http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/honey-bee-breeders-stung-by-secret-ban/story-e6frg6n6-1225885881016

HONEY-BEE breeders are outraged government officials banned bee importing and shut down the national honey-bee quarantine facility.

They say this was done without consulting them or scientific experts.

Industry players found out only by chance and have been struggling to find out why the facility shut its doors about 18 months ago.

"It's been impossible to get information out of the Department (of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry)," said Stephen Ware, executive director of the Australian Honeybee Industry Council, which represents the industry.

The concern is twofold: frustrated breeders might smuggle in bees carrying pests and diseases, and efforts to improve the genetic resistance of Australian bees to parasites such as the Varroa destructor mite would stall.

Bee imports from the US were banned in 2005 after the arrival there of aggressive Africanised "killer bees" but the 2008 ban on all bees was unknown in the industry until NSW breeder Terry Brown applied to import bees from Italy.

"I was eventually told they were reviewing all countries where bees were coming from," he said.

Bruce White is also a breeder, as well as a member of the government-appointed honey-bee R&D committee and a former manager of the quarantine facility at Eastern Creek in NSW. "It was news to me," he said of the closure. "The minister asked nobody in the field".

A spokesman for Agriculture Minister Tony Burke said the quarantine facility was not closed but merely out of use until Biosecurity Australia completed its scientific review.

But a leading bee pathologist, the CSIRO's Denis Anderson, said he had only just been contacted about the review.

"That's peculiar because I found out in round-about ways (the review) was about colony collapse disorder," said Dr Anderson, an expert on the phenomenon of bee die-offs, now linked to poor management.

"It would be a couple of weeks' work," he said of the review.

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