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NEW ZEALAND BEEKEEPER, JULY 2017
Artificial nest boxes for stingless bees. Now only one of these boxes has bees following the extreme heat during January 2017.
NSWAA conference I really enjoyed the beekeepers’ conference in Ballina from 18–19 May. This year’s theme was ‘Developing Pollination Markets for Beekeepers’. Approximately 250 attended, including some New Zealanders (Mary-Ann and me, Stuart Ecroyd (Ecrotek) and Peter Boutelje (who was selling honey prickers). You only get the real oil when you start talking to beekeepers and find out what’s going on. And I learned that putting toothpaste on insect bites stops the itch. (I got well bitten.) Like every country in the world, the Australians look across at us and what we are getting for mānuka honey and would like to replicate it. (By the way, Australians don’t like the idea of New Zealand having patented the name mānuka. Australia markets its honey as Australian manuka honey.) Our knowledge on mānuka has been gained over the past 30 years, but all the marketing and branding has only seen results in the past 10 years when we’ve really seen the industry go ahead. Everybody is trying to catch up, but it’s also going to be hard to remain ahead of the pack. There’s a real push all over the world to match what we have done with the mānuka industry. Overseas countries are pouring millions of dollars into researching different aspects of the honey. We may find ourselves starting to fall behind with all this research going on.
Once they get this sorted and include prickers in honey houses to get all the active honey out on the first extraction, how can we as a small nation compete with these big countries? We are holding our own at the moment, but for how much longer will we be sitting at the top? The mānuka standard may hold off the competition for a while but not for long, I feel. Small hive beetle The University of Queensland is well on the way to producing external traps for small hive beetle (SHB). The best results were found with traps set 100 metres out from apiaries. Talking to beekeepers on the NSW coast, I learned that they lost 20% of hives in the first three years, but now losses are only 3% each year. Perhaps the initial high losses had something to do with lots of feral hives in the bush and their beekeepers’ability to cope with the beetles. Nowadays there are still beetles in their hives but the bees seem to be controlling them better. There are a good number of different in-hive traps on the market. Some beekeepers think that SHB is worse than having varroa, mainly because the beetles take over and slime out a hive so quickly. Beekeepers can visit a site and the hive is good and strong, but return in two Following is just a tiny bit of what was presented at the conference.
I found stingless bees fascinating. Most beekeepers will keep one or two log hives as a curiosity. Stingless native bees don’t use the same brood cell again after raising a bee, so are practically free of viruses and diseases. A nest will have a virgin queen in it, (a princess) as well as the reigning queen so if the queen dies, it can take over. Queens last for about a year. Unlike our bees that can regulate heat, stingless bees can’t so will come out of the nest in hot weather. At the beginning of January 2017, temperatures at Grafton, NSW reached 46–51°C for a couple of days. One beekeeper we talked to lost 300 hives melting down through this period. His boxes were painted with aluminium paint to reflect the heat. Birds were dropping out of the trees from dehydration. Most died from the fall. The native bees in the artificial nests absconded because they couldn’t keep the nest cool, but those still in log hives survived. Native bee nests used to be common 20 years ago, I was told, but now they aren’t very common. Perhaps it’s something to do with a loss of biodiversity. Plantation forests have been sold to overseas owners who tend to clearfell the trees. These bees survive better in residential areas now, as there always something flowering in people’s gardens that’s more suited to their flight range of 250 to 500 metres. Native bees sell for A$500 a nest box. There were stingless bee producers at the pollination conference.
Part of the crowd at the NSWAA conference. Photos: Frank Lindsay.
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