Beekeeping groups in Victoria's Macedon Ranges are investigating feral bee swarms in an effort to stop them displacing native birds and animals.
Tree hollows are hot property in the bush, with native Australian wildlife already competing for homes due to climate change and habitat loss from forestry and urbanisation.
European honey bee swarms add to that competition.
As part of their natural reproduction process, beehives will divide in spring and a swarm will leave, clustering nearby for a few days as scout bees head out in search of a new home.
"They'll be looking for things like tree hollows, gaps in chimneys or wall spaces, or I've even collected them from compost bins," Woodend Bee-Friendly Society member Jim Sansom said.
The veteran beekeeper said swarming bees could be "fairly aggressive," but the extent to which the natural environment had been altered by the presence of the European honey bee was unknown.
Seeking feral bee swarms
Volunteers will place up to 150 bee bait boxes in the forest and monitor them between September and December to get a better picture of feral bee swarms in the Macedon Ranges.
"The bees are a little bit particular about the volume of the space they occupy, and it has to be weatherproof," Mr Sansom said.
Woodend Men's Shed members had already been building wildlife nest boxes to help with the decline in tree hollows.
Building the bait boxes has been a welcome new project tackling the same issue.
Men's Shed nesting box coordinator Paul Muller said the project had been a bit challenging.
"It took us a couple of weeks to come up with a design that we thought would work, because they want a flat pack," he said.
"We wanted to try and keep it simple for them to be able to handle, and to not lose all the parts and screws.
"I think there's about 2,000 wooden pieces going into this project, and we're using reclaimed wood for the frames."
Woodend Bee-Friendly Society action group leader Sam Rixon said using bait boxes to catch feral swarms was a first in Australia.
"It's quite ground breaking — a great opportunity to get some data to really assess the impact of the introduced honey bee on our native animals," Mr Rixon said.
Mr Rixon said each volunteer would be responsible for two bee bait boxes in their area of observation, which they would check twice a week for bee activity.
"We're going to be able to record the extent of the bee swarm problem, and we'll also be able to determine the effectiveness of these bait boxes in catching swarms, because it's a lot more convenient for us to rehome the bees if they're tucked up in a nice bait box rather than tree hollows," he said.
Extent of the problem
Mr Sansom said feral bee swarms tended to come from amateur beekeepers' hives, not commercial apiarists.
"[European honey bees] are a form of livestock that we need for pollination, and there are legal parameters surrounding the ownership and operating of bees," he said.
He said commercial apiarists wanted to prevent swarming as they didn't want to lose their workforce.
He said they had well-developed strategies for controlling bee swarms.
"One of our main objectives is to encourage new beekeepers to understand as much as possible about their responsibilities as beekeepers, and how to manage their hives better so they don't swarm," Mr Sansom said.
"But the other side of it is disease control, with incoming bee diseases and parasites like the varroa mite … feral hives in the bush can be places to hide and keep these diseases going, so what we discover with this project could be of some value to the authorities."
Ms Rixon said it was important to remember honey bees were an introduced species and needed to be managed.
"If we have feral colonies all over the place that are not managed properly, it poses a huge risk to primary industry and the environment — at our club we say that swarms are the beekeepers' pollution."
