 Nihinu i kita whānau, kipapatū anuku, ranginu i tēnārā. It's awful when they make you cry before you get up. It's a real privilege for me to be here and again thank you for your pūhiri this morning. I'm of this land and I think that's one of the things that distinguishes those of us who are pākehā here is that I'm really aware that I am of this land. I was born here, I travel a lot and I'm always called home and the home that calls me is the sea and the sky and the land here and you cannot take that out of us. So I'm also really aware that even the Māori story is the story of immigration and that I am very privileged to be able to be an immigrant in this land and so I just really acknowledge all of you for welcoming us specifically to this land but also for the people of this land who allowed my ancestors to be refugees here and I'm really aware of that. I had dinner very recently and was sitting next to the minister who gets to decide how many refugees we take and he told me that he was really willing to take refugees as long as they were Christian and I said to him, you do understand that, can you imagine what it was like for Jews to come to New Zealand in the 1940s where their windows were broken and where they were not welcome and he kind of had that whole but they were simulated and I just really, really for the New Zealanders in the room especially, we have to open our hearts. All of us are here at the privilege of the Tangata Whenua and we're here because our ancestors were looking for somewhere better and so I just open with that because I'm really aware that I'm going to talk about something today that we have great affection for but is an immigrant and one of the sort of soul-searching things I've had to do as a beekeeper is to really think about the balance between my little immigrant bees and the native bees and so I'm a geek by nature but I keep bees the rest of the time and so I wanted to call today's bees the new chickens and the reason I say that is I live in an urban area I keep bees in the city and I also have five chickens and a little permaculture food forest on about 300 square metres or something so I just want to talk about kombucha drinking hipsters because you know I know so we're all in love with the bees right and I make kombucha and I have a bearded son who could look like any of these lot and you know and we all want to save the planet and so I do just kind of want to invite the kombucha drinking hipsters who keep chickens to think about keeping bees so you know bees are an interesting lot like us they basically need two kinds of food sources right so we need basically we need protein and carbohydrate yeah and bees are exactly the same so if you think about bees bees need pollen which is their protein and nectar which is their carbohydrate and they don't always need it all at the same time so you think if you're raising a lot of babies those babies need lots of carbon lots of protein so in the spring my hives are quite small they've wintered over they've snuggled down into a little tiny nest and in the spring they need as much pollen as possible and this is a picture of a native bee and many of them many of you won't have seen native bees or if you have you may not know what they are and there's quite a lot of species of them but they're little tiny black bees and they're solitary so when we think about the bees that we know from Europe or North America those are the bees that live in hives they're mass colonies but the native bee is not and when you think about coming from this windy place that Lou's just talked about a large number of the plants in New Zealand are wind pollinated which makes a lot of sense right and as well as them being wind pollinated they can be bird pollinated or bat pollinated as well as insect pollinated but the European plants are largely insect pollinated and that makes a big difference to some of this thinking that we need to do about what we plant and how so I never knew I would get so deeply excited about the shape of a honey bee's tongue okay I was going to do you a whole presentation on the difference between a bumble bee tongue and a honey bee tongue but then I thought you know it's a little arcane got to find the right audience for that but when you think about the I don't know actually I had a pile of bees die the other day and they all died with their tongues out which I think is really interesting so that is how they die so yeah almost you know when we used to play cops and robbers or whatever as kids and you die that's exactly what they do so for the next slide please they are perfectly co-evolved for this little flower here and they're perfectly co-evolved for a bunch of flowers that have very short access down a little throat to wherever that pollen or that nectar is the nectar in particular it's important for us to think about that because when you start to read the kind of save the bee stuff often they forget about whether that's the difference between a bumble bee who has a much much longer tongue and a honey bee Yosef actually asked me to come and speak today about integrated agriculture and I want you to think about the bees as this metaphor for integrated agriculture so when we think about the UK what's interesting is that a number of the bees we have in New Zealand have become extinct in the UK and largely they co-evolve with clover and clover is not so prominent anymore in farms as it used to be and so the bees don't have the same forage as they used to and I think we'll find the same in New Zealand as there is in the UK which is that there is more biodiversity in our cities now than there is in our rural areas just kind of weird isn't it but that is how it is for the UK and I suspect it's the same here too I want you to think about you know I farm flowers I don't... I keep bees at the pleasure of the bees but basically the way that I get bees to want to hang around my house is I farm flowers and if we think about agriculture we think about long-term for dairy what we really need to be thinking about is farming the soil farming the water you know farming the plants that feed those animals not just thinking gosh how many animals can I get per hectare it's exactly the same for me as a beekeeper the more I can plant the food for the bees the more the bees will hang around where I am so I farm flowers I have a very bolted veggie patch so my mother eventually came round to the way that I garden and in fact when she died she had this incredible permaculture orchard but you know for me I recently so this is this year's honey this is like two weeks out of the hive I gave some to the Wellington City Council arborist and she's like can you tell me what's in here and so this this honey which hopefully some of you'll get to taste over the next sort of day or so is a mixture of pahurakawa thank you Wellington City Council the cabbage trees which my neighbours planted mint from my garden which is interesting so we took this out to G&S and threw it under an electron microscope it was pretty exciting and then what we're going to call urban weed okay so passionflower which we don't really want growing in our gullies in Wellington wattles so Australian weeds that are self-sewing themselves all over the town belt in Wellington that little yellow-flowered wild turnip my guys are doing their best to spread that and you can see where I start to have some dilemmas so there is a mixture in here of native plants and a lot of weeds that are also co-evolved with my bees and you've got a bit of spinach in there I've made my place so attractive that I now have regular swarms of other people's hives turn up in my vegetable patch okay and so what's really interesting to me is that I'd never seen a swarm until I became a beekeeper and they don't just turn up anywhere in Wellington they turn up in my garden and they turn up in my garden because it's clearly an attractive place for bees to live and so I did have a video but I gave up on it but you might be able to see there I've got a little box and I literally cut a branch and foolishly shook it on my head and 20,000 bees fell into the box via my head and moved into that little blue box that's there this is there honey it's now five boxes high and we just took off 25 litres of honey from those guys and they only turned up literally in my garden in late November so one of the things I would think about when we think about agriculture and we think about these are a free range animal here they stay because they want to stay they'll go when they want to go and we can think about ways to make it more attractive for them to stay including the way that I bee keep but in the end I'm not going to keep them if this isn't an attractive place for them to be so the New Zealand markets for honey are going through the roof at the moment this is New Zealand honey exports we are one of the biggest exporters of honey in the world and interestingly we've just gone up another 40% year on year last year so this is a major crop now one of the things that's really important with that is you probably all heard that the bees are dying and there was a really interesting article in the Washington Post this week saying that bee numbers are up in the US now bee numbers are up globally that going up in New Zealand they're going up in the US but it's because of the work of people who are planting for them and who are doing it and you know when I think about sometimes it's really easy to be cynical and one of the reasons I came in a way was we were at a seminar in Christchurch a few months ago and I realised how tired you get you need a 20 years on climate change or something and you just get tired every now and then we need some good news and bees actually are a good news story now not a good news story in terms of how much pesticide is still going out there and the diseases that they're under attack from but good news in the sense that individuals are thinking about them and starting to look after them in much better ways than we were before and you know we have a long way to go on this you know we have a long way to go to really start to think about integrated health so my neighbours, thanks to a bit of a bribe in the odd tour of my beehives we don't have any neighbours who spray Wellington City Council's made me a tree guardian so they don't spray my street and slowly my neighbours and I are getting together to plant manuka and to plant things that will keep bees in our area and of course I continue to bribe them with little jars of honey so what you'll also see there is that New Zealand gets the one of the highest prices in the world for our honey so as well as being a major exporter we get real value-add honey so clover honey is the cheapest honey you can get and so somewhere between $14 and $45 a kilo is basically the range for honey so manuka is one that obviously gets a really high range but also if we start to think about value-add as well so adding honey into pharmaceuticals and to nutraceuticals and to cosmetics we can end up with almost $1,000 a tonne which is a very different kind of proposition if you come back to thinking about I farm flowers then thinking about you know what are we getting for some of our other agricultural crops now I'm not saying we should all pile into honey but I want us to think very carefully about you know what are the longer processes what is it that we are growing and harvesting and able to sell as New Zealanders in the world market and one of the big issues that we have at the moment in the beekeeping community is less and less beekeepers want to do what's called pollination work if I have to send my darlings into an orchard and they're going to spray my bees I really don't want to do that right I really really don't want to risk I mean they're my family in that sense and so what's happening is that more and more of beekeepers in New Zealand are seeing the price of honey and saying well I'm not going to put my hives into your avocado orchard I'm not going to put my hives into your kiwi fruit orchard and so there are two kinds of pushes and pulls for the pesticide work we have to have pull-through demand from the consumer like you saying I want real food and I don't want pesticide in that food but then also long-term we'll find that we don't want to be part of that whole industrial cycle either so I'm a geek so I like to use tools and some of you may have been at Naturehack and I inspired a team at Naturehack to start mapping bee habitat because one of the things I'm an open data fan and I've been working big data for 20 odd years and I work a bit with the Ministry for Primary Industries and I also chair the Land Information Service so I was pulling some material from dock together with material from regional councils together with information that I could get from the Ministry for Primary Industries and what I found is some of this balance between what we're doing with natives and what we do with exotics really important so there's a New Zealand native called Tutu which is a fantastic nitrogen fixer really great for putting into incipient gullies really good for erosion control however as a beekeeper if that basically there's an insect that grows on it, sucks the sap out makes honeydew from the sap, bees come along collect the honeydew, turn it into honey neurotoxin for humans so kind of a slight one of those disconnects again right so what we've got is that I managed to put together some maps that showed where regional councils are encouraging people to plant Tutu and at the same time we've got Ministry for Primary Industries funding people to plant manuka so that we can have more bees and we've got this kind of sometimes little look at joined up thinking and how we do that so one of the things I'd invite you to think about today is how we can as technologists as many of you will be how we can use our technology skills to help some of these ancient arts not to kind of make them more geeky but to really use things like GIS tools to help us to plan where we can put bees and how we can encourage people to plant the right forage so that was my house which apparently is a number three perfect place to put hives I don't know if you've seen this, these are fit bits for cows so I'm pretty excited about precision agriculture and I'm also quite active in the internet of things kind of quantified self-movement and I think it's really interesting that we can do a whole lot of work now around fit bits for cows and what I'm looking for is the sort of hive data that I want would be great around like what's the weight of my hive so I can tell then if honey is coming in what's the humidity of the hive so I can tell if they're drying honey off what are the flight rates what are the temperature and basically they keep the hive at a constant temperature all year and then last thing is the kind of drone to worker ratio to kind of how the whole sentiment of the hive is and what they're up to these are things that would be very, very simple for us to do with technology and so I'm quite excited about how we can use technology that is not chemical technology in order to improve both beekeeping and bee health so I wanted to just quickly talk about sustainable harvesting but before I do that I was going to bring a frame out here and there's nothing like working with bees to get humbled so I was going to bring a frame of honey to show you so I opened up the hive yesterday it's really, really windy and the bees hate wind I can barely move this arm I think I've got about 20 stings in this arm and I've got really good at knowing when I piss them off, I clearly piss them off and so I retreated and thought well I'll wait till this morning and of course this morning it's bucketing down but this is basically how I have this honey with a knife in a kitchen with a colander and then I take it round to my neighbours or they come over and help me press it through and so I just wanted to mention the flow hive really quickly because I know a lot of people are excited and because I'm into technology people constantly see me the flow hive what I would say about the flow hive for me is I'm really interested to see how it goes however the problem it solves to me is two things one is kind of kombucha drinking hipsters wanting to figure out how to save the bees we should do that we should absolutely do that number two the thing I'd say that it solves is it makes honey extraction look really easy like you just turn a tap and there's the honey and if this hive had bees in it you'd have 40,000 bees on their heads at this very moment so this is clearly a hive that they've taken away from any bees to an area where there are no bees and you can see in the privacy of my own kitchen with a hot knife it's really not that difficult okay and bees make their home you cannot like even I don't even know if you could use the word bee in a singularity a bee is a social being they make their own wax they live in the wax it is their home they don't need us to build plastic homes for them alright last slide thank you so a few principles the bees know better than me so they know how to make their homes they know how to make their hives they don't really need me to mess around with them that doesn't mean I can't use technology to help that but it's real simple technology the Internet of Things technology plant strategically go wild let your your spinach and your mint go to seed they really love that get a no spray neighbourhood be a really good neighbour give them honey like be a good neighbour to people register your hive with MPI it really worries me that with so much disease around we need to manage that we need to know where they are a box for the bees is do not be greedy so we leave a box on for the bees our bees don't need to be fed sugar so if you think about colony collapse most commercial beekeepers feed their bees sugar in the winter and it's only because they've stolen all of their food source and then they give them shitty carbohydrate and they wonder why they die and then the data helps and one very very last slide plant flowers farm the soil and feed for our stock raise food and the side effects are that you get beauty and tomatoes even though they're from the bumble bees because they come and steal the pollen and the very last one is just don't forget just like the bees we live in a community and that community needs to be nurtured and looked after and food is one of the best ways we will nurture our local communities not just you know a global one thank you