Claire Moore’s dream has a chance of becoming reality.
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Ever since she started keeping bees, about 10 years ago, she’s wanted to begin breeding the animals.
It’s a dream driven by a deep concern about declining bee numbers. To combat the problem Ms Moore hopes to create a resilient, diverse and adaptable strain of bees.
To do it, she’s relying on the community to get on board.
It was her background in finance that inspired Ms Moore’s dream. At the same time as she was watching the global financial market, she was seeing bee numbers decline in the northern hemisphere.
Hive losses of about 10 percent over winter are viewed as sustainable, Ms Moore said.
Some countries have reported losses of 16 to 18 percent.
The decline in bee numbers has the potential to lay waste to a range of food production industries.
Many broad acre crops, almonds, watermelons and cherries all rely on bees to pollinate their plants.
The problem inspired Ms Moore’s dream to breed a strain of adaptable, resilient and genetically diverse bees.
“If there’d been losses like that sustained in an economy, then we would have done something in Australia about it. There would have been a change made in Australia,” Ms Moore said.
“In beekeeping we’ve been watching the decline in the northern hemisphere, but we hadn’t actually been making any changes.”
When she was first inspired to breed bees, Ms Moore was setting up a sustainable backyard in Melbourne’s inner north, and a swarm was a must-have.
Eventually, she moved with her family to Kyneton, to give her enough space to focus more on beekeeping.
Once she’s learnt how to breed the bees Ms Moore hopes to begin exporting within 18 months.
To kick-start her apiary she plans to set up a hive-share. It will allow community members to sponsor a hive, and experience a year as a beekeeper, learning the ropes, and how to extract honey.
The only catch is, Ms Moore doesn’t quite know how go about breeding yet. Selecting for certain traits in bees is a new field. She needs to complete training in NSW to learn to breed the bees.
To find the money for this, she applied for the 2019 AgriFutures Rural Women’s Award.
Ms Moore joked her husband thought she was crazy to enter for the award. Then she beat other entrants to become one of three Victorian finalists.
“It seems far-fetched, and it seems really out there, but in actual fact when you look at it, it does actually make sense,” Ms Moore said.
“It’s a really simple way of trying to solve a global problem.”
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