One of the country's largest honey producers has warned there could be an explosion in cane toad numbers in the NSW Northern Rivers following recent record floods.
Cane toads are invading hives on damaged sites across the region in search of the destructive small hive beetle, which poses a massive threat to bee colonies.
NSW Apiarist Association president Steve Fuller said the beetles were an opportunistic pest and had been targeting hives in poor condition.
"If a hive stresses or anything like that, they take it over," he said.
"It's what we call slime out — it's a mess, it's really ugly to deal with, it smells, the honey is not usable, usually you lose the hive.
"They reproduce in such large numbers and about every 48 hours they hatch again, then they keep on attacking the next weak hive, then the next weak hive until they take over the whole apiary.
"They like the bee hives because they're after the pollen and the larvae; they're after the protein."
The honey industry is facing a major biosecurity threat with hundreds of hives yet to be recovered due to access issues in flood-affected areas being too boggy or roads and bridges washed out.
"If we leave them in the bush, they become just havens or breeding areas for small hive beetle," Mr Fuller said.
"With the ground being so wet, small hive beetle is staying in the box and now cane toads are moving in the box to eat the small hive beetle.
Mr Fuller said he'd heard of an instance in which 11 cane toads were found in one box.
"What happened is a lot of the hives when they were washed away in the floods, they split open and then the cane toads, when they're little, they can crawl in between the frames.
"But as they stay in there and feed, they get larger and larger and then they can't get out."
Knock, knock who's there?
The ugly amphibians' appetite for bees started becoming a problem when the fires, and now floods, killed their usual prey.
"They can eat up to 2,000 bees a night ... when you've got seven or eight cane toads sitting in front of a hive, that's a heck of a lot of bees."
Beekeepers either raise their hives or move them out of well-known cane toad areas.
"There's not much else you can do, because a lot of these [in forests], we can't put poisons down in case people come through with animals," Mr Fuller said.
In addition to the biosecurity issues, he said beekeepers could be forced to supplementarily feed with sugar syrup and pollen during the winter, after the floods washed a lot of nectar and pollen out of trees.
Delay to disaster help
Mr Fuller said he was concerned the state government had been slow to deliver disaster assistance to beekeepers left devastated by the floods.
"We've been lodged since the second or third week; I only know of two beekeepers who have been helped.
"These guys have got families, they've got overheads to commit to, and with no money coming in, they've got to be getting short."
The NSW Minister for Agriculture, Dugald Saunders, confirmed that only two beekeepers so far had been approved for the $75,000 disaster grant.
"There's 42 applications that have come in and that's over the past few weeks, so it hasn't all happened seven weeks ago, it's happened over a period of time," he said.
But Mr Saunders acknowledged the industry had suffered significant damages.
"I'm in regular contact with the RAA to make sure we're absolutely doing what we can to get money out the door."
He said he expected that all, if not most, would be processed by next week.
