the honey assurance program, what we work on is sort of four areas. The moisture, of course, it has to be between 14 and 21. And this is actually very important for the antimicrobial benefits. Then it's also that sugar portion and actually what those sugars are. And as you know, honey's mainly glucose and fructose. Then there's the other part that has been gaining a lot more attention of late is this non-sugar portion of the honey. And we've been spending a lot of time in this looking at this non-sugar portion of the honey in terms of finding the differences between the honeys. Now the part of it, of course, is the pollen and the honey. And the chemistry center have actually built up a fantastic database for the West Australian honeys. So it's interesting to see how all of these will come together for our honey assurance. So the first thing that really is this is, but this is what we're really trying to deal with is these adulterants. So there's quite a list of them. And the problem is that they're all much cheaper to produce and add, they're all man-made, and they all can be easily added into honey. The other thing that happens is they actually can come in with imported honey. So that's a concern in this whole system. So what we've been doing is just to show you that when you deal with these corn syrups, rice syrups, glucose, golden syrups, as treacles, maple syrups, they're actually quite easy to pick up. So this is a very quick and easy technique that's been produced by, so it's by Connie Locke's laboratory and Karul Islam is the PhD student. And it's just been, we've actually found it very quick to pick these up. So when you actually adulterate just by adding substances, it's actually quite a simple process to pick up that adulteration. The problem that we have more so is when you go to the next stage and that is when you actually have to feed your bees. So the timing, everybody has to, there's a lot of places that do have to feed their bees before they go into winter, but it's this timing of when you actually feed and when the bees actually recover and they actually get their own floral sources. And so it's this timing of when you actually take off and harvest the honey. There's actually two, there's also, remember, they go, it's the sugars to the nectar, to the forages, but also we also have the other feeding that happens with the pollen and they can happen in very many ways. But again, that can also change the signature into the honey. So the pollens for the protein for the breeding. So we've got these two things that actually can come in that can actually add an adulterating influence on the honey. So just to go back to the traceability system. So if you're doing, the difference between us, I guess, in agriculture, so if you're in agriculture, you know, you're basically looking at a farm, which is a set site, you put your orchard in, it's set trees, you might have two clones, but it's a very defined area. You know, exactly what you're harvesting. It'll be, it'll happen in a very defined season. So, you know, it'll be spring, that'll happen. You then do your extraction and you go through to the end. When you're dealing with honey, it actually becomes a lot more sort of complex. So this is, you know, the Australian, we've been working on the sub biographical regions. These are regions that have been argued endlessly between geologists and botanists to agree upon. And these are the areas that we need to, that worked the system to actually preserve the vegetation for each of these regions. So these are very highly contested and well-defined areas. So we've used this and we've decided these are going to be the fences for the areas that we are actually going to define. It actually looks like an awful lot of them, but if you really look in Australia, you see that, you know, a lot of them are cut up because of the forest, because of the desert, sorry. And we only really deal with the periphery of Australia in terms of beekeeping. But the other thing that we also have is that, you know, we're in a farm, you're only really harvesting one time a year. We have, you know, not only beekeepers move from site to site, as I showed you previously, but we've also got this issue of the seasons. So you could have, on one site, you can have multiple flowerings, but different plants of different seasons. So it's, and we actually follow the non-gar six seasons, which is perfect for our environment. And you could have flowering, basically, in six seasons. So you're dealing with every sub-biographical region and you're dealing with six seasons. So the mission's actually started and we are actually now going ahead and we started this honey library. So we're actually bringing in all the samples and we're collecting all the metadata and we're building this library to characterize each of these honeys. So this is the project that we're currently in and the background to actually how we store the metadata about each of these samples I hand over to Brian. Liz, as Kirsty identified, I am a, I'm a geographer and so I'm a little biased in how I think about the world and how the world operates and I tend to compartmentalize things in space and time. And so when Liz was talking about this notion of, we started talking about this notion of traceability and being able to pinpoint where honey samples were coming from, my brain automatically goes to, well, where was the sample taken from and when was the sample taken? And that allows us to really make sure that we're dealing with as Liz had identified in authentically Australian honey. So that's where I come into the BQAL system and this sub-project, if you will, I will step back just a moment and identify that my role in the CRC is the theme leader for the projects, the projects that sit under theme one. And these projects are really focused around database integration and that is the notion that all of the data that is collected around the CRC, how can we, and that may be biological information, that may be chemistry, that may be flora, a whole suite of data that's collected and pollen information around the CRC. How do we bring all of that together? And really, there are some unique IDs, if you will, from a database management perspective that allows us to link data sets. And that's really around species, flora species, if you will, time and location. So it's sort of been on my team and I to really lay the foundations for data integration across the CRC. And so in doing so, there's a number of things that we've been thinking that is about and that is one is setting up this data integration platform and I'll explain that because it provides the foundation for being able to trace honeys to a specific location across Australia. And around this notion of species distribution mapping in terms of our flora and the phenology of our flora and what I mean by that is when is our different forage species flowering and when are they flowering in different locations across the nation? And also being able to, as Liz had identified, our APRs are traveling over long, extremely long distances to put their bees on flowering, on nectar sources. So generally what will happen is the APRs will go and scout locations and see if those locations look like they're going to be a viable nectar source in the near future and then they'll decide if it's economically viable to move their hives to that location. So having some sort of approach to predicting when flowering will occur in certain locations really helps the APRs in terms of saving time and money. And then that helps with how we sort of, really from a business perspective, how an APRs might migrate their hives around the state to maximize production from different flowering events. So there's a series of projects that sit under this theme one of the CRC and I've given you a bit of an overview of those projects. Now, in terms of supporting the bee call bee call process. So really we want to get a really good understanding, a really good overview of one where the APRs are accessing the resource and that is the Mullifers flora and where that flora is occurring and then when they're accessing it. And this is kind of just a nice overview diagram that comes out of one of my PhD students work that has just recently been published that really draws attention to how important bees and the bee industry is in terms of ecosystem services internationally. So we wanted to, and there really hasn't been a lot of research that has gone into bee industry in Australia and so a lot of what we've done is really starting from the ground floor. But we knew we needed to first identify and understand what species are actually out there and what species are our APRs using. And there have been a number of historic texts that have started to pull the story together. And they provided our foundation and our starting point of identifying all the flora species that the APRs are using, either for a pollen source or a nectar source. And then we went through a process of interviewing our APRs to identify, to collate the species that they're using on a regular basis. So in pulling all of that information together, then we have a comprehensive list of the forage species that are being used by our APR industry. Now that comes with its own set of problems. And one of the major problems is what we call different forage species. Now this becomes really important when we start to link different types of data across the CRC, whether it's, so when we start to try to link the chemistry data to the species that it's coming from, we need to make sure that we're linking apples with apples, if you will. So we went through an exhaustive process of first identifying what the forage species are that the APRs are using, but also making sure we have their names right. And a lot of times people use common names to talk about and discuss different flora. And on your screen, you're seeing just three examples of the Coast Beard, Heath, Red Gum, and Salmon Gum are three common names that when we started digging a bit deeper, we found that, well, really when people use these terms, these common names, they could be talking about anywhere between three, four, five different species. So we had to start to pick that apart. The other thing that happens over an extended period of time is species names change. Species are broken into subspecies or are broken into two or three or four species. And so these names change. And again, so unless we're keeping track of that and on top of it, we could be comparing apples and oranges. But, and we wanted to try to avoid that. Now, I'll give you an example. Just recently, one of our CRC researchers is working on the chemistry side of things had a sample that the APR is called Black Butt. And I picked up on this email thread and responded looking through our species database and said, hey, Kate, your APRs could actually be talking about one of six different types of species. Now that's really important when it comes to picking apart the chemistry of specific flora. I'll give you another example of changes in names. And this is an example of Wandoo. And Wandoo is one of sort of our classic forage sources for the APRs. And in 1904, Wandoo, paper bark Wandoo, using the common name was first given its Latin name. By 1934, it was identified, well, we're actually probably talking about two different species. And by 1991, Wandoo had been split into six, well, five species, and then by 2019, there was a six species identified. So this is where keeping on top of these changes is really important. And I'm gonna come back to this in just a minute because this is really important and has some significance in being able to understand and track these changes. So what we wanted to do was make sure that we had a database that allowed us to link common names to their species and to their geography. And so we have spent an exhaustive process pulling together all the species that are being used within Australia, really, making sure that we have linked the common names to their species names and making sure that that taxa is up to date using national species databases of flora identification. Then we've actually collected some additional information that we house in our database around sort of honey quality and nectar and pollen quality. But also we've got a good indication of where these species are occurring as well. And so again, that's really important coming back to that notion of traceability is being able to link common names as people are talking about them as samples come into the system, making sure that we know what species that honey is actually coming from and then also having an indication of where that honey is coming from as well. And as Liz alluded to previously, we link that back to the biogeographical zones. So we've taken this a little bit farther and using some of the data that's out there, including the Atlas of Living Australia, which is a species identification database at the national level as well as other data sources that allow us to identify where species are located. We've started to update some of our understanding of the species distribution of some of our more sought after flora for the apirists. And then we've taken those as I identified just a moment ago, we've taken each of those species, that the species range and mapped those back to the interim biogeographical regions for Australia. Now, coming back to that email that I showed you in identifying to Kate that, oh, your blackbutt sample could actually be one of these six species. Well, by understanding where one of these six species are identified by understanding where or the interim, the Iber regions as we call them, by understanding what Iber regions, these different potential species are linked with. If Kate then tells me that this sample was taken from a certain location, then I can automatically go to our database and say, well, it's probably not these species and narrow it down to one or two, as opposed to the six it could possibly be based on the common name. The other thing that allows us to sort of narrow down what species we're talking about is phenology and particularly the flowering stage of phenology. Now, this is an example of some of the state, really the state of the art in phenology mapping. And when I talk about phenology mapping, I'm talking about being able to map across the years, the different stages of a plant. What we're most interested in really is that sort of budding and that flowering stage. And this is some work that uses some out of the United States that's associated with the National Phenological Network which has access to millions of samples of flora and has access to pictures of those samples. And so what they've done in North America is developed some machine learning algorithms that will look at each of these pictures of a sample and identify what the phenological phase was. And this data is available. They've got a nice web-based application and you can go and explore this and look at and map when the different species in the database are flowering or identify when they're flowering. And that's all done through machine learning technology. Now, we don't have access to, unfortunately to pictures of all of our species. So what that means is that we've actually got to go sit in herbarium and pull samples out of the shelves and score them. And so we've started a process of doing that. So we, again, going back to that database that we've developed, we know the flora that the apirists are accessing. We've got a good indication of the range and now we can go and start to identify, we'll win and make some inferences around when these species are flowering. And so again, we're going back to the herbarium pulling records and we started scoring our herbarium records. And you can see here in the slide that for the marteses, species that we're looking at, we're talking about around 10,000 records, which it's a painstaking process, but it's the best we've got at the moment. And what that then allows us to do is to much like was done with the, with the National Phenological Network in North America, we're then able to replicate that process and identify when flowering may occur. Now, bringing that back to this notion of back to Wando, so we identified that there's six, potentially seven species of Wando, Wando being the common name around the state and they all have different ranges, species distributions. They also have different phenologies as well. So by understanding the phenology, and what I mean by that is they also have different flowering time. So by being able to map those flowering times to the species, to the region, when we have a question around traceability, we've got more information to identify where the sample has come from. Now, finally, moving towards this notion of, well, okay, giving us another tool in our toolbox, if you will, for aiding and understanding the traceability, if we don't know, if we've got an indication of, well, when the flowering time may be and where the location is, is that the sample has come from, we can actually go back you through historic, remotely sensed imagery and identify if flowering was actually occurring in that location at that time the sample was taken. So it gives us another tool to identify if a sample is actually coming from the location that an apiarist is saying it's coming from. And so here's just an example of giving you sort of a bird's eye view of what was satellite or what the airplane or drone may be seeing these days. And this is an area of Mary and from 2018, and you can see that we've got quite a bit of flowering going on in the tree canopy, but around the same date in 2019, a year later, we didn't have, we had limited to no flowering occurring. So the satellites give us an imagery that's available, archival imagery, give us another tool to go back and trace that honey back to a specific location, identify, well, was there actually flowering going on in that location at that time? This technology also allows us to predict flowering as I alluded to at the beginning of my talk, and our apiarists are traveling great distances across the state, and to save time and money, if we can predict when an event is going to occur, a flowering event is going to occur, we can save them really a lot of time and effort in getting their bees on a nectar source. And so some of the work that's going on here, and this is another PhD student, Dan Dixon, who's involved in the CRC, is looking at how we go about predicting flowering events using satellite imagery, and he's been using a combination of drone-based imagery and tying that to satellite imagery, which gives us a broader picture of the state now. In terms of the geography of Australia, Western Australia encompasses a third of the nation, and so really, you can't cover a third of the nation with a drone, so we've got to be able to relate what's happening in a small area to data sets that allow us to see a bigger picture, a broader picture across the state or across the nation. And so some of the work that he's doing is looking at identifying how much of a pixel, and when I say a pixel, for those of you that are not remote sensors, if you've taken a picture with your mobile phone and you zoom in and your picture gets pixelated, you see the little squares, same's going on with a satellite image or an image taken from a drone or from an airplane. But the satellite image and is going to be what we would say is a coarser image, so that pixel covers a larger area of the surface of the earth. And so the image that you see on your screen, those white squares are giving us an indication of say a satellite image in relation to some imagery taken from a drone. So we can use that drone-based imagery to identify how much of a satellite pixel is flowering. And so we can quantify that as the percentage of this satellite-based pixel that is Mary and how much of that is flowering. And that allows us to start to predict and make inferences as to where flowering events are occurring and then we can inform apirists and they can start to think about migrating their hives. And so where this is heading is some sort of predictive system that would provide an output that maybe would look like this where you would know where your apiary site was and you could say log on and see that we've got a flowering event starting to occur and we're seeing percent flowering in the canopy at 10, 20, 30%. And this is really looking at some of the more specifics of how that's done and it's really a relationship between how we metrics that we were derived from the imagery and what's actually happening on the ground. But again, what I'm getting at is that again, this provides us another tool within our tool set to really make sure and authenticate the location and the flora that our honey is coming from. So just to wrap up kind of what I've been talking about is really, and again, I'm biased as a geographer, but we have a suite and we've been developing a suite of geographic tools that allow us to help in the traceability process. And that's around the time and the date that a sample was taken. What the common name of that sample is and linking that to the scientific name, the species name, understanding where the sample was taken from and being able to tie that to a species range or to a biogeographical zone, understanding when and then coming back to that notion of time and date and the phenology of the species, was it flowering? Is this the species known to flower at that time? And then being able to come back using some of those predictive tools, but really in a hind casting perspective to be able to go back and look at some of the archival imagery and say, yes, we know that this sample was taken from this location and it was flowering at this time. So maybe I'll stop there and maybe we'll move towards. Actually, I'll hand back to Kirstie as moderator of this session to take us forward. Awesome, thanks, Brian. That was so informative guys. Thank you both so much. As someone who knows very little about the Honey Bee world, as much as I've had those conversations with both yourself and Liz, it's really great to actually get that inside and all you should sit down and have a bit more of an intensive session about it all. Everybody's asking some great questions. I am aware of the time, so we're probably not going to get through all of them. I'll just pick out a couple that I think are more applicable because I'm just coming back to that international audience that we do have here. One thing that caught my eye when we are talking about tracing the honey, is there a way to look at the origin of the plant in the honey through something like PCR or doing some kind of analysis like that on the honey? You're on mute, Liz. Yes, we've been here. There's a lot of investigation into this aspect. It's not as simple as it seems because you've actually got to get a signature for every bit of flora. So there is a lot of research actually going into that area. It's sort of first started off by looking at the pollen and then we've actually been doing different techniques to try and speed that up, but then it's also gone into a few other technologies. But there's certainly lots happening in that area. Amazing. And just to confirm, when we're looking at the adulterants in those samples, was that done by thin... Yep, so it's done by... Yeah, high performance than layer chromatography. So that paper that I actually put at the bottom of that slide has just got accepted and gone in there. So there's two papers in that area and actually there's another one that actually came from Europe as well. So you'd be amazed how suddenly the HPTLC work is absolutely boomed. And I think the thing that's actually attracted us to it is that it's one machine and you can do both the sugars portion and the non-sugar portion. And then you can do the correlation between the two because most of these new analytical techniques are trying to use both the sugar information and the non-sugar information to look at the proportions between the two. And so that's actually what makes that so exciting. Great. There is another question here about the databases that we're using for the herbarium species and satellite imagery. I guess this is also leading to a bigger question around year old climate change potentially but are we seeing changes in flowering patterns over years? Is there any work in that space being done as well that complements what you guys are looking at or what's happening? Yeah, look, it's a good question and it's one that we've thought about. What we can do with the database based on the samples that we have is we can identify variability by latitude and which is quite obvious and it appears within the record as well that species further north with the same species in its northern extent will start flowering before the same species in its southern extent and that's quite obvious and that's how things happen. But in terms of being able to identify changes across years and associate those as a causal relationship to climate change, we just don't have the number of samples to do that. I really wish we did but I would be very cautious in pointing to specific changes based on the data that we have. I would love to be able to do that but yeah, I think we just don't have the data record to do it. I mean, anecdotally, it's out there but yeah, being able to provide causal inference. Yeah, as scientists, we need the data to back up what we wanna say. Yeah, and I guess are you referring to the, from my own work, satellite imagery as well and comes back to that pixel size being able to narrow down to that size from past data sets, from prior to the 80s, prior to the 60s, then near impossible for WA or Australia in general because we weren't generally a focus around that time in this part of the world. I imagine that that's also a limiting factor to be able to extend back that far across that kind of decade or period. Yeah, look, I think the satellite, using satellite imagery is probably, there's a lot of possibilities there, particularly with Landsat going back to the 80s but the work that I presented to you has focused on one species and is still in its infancy. So being able to sort of hind cast flowering episodes across a broader range of flora. We're just, we're not there yet. But probably, I mean, those are two viable data. So if we had the herbarium records to do it and we could link that with the satellite imagery, then we could probably start to unpick that a little bit more. But it's a big area of research moving forward, I think. Future projects on the wish list. That's right. Everybody's interested in doing a PhD. Let us know. All right, great. Let's finish up with a couple of questions specific to beekeeping, I guess at that more local scale. Does beekeeping require specific temperature ranges? And is there a way to maybe attract more people into the world of beekeeping? So it does require a specific temperature range. And I guess it's to do with the species of the bees. You go more north, you go into the Asian bee, which is actually quite different. So bee species change. So here we've only got the apis malifera. And we're very concerned about the Asian bee actually arriving here because then it'll bring, it's a carrier of four grower. So there's certain things. So our bees are more comfortable down in the southern parts of Australia, and mainly because of the humidity, I'd say more than anything. As you get greater humidity, we seem to get more diseases. So that's why we get the hive beetles more on the humid areas. And so there's different things that actually affect. It's not necessarily, it's also about the flora as well, so it's also got to do with that. And is there a way, are we in a need to attract more people into the, I guess this is a double-edged sword because we have such an international audience. I can't speak for other countries, but in Australia, I know that we have, obviously people are always wanting to get involved with things like that. Is there any kind of a scheme happening in Australia around that? No, so we've, I was actually gonna hear, since 2008 here in Western Australia, we've had a 600% increase in beekeepers. We honestly, beekeeping is very popular. Our biggest challenge we have here now is moving hobby beekeepers into more commercial beekeeping. We used to have quite an old, well relatively old, and beekeeping, or beekeepers instead of beekeepers, but they must say the average age is really coming down of late. We've had huge interest in beekeeping here, and lots of new ideas coming in. It's really invigorating to see. I think every state has just got this massive interest. It seems to be when you look at the, the sort of the bee management, you know beekeeping managed hires, there's a, it seems to be a huge boom in the southern hemisphere. So the most managed hires are actually in India, and then second China. And so here is certainly in the sort of our sort of region, we've just had an absolute boom of beekeeping going on. I know it's a lot more challenging in the north, northern hemisphere. That's great. All right, I'm gonna finish up with a couple more questions before we let all of our beautiful guests go. Are we after any kind of donations of pollen, honey, or plants? And also we mainly covered the biological aspect here. What works being done in the economic realm in your research centre? Oh yes, there is. So Ben White is actually leading, well there's two, Ben White's doing it within the CRC, and there's another economist outside the CRC who was actually, we work with a lot as John Karazinski. So Ben White in the CRC is actually looking at the value of honey and the value of apricides, and just really trying to help give evaluation to the industry. At the present time, we have very little voice, and so we're actually trying to gain a voice in terms of finding out where we actually sit in terms of valuation. John Karazinski actually worked a lot on the pollination side, and he actually worked out that the pollination services that honey bees provide to Australia is worth 14.2 billion. So everyone keeps saying, oh, you're a small little cottage industry, and I keep saying, no, we're actually a billion dollar industry. It kind of changes perspective. In terms of honey production, it's actually, but it's more difficult to actually get a pinpoint because we have so many hobbyist beekeepers. Of those big numbers that we have, you normally only get about 20% of the beekeeper number actually being commercial beekeepers. So it's very difficult to know how much people are giving to their neighbour and what's happening out there. So we don't really know the true amount of honey being produced in Australia. And are you after any donations, team? Do you need any more information around pollen or plants or anything like that to help with any projects? Oh, absolutely. As much as we can do, we do have a web app that's on the CRC website and it's actually about taking pictures and then it gives us a time and place of where that, we wanted you to take the picture with a bee on it and that information goes back through to Brian and actually helps them. So we have tried to do it through that way. But I must say that, even when I was talking with a land care group yesterday, they're doing some amazing stuff that we just not connected into. So we need to actually link with everybody because the more eyes out there, the more we will actually be able to get trains and understand things. And I guess the other thing that I wanted to say before we go, because I know you're gonna close us, is we actually have got a conference next year. So it's at the end of June and it's called the Australasian Honey Bee Research Conference, the conference 2021 conference. And we're hosting it together with the Bee Industry Council of Western Australia and our beakers also involved, which is the Australian Honey Bee Industry Council of Western Australia, so we're all together. And so what it does is a lovely mix of the research together with the beekeepers. And so we're opening our websites, going to be actually, it's there sitting there, but it's actually gonna be launched next week. So we'll be tweeting and LinkedIn and whatever you want and so I'll get that all out to you. So I know we'll be catering both for online and in person because we honestly don't know where we're gonna sit by this time next year. So we're catering for all of us, wherever you are, however you want to be. So we will. Fantastic. Thank you for attending today and a special thanks to Liz and Brian for taking the time out and giving us all a little bit more insight into what's happening in the Australian world of Honey Bee products. Okay, so stay healthy and we'll see you soon. Bye.