As we return to Brisbane to drop off the Buzz Bus, we stop for a celebratory ice cream and a dip in the Pacific Ocean in the beautiful coast of Eastern Australia. Surfers float waiting for bigger waves and signs on the beach warn potential swimmers to look for another place to dip their toes as the list of potential dangers is long here. It is early and few people have descended on the beach yet. The gorgeous Pandanus hold on to the shallow soil between the rocks and sand. The water is cool and the sun harsh and we chat the time away. By the time we return the Buzz Bus at Brisbane airport we have driven more than 2,600 km in Eastern Australia alone.
I am excited to go back home in Sweden after three weeks away from my family. It has been hard to keep up with news at home, and I had barely been there three weeks since our big move from Scotland. The Australian trip has been amazing. So long in the planning and delayed for years, and it somehow has now passed so fast.
I have learned a lot about the plants, wildlife, and people of Australia. The mysterious continent has lived up to my expectations of natural wonder, and David and Daniel, my project collaborators and travel partners, have been amazing. Spending three weeks driving and working in the constrained space of a campervan brings its challenges and rewards, and I feel we have built our friendship and shared so many fun and amazing experiences together. Thanks guys!
Now the slog of the return trip begins. The distance I must travel to go back home, including several flight connections, amounts to 19,631 km.
The end of the fieldwork component of the project means the start of the next phase. We will have to identify the species we studied with the help of Australian bee experts. I will have to process and analyse the thousands of buzzes we collected and to do that I need to write and refine methods that enable to recognise buzzes automatically. It will be some time to do these analyses and then we get a chance to test our hypotheses and make inferences of what we have found in this project. At the end we hope to have a paper to tell others about our scientific discoveries. Each part, from the conception of the project, to fieldwork, analysis, and write-up, has aspects that I love. Doing science is fun, and I certainly feel lucky that I get to do this for a living. Thanks for funding this expedition to Australia National Geographic!
30 September. This is the last stretch of the trip. The last chance of finding bees before starting to wrap up this expedition. It has been a mixed bag for finding bees for studying vibrations. Perhaps is the cool, rainy days we have encountered, or Spring, or trying to cover too much ground, or any other reason that makes field work in a new continent hard. But it has been a blast and somehow we have managed to scrape a few measurements in bees across Australia. Today is our last push and the bright sun and blue skies with relatively little wind are promising.
We leave Hervey Bay after exploring some Solanum torvum growing behind the campground. We drive down the Bruce Highway and Daniel has an inspired suggestion to get off and explore a side road. With the corner of my eye I spy a large shrub with bright yellow flowers in a spike. ‘Stop here’, I ask Daniel who pulls over near a farm. We climb down to the river bank where I saw the plant and confirm is the (exotic) Senna didymobotrya with large, buzz pollinated flowers. Within seconds we hear the deep buzz of a large carpenter bee (Xylocopa sp.) above our heads. With some tricks and patience we sample a few bees including Xylocopa. We are thrilled of this strike of luck to locate the bees that will allow us to close the trip with more observations.
A farmer comes by intrigued by our excitement at a weedy plant and we tell him about the Buzz Bus, he allows us to go deeper up the river bank to look for more buzz pollinated flowers of Solanum and Senna that he says are plentiful here. ‘Just watch out for the carcasses of the feral pigs we shot last week!’, he warns us. We find many bees of different species and collect buzz after buzz in our mobile lab. This is the most productive day of the whole Eastern trip!
The day has been a complete success, and we pull over late in the afternoon on our next campsite at the edge of a pine plantation. How here to cut down Eucalyptus forests to plant Scott Pines (Pinus sylvestris), while the rest of the world cut their native forests to plant Eucalyptus?
The usual brush turkeys watch us set up camp, and we spend the evening cooking, measuring and photographing bees. A pair of kookaburras huddle together above our heads as the sun sets. The campsites light up their fire pits as the darkness quickly engulfs everybody. Tomorrow we head to Brisbane to return the Buzz Bus and end three weeks of wonderful fieldwork.
29 September. Today we continue our drive south, guided by the records of invasive Solanum that we have been able to find online through the patchy internet reception we can get. The first stop is in Granite Creek in a rest stop that advertises free coffee for tired drivers. The parking area off the road is an invasive plant paradise. Surrounded by a national park, here you can find a wide range of invasive plants from around the world. The invasives include Solanum americanum, Tecoma stans, Argemone ochroleuca, Thunbergiaalata, Verbascum virgatum, and others. But we are here for buzz pollinated Solanum and find plenty of S. mauritianum, S. seaforthianum, and even tomato (Solanum lycopersicum). The perennial honeybee is here trying clumsily to get pollen from S. mauritianum without ever vibrating. Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus), another exotic organism, seem to also thrive in this part of Australia and I tell Daniel about their wintering grounds in western Mexico. There, the monarch butterflies can be found in enormous numbers, hanging from conifer trees, resting after their long migration from the USA and Canada. Or at least they used to be there in large numbers when I visited; who knows how they are coping with the brutal deforestation going on in the forests of Michoacan. Here in a roadside of Eastern Australia, lonely monarchs flutter a bit lost. The grass is tall and as we walk around, I think of snakes hiding in the grass. No wild bees here in the cloudy, cool morning, so we drive again.
Eventually we make it to our next destination in Hervey Bay. This is a touristic town on the coast, but with plenty of records of the plants we look. It is getting late (drives in Australia are long), and we go to the Botanic Gardens where we find some stingless bees.
As we drive back to the campground I hear a strange noise coming from the trees. We stop in a park in the coastal road and we saw giant black fruits hanging from some trees. Something doesn’t add up. Then one of the fruits rattles, crawls on a branch and extends its enormous membranous wings. They are flying foxes! I couldn’t be more excited of seeing these giant bats (Pteroptus alecto) for the first time. There are several dozens in this tree and several more in the next one. A tree further down is also full with flying foxes and we realise that there are several hundred bats around us. As we approach the trees and look through the binoculars, I see a pair of eyes looking right back. The bats are becoming active and are well aware of our presence. Their terse fur, sometimes forming a lighter collar in some individuals gives these wonderful animals an elegantly sinister look. The bats stretch their wings, and you can almost feel the texture of the skin that stretches in their hands-turned-wings. They communicate and interact with one another. They keep their sights on us, and when a drunken woman hits their tree with a branch, they take off with the sound of leather cutting the wind. Their silhouettes swish across the blue sky of the dying daylight, and the trees rattle with their movement. I wish you could hear them.
28 September. Not much to report today. It has been raining all day. In the morning we waited for bees in Solanum mauritianum but the rain kept them away. After a while, and without hope that the sky would clear, we decide to leave and start our drive back south. It is a long way to Brisbane (about 1,000 km from here), and perhaps we will have better luck with the weather tomorrow.
We stop in Finch Hatton gorge, at the base of Mount Dalrymple, which at 1,260m above sea level is one of Queensland’s tallest mountains. The vegetation is amazing and we reach a pool in the river called the Ring of Fire. An ominous board suggests caution while exploring the boulders around the gorge. Others have died while miscalculating the risks of navigating the slippery rocks and cold pools. Daniel, unfazed jumps in the water and explores a small waterfall. The name Ring of Fire comes from a plant that produces red flowers in a crown-shaped structure. Sadly is not flowering at the moment. We explore the trail a bit more and keep driving south.
It has continued to rain into the evening. The night surprises us while approaching the campground for tonight, which is located in a working farm south of Rockhampton. We are glad to pull over at last, as thick rain and fast trucks along the Bruce Highway make for a scary combination. In the campground, we eat an early dinner and go to bed. The camp kitchen has some very interesting decorations, and people here seem to like quite a bit Ned Kelly, the infamous outlaw.
27 September. It’s before 6:00am and we are waiting by the Broken River. We stand on the edge of a murky, slow flowing river guarded by tree ferns and lianas that touch the water surface. The muddy water hides a platypus somewhere. Bubbles raising to the surface and a cloud of mud in the water reveal the location of the almost mythical platypus. A small creature breaks the water surface, the colour of its fur barely distinct from the colour of the mud at the bottom of the river. Its duck-like bill chews rapidly, probably on invertebrates dug out of the bottom.
Before we can fix the binoculars or the camera it dives again. A little while later it re-emerges, its clawed paws stretched on the surface along with its flat tail giving us a glimpse just long enough to get a good view before the platypus dives again. We spend sometime admiring this extraordinary animal in silence. I think of the book I am reading (appropriately called Platypus Matters by Jack Ashby), and the story of how Europeans sought to settle the questions of whether the platypus lays eggs and feeds its young with milk, and, if so, what kind of strange mammal this is. Together with a handful of species of Echidnas (the hedgehog-like creatures that also lay eggs), the platypus forms an unusual branch in the family tree of mammals called the Monotremes. Platypus go by many names in different countries but is an animal well known despite its localised distribution and the fact that only one zoo outside Australia has a living platypus (San Diego Zoo). In Spanish the name is ornitorrinco.
If you squint you can see a platypus (ornitorrinco)
We pack and move to look for bees. We search first the montane forest, looking carefully in the few flowers that manage to grow in the understory of this dense forest. Palms grow at every gap in the canopy, and we see stag-horn ferns (another ‘platy’, Platycerium in the fern family Polypodiaceae) hanging onto every tree. These stag-horn ferns make their own hanging basket using modified leaves that catch debris and vegetation, and make long bifurcated leaves that extend like vegetal stag horns. Some of the ferns look so big that they seem capable to bring the smaller trees down with their sheer weight. A smallish goana (a large reptile also called monitor lizards) stays still by the water hoping we haven’t noticed it. We find some flowers and catch a glimpse of a bee. We stay still to see it foraging fast as lightning and zooming away in the vegetation in search for another rare flower. We wait for a while but the bee decides not to return.
We try our luck in the nearby pastures where a few farmers maintain cattle herds. The grassy mess of cattle farms has replaced here the ancient forest. Besides the grasses, several other non-native weeds make their home along the road. A spear thistle (Cirsium vulgare, Asteraceae) spreads its spiny leaves and shows off a purple inflorescence head. Mexican poppy (Argemone ochroleuca, Papaveraceae) grows here and there. In the 1930s, the Australian government leased land to young men on the condition of clearing out 35 acres of forest and transform it into cattle pastures. The exotic grasses and the cattle to go with it were considered more valuable.
Solanum mauritianum, a buzz pollinated species that is at home in cattle fields and disturbed sites
Along the dirt road, we spot our good-old Solanum mauritianum (Solanaceae). As other Solanum, this one loves the disturbance of the roadsides and pastures. We stop, and soon find the first bees. The sun is shinning and bees are busy buzzing the Solanum flowers for pollen. On the roadside we measure and photograph.
We are lucky enough to come across a territory guarded by male carpenter bees (Xylocopasp.). The male bees fight with one and other to defend a patch of Solanum, where the female bees come to collect pollen. They zoom around us and chase each other away. These are some of the most beautiful bees I have ever seen, and are restricted to Eastern Australia. The males of Xylocopa bombylans, have a metallic green-blue body that shifts to yellow-orange in the thorax. The iridescence of its exoskeleton is wonderful, and yellow hairs adorn their legs. The face carries an elegant ivory mask, and they are not shy or fearful of anybody entering their land. We spend a few hours observing these bees and studying their buzzes. This is a good day for the Buzz Bus!
In the evening we find a local campground, which used to be the school of the ranchers’ kids, and has now turned into a nice place to spend the night. We make a fire and enjoy a quiet evening under the stars. In the night, a rainstorm comes in and batters the roof of the Buzz Bus. I dream that the campsite is flooded and wake up to check whether we are at risk of being washed away. It looks fine, but the people in tents that were near us have had to move under the roof of the old school. The rain carries on all night.
26 September. We wake up in our campsite in the Capricorn Caves. Outside, the brush turkey waits for us hoping for a food scrap. First thing in the morning we walk to the caves and on the way we found a Solanum vine that I last saw in Mexico. This is Solanum seaforthianum, a Brazilian vine that has found a way to travel the world on the wings of well intentioned gardeners that prize their beautiful lilac flowers, which appear in generous bunches as the plant climbs any available surface. It has somehow made it to eastern Australia and appears to be doing fine with plenty of fruits. This is the first time we see this invasive plant in this trip, but probably not the last. I cannot find any other previous records of this species in iNaturalist, the image-recognition app that has become our good companion for scouting potential sampling sites of buzz pollinated plants. No bees in this invasive vine though. Near the caves we study a colony of stingless bees that a local meliponiculturist (a bee farmer of stingless bees) has placed in the area. The tiny bees (probably Tetragonulasp.) are busy guarding the entrance to their wooden home.
The exploration of the caves is amazing, if too brief. These rare karstic caves are above ground, not below, as they gorge the mountain and they are effectively dry inside with only rainwater penetrating them in the rainy season. Inside, colonies of ghost bats and other bat species call in the dark chambers outside of the reach of tourist lights. The caves were discovered by Norwegian farmers in the late 1800s, and became the first touristic attraction of Queensland. They have also yielded some great fossils of marsupial lions and other fantastic beasts.
After leaving the Caves, we head up straight north. We want to reach beyond Mackay before the end of today. The goal is to spend the night in Eungella National Park, 380 km north from here. The drive is long but smooth. The vegetation changes little until the cane fields appear. Increasing in coverage as we move north, before we reach Mackay they have become monstrous. The last push west of Mackay to the mountains where the Eungella park is perched, is a continuous field of sugar cane and mills. A narrow train track will help moving tons of sugar cane during harvest time. The mill churns out sweet smoke from gigantic chimneys. Mechanised bands carry broken sugar cane across the road and above our heads.
As we reach the base of the Eungella mountains a dramatic and most incredible change takes place. The monocultures yield to a brutal explosion of plant diversity as the land becomes steeper and more inaccessible to farming. The hills are soon covered by dense, dark green vegetaion, eucalyptus and palms coexist, and when we reach the top, massive tree ferns appear. The montane tropical forest is loaded with vines and epiphytes and the amazing elk-ferns reach massive proportions growing in every tree. It is getting dark but we stop in the Sky View to admire the valley far below and to immerse ourselves in the montane tropical forest.
Now is dark and we decide we will not be able to reach the campsite near the Eungella dam. We pull over near a visitor centre and we find a room available for the night. Reluctantly, we move for a night to this cabin, but have dinner in the Buzz Bus anyway.
At night, I take my headlamp and walk to the Broken River, where we have been told the mysterious platypus can be seen. This is not the time of the day to find platypus, but I go there to check what other things I might be able to spot. A few minutes into my night walk, I hear noise in the bush. I slowly move the beam of my headlamp and see the strangest creature staring at me. The size of a racoon, grey short fur, a naked tail and a funny curved long snout. Some type of possum that shies away and disappears among the leaves. Then, in a grassy plain, a pair of bright eyes reflect the beam of my headlamp. A small wallaby assesses my every movement and when it decides I am too close, escapes with funny, substantial jumps and into the forest. I see another two of these small wallabies. When I reach the river, I see a golden male frog mating with a much larger dark green female. They are hypnotised by the light and the three of us stare at each other for a while. Later I return to the room and talk with Daniel about the amazing Australian fauna around us. Tomorrow we want to wake up early to look for a platypus before heading out to search for more bees.
25 September. Today we wake up early and head north of Yeppoon to the edges of Byfield. This is an area with large plantations of non-native pine forest, and scattered native vegetation in some hard to reach spots. The pines pepper the landscape even in the areas that are now part of a state forest. In the outskirts we get a bit lost looking for a watering hole and end up in a small side road. On the edges of the dirt road we spot Grevillea banksii (Proteaceae), a shrub that produces the type of handsome red inflorescences that Australian birds love. But instead of pollinating birds we notice some small native bees stealing nectar. Our first native bees for a long while!
Measuring buzzes
Quickly, we get to work and manage to capture a few specimens, which I later determine to be the stingless bee Tetragonula carbonaria (Apidae, Meliponini). These small bees resemble the stingless Trigona bees from the neotropics but have a rugged back (scutellum) that projects over the abdomen as if they were carrying a shield in their back. These bees refuse to produce defence buzzes and we record five individuals as non-buzzing. Although not unexpected, we are very happy to score this new species of a highly social, tropical bees as non-buzzing.
We keep searching nearby, and discover some bright magenta flowers in a small bush. This is plant clearly belongs to the family Melastomataceae, a curious tropical family in which the majority of species are buzz pollinated, which appears to be a highly unusual trait for an entire family. We are very excited about the findings of what then we established to be Melastoma malabatrichum, a species that others have studied before in the old tropics but for which I am unaware of pollination studies in Australia. In any case, it is the first time I see this species in the wild. The flowers are large with spread out petals and five bright yellow anthers carrying pollen at the centre of the flower. The anthers are poricidal, opening through small pores at the tips, which makes buzzing the most effective way to remove pollen from them. As they are nectar less, pollen is the only reward that this plant offers to visiting bees. But M. malabatrichum has a trick under its sleeve, because in addition of the five yellow anthers, each flowers carries a second set of purple anthers that mimic the colour of the petals. These inconspicuous anthers sneak behind the back of unsuspecting pollinators, which mostly ignore them while visiting the yellow anthers, and manage to put extra pollen in their back. The purple pollinating anthers are known as pollinating anthers, and the yellow as feeding ones. This is a classic example of heteranthery as studied by Charles Darwin and Fritz Muller in the middle of the XIX century.
Watching these mighty Melastomes, we see a large green bee zooming by, and in the excitement of seeing a buzz pollinator for the very first time in eastern Australia, I miss and let it escape! Bummer! We find more plants and wait patiently for it to come back. The mythical green bee never returns but instead we witness to black stripy buzz pollinators arrive to the melastome and we manage to catch them both. Hooray!
We go back to the Buzz Bus and record their buzzes. As the data is acquired by the computer we breath a sigh of relief of having the first buzzes of this trip.
We go back to the field and wait for a while but no new buzz pollinators arrive. We spend the rest of the day exploring this and other parts of the region, but no more pollinators arrive. As the afternoon sets in, we pull over in a sign that says Capricorn Caves. The place is closing, but after some pledging they let us stay in their campsite that is under renovation. The nearby caves can be visited next day, and with the last rays of light of the day we walk in the beautiful forest that surrounds us.
Somehow we have found this little paradise of sharp karst in which caves occur above ground in small hills with ragged peaks. And below, we find a few well preserved fragments of dry tropical rainforest or vine scrub, where dense vegetation of broad leaves co-occur with woody vines that climb and twist among the trees. We see a few honeybees, wasps, beetles, spiders, but not native bees. As we walk a wallaby crosses my path and gets lost in the vegetation. I hear noises on my left and wait quietly to see a second wallaby come very close to me just to notice me and jump away in the forest.
Ahead in the path, Daniel is admiring some green ants, a type of ants that use silk to tie tree leaves together and build aerial nests. The hanging nests are sensitive to vibrations and touching the branches cause a horde of green ants come looking for the trouble maker. It is best to keep your distance from their armies. Daniel tells me that aborigines used to eat the ants which have a citrusy flavour, and to prove his point he tries one. Apparently they’re indeed lemon like.
In the camp, a brush turkey (Alectura lathami) has adopted us and she waits for our arrival to see if she can find any scrap of food near the Buzz Bus. She is disappointed.
That night I photograph bees for measurement and make some notes of what we have seen over the last days. We go to bed late and tired but hoping that the next day brings more bees. Above in the sky, we see Scorpio, the Southern Cross and a bright Jupiter. The flashes of the camera go on for a while.
24 September. We decide that we need to push further north to try to avoid the high density of people here and give us a better chance to find a bee-rich region. So, today is a driving day. Along the way, we spot an Emu keeping its distance from the road. A few other, less cautious animals are now feeding the many raptors that feast on the roadkill: kangaroos, wallabys, equidnas, snakes, birds… Roads impose a high toll on local wildlife. The landscape is very nice, sometimes flat expanses with pastures (cows seem to be revered in some towns that erect endless statues of bulls and cows), others forests of tall Eucalyptus, and still other times hills with steep sides and thick forest cover. As we continue travelling north, some white cockatoos appear near Rockhampton, and a kokaburra watches pensively from a power line.
We have crossed the Tropic of Capricorn and are now officially in the Australian tropics.
In the afternoon, we reach the town of Yeppoon, and look for a place in the outskirts of another very touristic town. We stay at a busy beach caravan park. The beach is endlessly long, with dark yellow sand. We find a few flowers in the sand dunes, but is perhaps too late for bees. In the evening we eat some delicious rice and veggies that Daniel prepares and make plans for the next day. We hope to stay local tomorrow and spend the day walking in the search for bees.
Daniel gives his best impression of a buzz pollinating bee after a long day of driving.
22 September. Today I dropped off the Buzz Bus at Perth Airport and flew to Brisbane. A long five hour flight across the continent, and landing in Brisbane in the late evening after two hour time zone shift. A distance of about 3,600km. Here, I met Daniel and we stay at a hotel nearby making plans for our departure next morning.
23 September. Early in the morning we pick up the eastern Buzz Bus, and head to the supermarket to get supplies. After a long morning, we finally set out to start our eastern transect. We drive north out of Brisbane, and hit the first traffic bottleneck after a coupe, of kilometres. The traffic is heavy and we move slow. The Buzz Bus seems to be a rare sighting among the trucks and smaller cars of the commuters. The drive out of the city drags on, and we seem to struggle to leave behind the urban sprawl. The first stop is to check out Glasshouse Mountain, an old volcanic plug that raises steeply from the nearby plain. We go up Wild Horse mountain to get a better view and on the way we spot a giant Monitor Lizard. The beautiful monster guards us with one eye and then moves to a crevice in an old Eucalyptus trunk. The views from the forest fire observation point are great and we spot several flowers and some honeybees.
We keep driving through the heavy traffic and what seems to be never ending urbanity. We reach Noosa Head later in the afternoon, and the tows is a busy place in which cars go bumper to bumper. The are so many tourists and cars that we need to park on a rugby field. We walk to the mass of tourists and get info on hikes from a friendly volunteer at an information centre. The beach is teeming with tourists and surfers. We manage to walk up a nice path bordering the coast. This is a paradise for surfers and Pandanus trees! Pandanustectorius, also known as thatched screw pine, is a palm-looking plant that produces large supporting roots that can sprout from high up the trunk. The new support roots can give it an appearance of legs, and some people call it the walking palm. I really like this plant, which I had only seen in the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens on gloomy, grey days. Here the Pandanus tree is in its element growing abundantly along the rocky cliffs and in the understory of this subtropical forest. I take plenty of photos.
But the big surprise is waiting ahead. The dense mass of tourists serves finally a good purposes and somebody has spotted a koala somewhere in the trail. We speed up and find some people squinting at the branches high above. Very hard to spot without binoculars, but I finally notice a ball of fur barely moving above. A koala in the wild! The koala appears quite large, and although mostly we can only see its backside, now and then it stretches for an Eucalyptus leaf and I can distinguish its face and ear. It is very exciting!
The daylight is coming to an end so we have to leave and head to Pomona where we are staying for the night. We arrive in the dark, and the caretaker grumpily welcomes us. We start talking and I tell him about the many years I lived in Scotland. This perks him up and he tells me with pride that he was born in Ireland and that he has been back many times after migrating to Australia when he was three months old.
— People think that this area is very green—, he says referring to the wetter vegetation found here compared to other parts of inland Australia, his long side-chops running wildly to his mouth,— but it will never bee as green as the hills of Ireland and Scotland!
21 September. Last night we stayed in a caravan park in Greenhough. The friendly staff treated us to a story of walking the Way of Santiago, a trail that extends 700km in a journey to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The rusty showers and swallows nesting in the entrance to the laundry room adds character to a place that seems to exist in the strange dimension of roadsides. Unsurprisingly, we chat about David Lynch over breakfast.
In the morning, we continue driving south, and we start the day with procession of 1960’s race cars that pass us in the opposite direction. We try to stop more rarely, but patches of Solanum distract us. We reach then Badgingarra National Park and quickly becomes the highlight of the day. A lunch break under a willow look-alike tree that is more closely related to guavas and Eucalyptus (Myrtaceae) than to willows (Salicaceae). Then a quick walk (no wild bees in sight), and the flower fest continues. Too numerous to name them now, we continue recording and photographing flowers. David spots a striking buzz-pollinated flower in the family Malvaceae (think hibiscus, mallow flowers but then transform them into some sort of tomato flower mimic). We photograph it and continue talking about follow up projects.
Late that evening we reach Perth and pack and clean the Buzz Bus. David and I say good bye after I drop him off at his family home. It has been a fantastic trip and we make plans for the analysis and write up of the data we are collecting. It has been great to have David’s expertise and knowledge of the flora of Western Australia and I have learned lots from him over the last eight days on the road.
Tonight I will stay in a hotel near the airport. Tomorrow I fly to Brisbane to meet Daniel Montesinos and start the second leg of the expedition.
