About Tobias (Toby) Smith
Proud to be an industry member of the
Australian Native Bee Association |
Dr Tobias (Toby) Smith is a native bee researcher and commercial stingless bee keeper and a stingless bee obsessive. Toby's work time is divided among native stingless bee keeping, university teaching and stingless bee research. Toby spends half of his work time lecturing and researching stingless bees at the University of Queensland. Toby teaches topics including ecology, entomology, pollination, and bee identification. Toby's research background is in understanding native bee communities in agricultural landscapes, the use of native bees in crop pollination, and native bee biology and ecology. Toby's current research is mainly focused on stingless bee biology. Toby has written a book on the identification of Australian bees, targeted at university students and researchers (The Australian Bee Genera: An Annotated, User-Friendly Key - Download free PDF HERE). About 10 years ago, Toby's stingless bee keeping 'hobby' morphed into something more serious, and he has been managing native stingless bees commercially ever since. In the last 10 years Toby has propagated over 1500 new stingless bee hives, and manages hives in NSW and QLD. For the past several years Toby has also presented school and day care native bee education workshops through his business Bee Aware Kids, although those activities are in hibernation for the time being (except locally on the Coffs Coast).
For an entertaining and informative overview of Australian native bees and the secrets of their lives, listen to Toby chat with Sarah Kanowski on ABC Radio National's Conversations program HERE. Toby talks about adventures in tropical rainforest in search of rare bees, new bee species discoveries, keeping hives of native stingless bees, and the lives of Australia's biggest and smallest bee species. |
Ever wondered what the process of transferring a stingless bee colony into an artificial hive box looks like? Watch Toby transfer a colony of Tetragonula hockingsi native stingless bees into a hive box at the University of Queensland, Brisbane. In Toby's role as a researcher at the University of Queensland, Toby manages stingless bee hives in specially designed observation hives that can be used for studying these bees' behaviour inside the hive. Some of these were created using the process shown in this video, using wild colonies in urban structures around the university. |
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Looking for a simple bee-related activity to do at home? How about making some bee nesting blocks for some of the common solitary bee species. Toby teamed up with the City o Gold Coast Council's NaturallyGC program to produce this instruction video about making simple bee nest blocks at home. It's fun an easy, and will usually give you good results. Remember though, the best thing you can do to help native bees in the garden is plant more flowering plants. Once the flowers are taken care of, then you can get on an make some of these new homes too. |
The charismatic stingless bees are not only found in Australia, they are found in tropical regions around the world. This University of Queensland lecture by Toby gives an introduction on stingless bees globally, their biology, conservation, keeping and research frontiers. The video can be found on the Science at UQ YouTube page here. |
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