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The tragic death of Mike Hall, hit by a car in an Australian road race, left a hole in the world of endurance cycling. Craig Cunningham is one of many he inspired to ride an audax and experience the thrill of these most extreme rides

On 31 March I remember waking and looking at my phone to find an abundance of posts commemorating the life of cyclist Mike Hall. Hall was hit by a motorist in Australia and killed, just hours from completing the Indian Pacific Wheel Race which saw contestants ride across Australia unsupported, with the hardest riders pushing themselves for as much as 20 hours a day.

These incredible achievements aren’t done for giant cheques or coloured jerseys – the tangible rewards are just byproducts of a more personal journey. Such motives didn’t become clear to me until I took the plunge. I only realised the true extent on completing the London Wales London (LWL) audax – a 400km ride with a 27-hour time limit, vicious climbs including Yat Rock. The name alone held gravitas, bringing to mind professional races such as Liège-Bastogne-Liège and the legendary audax events of Paris-Brest-Paris.

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Email mix-up blamed after historically significant plant samples incinerated by quarantine officials

Australian biosecurity officials have destroyed historically significant plant samples from 19th century France and damaged the reputation of Australian researchers, the head of the peak herbaria body has said.

In two separate incidents, quarantine officials have incinerated specimens sent to Australian research facilities from overseas.

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Transformation of former coal plant to 42MW solar farm in north Queensland set to begin with $60m from CEFC taking it to financial close.

There is now 5.6GW of new wind and solar under construction in Australia, and it may already be having an impact on electricity futures contracts.

Zed Seselja says Turnbull government committed to climate change agreement, but if the US pulls out, it would put a question mark over the deal

A leading government conservative has put a question mark over Australia’s continued participation in the Paris climate agreement in the event Donald Trump decides the United States will pull out.

The assistant minister for social services and multicultural affairs, Zed Seselja, one of the government’s up-and-coming conservative figures, told Sky News on Monday that “as it stands” the Turnbull government was committed to Paris agreement, but if the US quit the pact, that would change the nature of the agreement.

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Clarach, Ceredigion Some like the smell, others endure it. In my case, the scent of Allium ursinum makes me feel hungry

My route through the beech woods was chosen to avoid the worst of the cold northerly wind that was cutting across the valley. Though the majority of leaves were still to open, the trees broke up the breeze and let me slacken the pace I’d needed to keep warm.

The acoustic of this woodland is softened by its deep, moist leaf litter; outside sounds are dramatically attenuated, letting you focus on the spring birdsong and the occasional creak of high branches stirring in the wind.

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New company reveals plans to mass-produce autonomous electric vehicles, and potentially build a battery gigafactory, on Australian soil by 2020.

As negotiators meet in Bonn, the talk is of the US president and his intentions for the Paris accord.

World Bank argues structured migration program would prevent forced migration in future generations

Australia and New Zealand should allow open migration for citizens of Pacific nations threatened by climate change, to boost struggling island economies and prevent a later mass forced migration, a paper from the World Bank argues.

The policy paper, Pacific Possible, suggests, as one climate change adaptation measure, open access migration from Tuvalu and Kiribati – for work and permanent settlement – to Australia and New Zealand.

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With the UK government ending subsidies for onshore wind and the Trump administration pushing for a return to coal, you might think the wind power revolution had run out of puff. Far from it. The cost of energy from offshore wind in Britain has fallen by a third since 2012, and wind accounts for over 40% of new capacity in the US, representing an annual investment of $13bn. Now next-generation wind technologies promise to make wind energy safer and more affordable – if they can make the difficult jump from research prototypes to commercial products

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Redflow says it has resumed deliveries after solving a problem with impurities, and has also secured its large contract – for a Pacific Islands hybrid storage installation.

Herbert Smith Freehills has advised Origin Energy on its agreement to sell the Stockyard Hill wind project in Victoria to Goldwind International.

Farming the Sun's solar power bulk-buy programs are being extended to the Northern Rivers region.

Koutsantonis rejects calls for higher solar feed in tariff, saying the emphasis needs to switch to battery storage and electric vehicles.

Origin to buy output from 530MW Stockyard Hill wind farm at less than $60/MWh in price that will stun Australian industry. Following numerous solar deals, it expects renewables to account for more than 25% of its supply by 2020.

Environmental flows down the Darling Anabranch from Lake Cawndilla have converged with the Murray River downstream of Wentworth creating a fish highway not seen for three years.

Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 11 May 1917

The bees are exceedingly busy amongst the flowers, the stocks and flowering currants perhaps getting most attention in the garden, but the gooseberry bushes and other blossoms on the fruit trees also prove attractive. Enjoying their feast of honey, these insects bustle from flower to flower, poking in their tongues and dusting their hairy heads and bodies with pollen; they comb it off with their legs until their “thighs” are thickly loaded with yellow, brown, or white lumps. The earth bees, many of them ruddy-haired, are the smallest but most numerous; they but lately emerged from pupal sleep, but are now filling their newly-excavated burrows in grass plot, path, or sunny bank with pollen food for their infant grubs which will shortly emerge from the eggs. They have various parasitical enemies, and it is amusing to see them enter the burrow, see that all is well within, back out and back in again, remaining then looking out from their doorway, alert and on guard.

The round-bodied flower bees, many of them with long, hairy legs, are larger; they too, inhabit burrows which they excavate themselves. The biggest of all are the bumble-bees, some banded with brown and black, some with white, some with reddish tails, others warm brown all over, and the biggest and handsomest of all black, with big red tips to their ample abdomens. Often after a feast these bumble-bees are so lethargic that they halt to snooze on the flower heads, the stones, or, at the peril of their lives, on the public paths. If we touch them gently they raise an expostulating leg, one of the second pair, waving away the approaching finger. They do not sting readily; they are far too busy when really awake and too sleepy at other times to be troublesome, but it is well not to handle them roughly.

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So critical has the situation become that the Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was forced to shirtfront the major gas exporters last month.

Clean air and low emission zones, one proposal in the government’s new air pollution plan, are already in place across Europe. Do they work?

Following a high court order the government have launched their new clean air plan. One proposal is for clean air or low emission zones in many UK towns and cities aiming to reduce traffic pollution by restricting vehicles with weaker exhaust controls.

There are over 200 zones across Europe, but do they work? Europe’s largest is in London. Before the scheme the capital had one of the oldest delivery fleets in the UK. This changed in the run-up to the implementation of the zone and exhaust particles decreased alongside busy roads in outer London.

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Bees have been living with the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder for a decade. Simon Klein, Author provided

Ten years ago, beekeepers in the United States raised the alarm that thousands of their hives were mysteriously empty of bees. What followed was global concern over a new phenomenon: Colony Collapse Disorder.

Since then we have realised that it was not just the US that was losing its honey bees; similar problems have manifested all over the world. To make things worse, we are also losing many of our populations of wild bees too.

Losing bees can have tragic consequences, for us as well as them. Bees are pollinators for about one-third of the plants we eat, a service that has been valued at €153 billion (US$168 billion) per year worldwide.

Ten years after the initial alarm, what is the current status of the world’s bee populations, and how far have we come towards understanding what has happened?

The current status of bees worldwide

Since the alarm was first raised, many countries have created new monitoring methods to judge the status of their bee stocks. As a result we have much more data on bee populations, although coverage is still patchy and differences in survey methods make it hard to compare between continents.

It is clear that bees in the United States are still struggling. Beekeepers can tolerate up to 15% losses of colonies over winter, but the US is massively above this threshold, having lost 28.1% of colonies over the 2015-16 winter.

Canada, by contrast, reported 16.8% losses. This is better, but still above the level of losses at which beekeepers can easily restock.

Only recently have we had data from central Europe. There, honey bees seem to be doing better: 11.9% losses in 2015-16. Meanwhile, in New Zealand surveys only began in the last year and have reported winter loss of 10.7%. Australia does not yet have a countrywide survey of the state of bee colonies.

Fortunes are mixed for bees around the world. Simon Klein, Author provided

Honey bees are not the only bees that we should care about: wild bees are vital pollinators too. Some plants are pollinated by only one wild bee species, such as the macropis bees that forage on the loosetrife plant.

Unsurprisingly, we have much less data on wild bees than honey bees, and those data we do have point to bigger concerns. For our wild bees we only really have good data for populations that are endangered or that have completely disappeared. Between 2008 and 2013, wild bee diversity in the US dropped by 23%, and a previously common bumblebee species was recently listed as endangered.

Do we understand why?

The good news is that the past decade has seen plenty of progress in understanding the mystery of Colony Collapse Disorder. The bad news is that we now recognise it as a complex problem with many causes, although that doesn’t mean it is unsolvable.

For all bees, foraging on flowers is a hard life. It is energetically and cognitively demanding; bees have to travel large distances to collect pollen and nectar from sometimes hard-to-find flowers, and return it all to the nest. To do this they need finely tuned senses, spatial awareness, learning and memory.

Anything that damages such skills can make bees struggle to find food, or even get lost while trying to forage. A bee that cannot find food and make it home again is as good as dead.

Because of this, bee populations are very vulnerable to what we call “sublethal stressors” – factors that don’t kill the bees directly but can hamper their behaviour.

For solitary species such as the blue-banded bee, native to New South Wales, difficulty foraging can be a very serious problem. Simon Klein, Author provided

In a recently published review, we argue that modern agriculture and industry have created a host of sublethal stressors that damage bees’ cognition. For example, diesel fumes and neonicotinoid pesticides both reduce bees’ foraging efficiency by disturbing chemical communications in their brains. Modern intensive agriculture disturbs bee nutrition, which impairs their brain. Climate change interferes with the relationship between bees and the plants on which they feed.

In addition, managed honey bees are afflicted by a range of pests, viruses and predators that have been spread around the world as a side-effect of international trade. The worst is the ominously named Varroa destructor mite, which causes brain development disorders.

What can we do?

At the global level, to preserve our bees we have to improve the environments in which they collect food. Every small action can make a difference. Planting flower borders with bee-friendly flowers in your garden can provide food for both wild and domestic bees. You can reduce or eliminate the use of herbicides or pesticides when gardening. Even mowing the lawn less often can help bees out.

You could install a native bee hive or insect hotel. Another tempting option is to buy local honey, which often has a more distinctive flavour than mass-produced versions.

In Australia, we are fortunate in that our bees seem to be doing better than many other parts of the world. The Varroa mite has not yet invaded our shores, and in many areas bees can access pesticide-free bushland (although unlike Europe, Australia has not yet banned use of neonicotinoids in agriculture).

Australia also has an incredibly rich diversity of wild native bees: up to 1,600 different species, including our emblematic stingless bees. Even so, to protect this diversity we need better surveys of how these species are doing.

Ten years on from the alarm over disappearing bees, it is fair to say we now know the nature of the problem and what can be done to fix it. It’s up to us to take the steps needed to sustain these precious pollinators of our food for the future.

Andrew Barron receives funding from a Special Cooperative Agreement with the US Department of Agriculture.

Simon Klein does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.