Double stings hurt beekeepers

The Rushworth-based family business dates back to the early 1930s.

Marketing and sales manager Jessica Clarke said low yielding trees and ‘dumping’ of hives were both contributing to a poor season.

“I’ve been in the family the past 10 years and this would be the worst,” she said.

Jessica said the low yields from trees had forced the family to spread their hives over a greater area.

“We’ve been doing a lot of patchy work. We’re trying to have the bees in the Mallee, also trying to source it in Strathbogie — it’s all just so patchy everywhere.

“The trees are producing, but they’re not producing in the large batches that we have been able to get in previous years.”

The Clarkes’ bee season starts at the end of each July, when they take their bees up to the Robinvale area in north-west Victoria for the almond pollination.

After about a month they are returned to the Goulburn Valley for the canola season and then distributed around local trees or forests near Deniliquin and other towns in southern NSW.

“We’re finding a lot of trees are starting to play out with the weather and the seasons, basically they’re looking like they’re about to flower, but they’re actually not yielding the nectar that they usually would,” Jessica said.

“We’re trying to find the tree sources. They’re just not flowering with the weather so we’ve had to travel about five hours away, which we haven’t had to do for a very long time, but it’s like any season, like any farming.

“We’re very lucky that this is our first season of not much.”

Ironbark Apiaries said another problem to simultaneously hit this year’s bee season has been the growing issue of beekeepers ‘dumping’ hives near other hives.

Jessica said if hives were placed too close to others the bees can come into conflict.

“There’s a lot of beekeepers coming into the industry, as well as buying bigger quantities,” she said.

“Then everyone’s dumping on one another as well as it becoming a bit of an issue because the trees can only produce so much.

“There are some people in the industry who will put their bees on the other side of the fence and when you have things like that the bees start fighting over who is getting the nectar and so of course they’re not going to produce as much as they actually could.”

Jessica said there was an accepted custom in the industry that rival hives not be placed within five to eight kilometres of another batch.

“Having so many people coming into the industry, they don’t really understand that.

“It really is a growing problem. We’ve even seen some people who will dump them on the side of the road, which is really bad, and it gives beekeepers a bad name.”

Agriculture Victoria has acknowledged that a combination of an increase in the number of people taking up beekeeping and increasing competition for access to floral resources has contributed to the issue.

It said the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning allocates leased bee sites on Crown land or within national parks, but hives placed on adjoining private land may overlap with hives on public land.

Agriculture Victoria also said beekeepers sometimes deliver hives to sites unaware that they are within the flight zone of a pre-existing load of beehives.

Ironbark Apiaries’ range of honeys and honeycomb was on display at the Seymour Alternative Farm Expo during April, and Jessica is optimistic the business will extend into a fifth generation.

“We’re fourth generation. We date back to the early 1900s. I’ve dated it back to 1933, but we do go back further,” she said.

“One of our daughters, she’s our little honey taster — so if it’s not Evie-approved we don’t sell it. That’s what we like to say.

“She says she wants to be a beekeeper so we’ll see, but there’s no pressure.”