23 year old bee hunter saving native species, one ‘hotel’ at a time

When Clancy talks about saving native bees, he bursts with energy reminiscent of his conservationist idol Steve Irwin.

“There’s a common misconception that all bees make honey and live in hives,” he says, citing Australia’s 2,000-odd species.

“But the majority of our native bees are actually solitary.”

The 23-year-old ecologist known as “The Bee Man” is on a mission to conserve solitary pollinators by building them structures in which they can take shelter.

These bee “hotels”, which are often made out of bamboo reeds and hardwood, contain multiple “rooms” where females can safely lay their eggs.

“It’s one of the simplest ways of simulating, as best as we can, the natural environment where native bees and other insects will nest in,” Clancy says.

“Then, when it goes into someone’s garden, they might start to see little bits of leaf from a leaf cutter bee or some tree sap from a resin bee, and that gets them to engage and stay connected with native pollinators.”

The University of Melbourne graduate from country Victoria has contributed to the building of over 800 bee “hotels” so far, and he’s looking to expand his outreach across Australia.

Through school workshops and community-based conservation projects, Clancy has been sharing resources and inspiring others to become housekeepers for bees.

Bees caught in the ‘crossfire’

Since European settlement in 1788, Clancy says more than 9,000 insects and other invertebrates have gone extinct in Australia.

“We’ve seen this particularly in the last 30 to 40 years, when insecticides and pesticides have become really efficient at killing pest species.

“Those substances don’t discriminate between which insects they kill or not, so there’s lots of other species getting caught in the crossfire.”

Before: A carpenter bee. . After: A leaf cutter bee. .

Combined with weather changes and habitat loss, the decline in native bees is already being felt by some communities.

For example, in the Northern Territory’s East Arnhem Land, it has disrupted the traditional honey (guku) harvests of the Yolŋu First Nations people in recent years.

As part of his bioscience research, Clancy spent time learning from the Yolŋu about the importance of stingless bees to their dreamings, songlines and traditions.

“For thousands of years and generations, the Yolŋu have celebrated the guku harvest,” Clancy says.

He says this was the moment that “sparked a fire in [his] belly” and motivated him to come up with solutions.

With fewer pollinators, Clancy says the ecosystems that rely on them will be disrupted too.

“The agricultural industry is definitely going to be put under pressure, as well as the average punter’s backyard that’s full of fruits and vegetables yielded from pollinators,” he says.

According to the Department of Agriculture, around 35 per cent of crops in Australia need bee pollinators to grow, such as almonds and apples.

Repurposing nature strips

Besides building shelters for solitary bees, Clancy suggests taking advantage of the grassy nature strips around cities to boost insect biodiversity.

“Seeing how much of these areas we have everywhere, we could transform them into pollinated gardens and create habitats linking different parks and reserves,” he says.

In Melbourne, for example, a peer-reviewed study found nearly 37 per cent of public green spaces consisted of these roadside strips of lawn.

Urban ecologist Philippa Bell from the University of Melbourne has been researching how effective it would be to transform these spaces into native gardens.

She says her preliminary results have shown a four-fold increase in the total number of insects and a doubling in the number of different species.

“Native bees showed the greatest affinity for these gardens.

“They were installed within council guidelines, which are designed to ensure the gardens remain safe and accessible for cars, pedestrians and other users.”

While traditional lawns are exotic grasses that are hard to remove, Ms Bell says there’s a lot of interest from city councils in using road verges to grow meadows.

“The overall rhetoric is … we don’t do anything with [road verges] and they can be costly to maintain when council has to send somebody out mowing every couple of weeks,” she says.

For Clancy, it’s an exciting prospect, and it’s just one of the ways in which he hopes to get communities involved in native bee conservation.

“I would go anywhere in Australia,” he says.

“I want to go to rural and regional schools to give them the opportunity to listen to someone who’s also from a small town and has gone off to do cool stuff in science.”