Introduction - Three Typical New Zealand Beekeepers

"Beekeeping" - the term conjures up visions of veiled people in white suits doing mysterious things with smoke and boxes and honey combs.

And somehow these same people magically produce honey, that wonderful tasting, natural substance that no amount of science or technology has ever been able to reproduce.

But who are the beekeepers? And what do they really do? The following "snap-shots" will introduce you to three New Zealand beekeepers. They're typical of the over five and a half thousand people in this country who own and manage the world's most important beneficial insect.

"That's Enough Honey to Drown In!"

Still, the honey flow turned out to be a little better than average, with two boxes of surplus honey produced per hive. So the late summer and early autumn have been taken up with removing the more than 30 tonnes of honey from the hives and extracting it in the honey house. Now John and Alison Snelgrove are in the midst of cleaning up the machinery they used for spinning the honey out of the honey combs. They have just sent away the last of over one hundred 200 litre drums of honey to a packer in Christchurch.

John is a third generation beekeeper. His grandfather was one of the pioneers of the beekeeping industry in New Zealand, and his father built up the business during the years of good production and good prices for clover honey in the 1960's and '70's.

John always knew that he wanted to be a beekeeper, and helped his father with the hives from the time he was a teenager. But his father insisted that he also qualify in a trade, so John apprenticed as a mechanic in the nearby town. In the early years, after John met and married Alison, they both worked at jobs to make the money to buy the business from John's folks. As it turned out, their other work skills have also come in handy several times since, when crop failures meant they had to take on other jobs in the winter to keep the business afloat. John's father and mother have also been very understanding, leaving in a portion of the purchase price as a personal loan.

John and Alison have increased the original 800 hives to just over 1350. They found the move necessary to keep their business viable in the face of a levelling out of honey prices in the last decade.

John and Alison also had to make extensive renovations to the honey house, which had been in continuous use for some thirty years. One of their first visitors after they took over from John's father was the local health inspector, who insisted on a programme to bring the building and its honey processing equipment up to new food hygiene standards.

John does most of the field work, leaving each morning in the five-tonne truck drive visit the many farm properties where his hives are kept. Each location is called an "apiary", and some are as far as 150 km from John and Alison's home. Needless to say, John's working day can often be very long. During the spring, which is the busiest part of the beekeeping season, John has to visit each of the nearly 70 apiaries every 3 to 5 weeks. John has a lot of jobs to do on each visit, including feeding the hives, replacing old queen bees, and ensuring that the well-managed colonies don't swarm. He also has to check each hive for American foulbrood, a disease which has the potential to spread and destroy many hives.

After adding extra boxes to the hives when they begin to require extra honey storage space during the Christmas period, John begins the long process of removing the honey from the hives and bringing it back to the honey house. Both John and Alison work in the honeyhouse over the summer, with Alison often extracting the crop by herself while John goes out in the truck to pick up another load from the hives.

Because John and Alison have always sold their crop in bulk to a local honey packer, they do not get involved in the additional work and expense of packing and marketing their crop. Still, they do pack a small amount of honey each year, most of which is given to the many farmers who own the land where the hives are kept. John and Alison also sell a small amount of honey at the back door to local customers, many of whom bring their own containers to be filled.

Alison does all the administrative work for the beekeeping business, including the usual paying of accounts and wages and the maintenance of a detailed cash book. Along with John, she also produces a detailed budget each year and tracks their progress against a cashflow forecast. She found this was vitally important in the '80's when interest rates were so high. Their business assets are tied up in beehives, rather than land, and as a result their access to credit was much more limited than their farming neighbours.

For the last two seasons John and Alison have employed a local school leaver. The young man worked "on trial" for the first several months, since he didn't have any previous beekeeping experience. John was aware that new employees often quit bee businesses quite suddenly when they receive their first good stinging by the bees. However, the young man has shown a real interest in beekeeping work, and John has now offered to pay the worker's fees for the Certificate in Beekeeping correspondence course so that he can increase his knowledge and skills. He realises, however, that once the young man is fully trained he might very well decide to move on or start up beekeeping on his own account.

The system John uses to manage his hives has been handed down from his father and modified by John in light of new developments and changes in beekeeping technology. Still, he knows that the system is quite different from what is in use by other beekeepers in other parts of the country. He used to always attend field days and seminars held by the local MAF advisory officer. But now that the service is no longer available, he relies on the annual National Beekeepers' Association field day, the association's magazine, and local branch meetings for information. John sees these meetings as a good opportunity to catch up on what the season has been like in surrounding areas as well as a chance to meet with his fellow commercial beekeepers. He doesn't normally visit with other beekeepers otherwise. The nearest one lives some 30 km away.

John has always been a firm supporter of the National Beekeepers' Association, and his father once held a position on its executive. He and Alison have travelled to the association's annual conference in July for the past ten years. Because the spring and summer periods are so busy for them, they aren't able to take more than the occasional day off during that time. So they combine the trip to the annual conference, which is held in a different provincial centre each year, with a few weeks holiday.

For the past several years John has acted as his branch's delegate to the conference, and he has recently found the need to become more politically involved in industry affairs. He has lobbied his local member of Parliament on a proposed plan to allow Australian honey imports, and he and Alison have appeared in the local paper explaining their opposition to the plan which they believe will expose the beekeeping industry to the risk of bee diseases from overseas.

John and Alison aren't quite sure how long they will be able to stay in the beekeeping business. John's back is giving him trouble now, and with all the heavy lifting involved in honey production, he may be forced to take on a less active job in the future. John also knows how difficult it is to finance the next generation into beekeeping, and he has suggested that both his sons get a trade qualification, just like he did, before they decide what line of work they are going to pursuit. If the sons find other careers, John and Alison will probably sell off the business, in parcels of hives and equipment rather than as a going concern.

"But I Thought Beekeepers Just Produced Honey..."

For Joanne, Bob's wife, fielding such phone calls is a normal part of the job. One of Bob's workers had just called in, from a pay phone about 15 km away, saying that he and the other worker are going to be "a bit late". They've had a puncture, and changing a flat tire on a fully laden 3 tonne truck is going to take a while.

Bob just sighs, and tells Joanne not to expect him home until dawn. Because of the heavy rain the night before, the orchard is very greasy, and once the hives make it to the orchard they will probably have to ferry most of them into position around the blocks with the four-wheel drive.

By now, Bob and Joanne Hopkins are quite used to coping with the unexpected. They manage 1100 beehives in the Bay of Plenty, and in the 10 years since they began full-time beekeeping they have learned that in the pollination business, good planning and long hours are two of the big keys to success.

In the early '80's, Bob and Joanne spent three years building up their business from the 50 hives Bob was running as a sideline, to the 650 they needed to go "full time". During that period Bob worked as a builder, while Joanne held down a part-time job as a nurse and also managed to care for their young family.

The last year of sideline beekeeping was really hectic, with Bob trying to take care of 350 hives on a part-time basis, and spending every other free moment behind a saw bench cutting timber for the big increase they needed in hive numbers. Now that they are established, they buy most of their hive parts, since they find that time-wise, its actually cheaper than doing it themselves. But during the building-up phase they put all their available cash into more beehives, and "donated" their labour to the business instead.

Now their business is well-developed, even though it still consists primarily of the hives, the two trucks, and a workshop/storage shed. They have one full-time employee, as well as several other people they hire during the pollination period to help with the big job of shifting most of their hives into and out of the orchards.

The Hopkin's hives are managed each season with the primary goal of placing 90% of them in kiwifruit orchards for the November flowering period. They service 40 kiwifruit grower clients, and the contracts provide at least two-thirds of their yearly cash flow.

Honey production has never been a major focus for the Hopkin's. Instead, Bob puts all his energies into ensuring that the hives are re-queened annually, are well-fed, and have the proper amounts of brood required to provide good kiwifruit pollination. To make sure the hives are up to scratch, he visits them 3 times in the month just before pollination.

Because of the large number of hives needed for kiwifruit pollination in the area where the Hopkins live, apiaries are so numerous that the region is in effect "overstocked". Rather than get into arguments with other local beekeepers who can tend to claim an area through the historical siting of their hives, Bob decided at the beginning of his beekeeping career to locate most of his apiary sites up to two hours travel from home.

Once pollination begins, the hives which meet the standard are shifted from their apiaries and brought into the orchards. The process always takes place at night so that the bees do not become disoriented or lost. Bob and his employees begin work in the late afternoon and continue on through the night. There is also a day shift of one or two part-time workers who feed sugar syrup to the bees once the hives have been placed in the kiwifruit. Research has shown that such feeding once every three days increases pollen gathering by the bees.

Once the hives are all removed from pollination in mid-December, John takes them to various sites where there is a possibility of catching a nectar flow. Often, however, the hives come out of the orchards in poor condition, so the Hopkin's have learned not to budget on a honey crop.

The recent downturn in kiwifruit prices has had a impact on the Hopkin's business, with some clients pulling out orchards and others selling or leasing their properties to packhouses or management firms. There has also been pressure on the pricing of pollination contracts, which has begun to erode the profitability of the Hopkin's enterprise.

The Hopkin's are now investigating income diversification options, and last year provided several tonnes of live bees for the package bee market overseas. As well, Bob has found a number of new apiary sites where he has the chance of producing manuka honey. Publicity on the antibacterial properties of this honey has resulted in a significant increase in the market price.

During the transition from sideline to full-time commercial beekeeping, the Hopkins received a lot of good advice from the local MAF advisor. There were plenty of workshops and discussion groups, and a considerable number of late night phone calls. Now all that has changed, and the Hopkins main interaction with MAF is through their local pollination association, the audits growers sometimes pay the advisor to do on their hives, and the supervision of the local American foulbrood disease control programme. The MAF advisor was a great help during their second season, when they had to burn 34 hives which had become infected with American foulbrood. With sound management, the disease outbreak was contained and it didn't stop their expansion programme. Still, the experience gave them a real scare, and they realised just how important regular bee disease inspection is. Bob now donates two to three days each year to carry out voluntary inspections of other beekeepers' hives in the district, under the supervision of MAF. He is also a firm supporter of the NBA disease control levy, even though it is a cost to his business over and above the small percentage of hives he loses each year to the disease itself.

"You Mean You Actually Keep Bees For Fun?"

Their neighbour is Mary Stewart, a hobbyist beekeeper, and she's in the midst of giving her hives a spring check. Mary owns two hives, which she keeps at the back of her section, up against a hedge so that the flight of the bees doesn't interfere with anyone who lives nearby. She also takes care of another hive, elsewhere in town, which belongs to a friend who started beekeeping with her but lost interest a couple of years of ago.

Mary and her friend decided to take up beekeeping when they read an article about bees in a gardening magazine. They attended an evening course at the local polytechnic, and then once they had determined the amount of time and money that would be involved, they bought their first hive.

The hive was advertised in the local paper, and belonged to a local hobbyist who found out, much to his surprise, that his son was allergic to bee stings. Once the hive had been moved to Mary's, she and her friend purchased bee boxes and frames in kitset from a beekeeping supply shop and assembled them in her garage. They stocked the new equipment with bees and combs taken from the original hive. They also bought three new queen bees, which were delivered by post. The queens were used to head up the new colonies and replace the one in the parent hive because the previous owner said the strain of bee was too aggressive to be kept in town.

Mary enjoys having the hives in her back yard because she can check their progress whenever she likes. She also likes to just watch the bees carrying out their many activities. Sometimes she just sits next to a hive and watches the bees come and go.

Mary made a lot of mistakes in her first beekeeping season, but she still managed to produce a small amount of surplus honey. She felt the cost of a honey extractor couldn't be justified for such a small number of hives, so she cut up the honey combs and squeezed them through a piece of cheese cloth. It turned out to be a slow and messy job, and so the next year Mary joined her local hobbyist beekeeping club, which rents a hand-powered extractor to members.

Most of Mary's honey is either eaten by her family or given away to friends and neighbours (and especially the children over the fence). In a good season she has produced 120 kg of honey from her three colonies, although her average is less than half that amount. And one season she didn't get any honey at all because the poor spring weather meant that her hives never built up and produced a crop.

Mary doesn't really know that much about the beekeeping industry. She occasionally gets a broadsheet published by a beekeeping supply house, and she owns a New Zealand-produced beekeeping book. But she isn't a member of the National Beekeepers' Association and she has never been to a branch meeting because she thinks the association is mostly concerned with marketing and commercial activities. However, her hives have been inspected for American foulbrood on several occasions by a volunteer from the NBA, and she enjoyed watching and asking questions, since she was still uncertain about what the various bee diseases looked like. She was amazed when the inspector told her that commercial beekeepers throughout the country were levied to provide funds for the inspection service, since she didn't have to pay a thing.

NZ Beekeeping: Appendices