Buzzing Into the Future: Meet the Young Aussie Saving Native Bees One Backyard at a Time
Clancy Lester, aka Bee Man, aka @beesandblossoms.aus , is becoming Australia’s Native bee hero—and he's only just getting started.
Australia is home to over 2,000 native bee species and Clancy Lester has found his mission: educate, advocate, and conserve. A 2025 ABC Haywire Trailblazer, Clancy's journey started with a university research opportunity in northeast Arnhem Land. "I just heard the word Arnhem Land and I said, 'What’s this about?' It sounded like an absolute dream," he recalls. That research involved studying the stingless sugar bag bees and connecting with the Yolngu people, where Clancy learned of ancient songlines and totems that all linked native bees within the genus of Tetragonula and Austroplebia.
"Even the whole marital system and the totems in Yolngu culture are intertwined with sugar bags," Clancy explains. "There's a Sugar Bag Man in their Dreaming stories. It’s beautiful, and incredibly humbling to learn."
But the mission didn’t end with research. Clancy returned to Melbourne with a fire lit under him. He turned his passion into action: teaching workshops in schools and his local community, creating DIY bee hotel guides, and sharing his infectious enthusiasm online. "I didn’t know much about native bees until recently," he admits. "But once I started learning, especially from Indigenous knowledge, I was hooked."
In just a few months, his Instagram exploded to over 28,000 followers and counting. His approachable content—part science, part storytelling—resonates. "Not all bees make honey," he explains. "That blows people’s minds. And most native bees are solitary. They don’t live in hives. Every female’s a queen, really."
Clancy is passionate about encouraging people to rethink outdoor spaces. "You want some mess. A bit of bare soil, some old stems—that’s habitat. We’ve been trained to think neat is good, but for bees, a wild garden is a haven - So stop over managing it and start observing. The bees will thank you."
Through his platform and outreach, Clancy is fostering the next generation of citizen conservationists.
Clancy’s message reaches further than just Australia, the idea of creating habitat in our outdoor spaces for insects and pollinators to thrive can help turn the tide of mass pollinator extinction across the globe.
The United kingdom government has put forward a framework called National pollinator strategy . It is a set of guidelines to promote healthy pollinator populations across the country. its aim is ‘to see pollinators thrive, so they can carry out their essential service to people of pollinating flowers and crops, while providing other benefits for our native plants, the wider environment, food production and all of us.'
Join Clancy’s mission and create our own little pollinator haven at home!
