After half of their bees were wiped out by chemical spray at the beginning of last year, Boggabri bee keepers Marlene Nelson and her son John have managed to save their 40 year old business.
They have gradually built up bee numbers over the last 12 months, and are now once again carrying 130 hives with approximately 80,000 bees in each one.
Dry conditions have hampered the road to recovery for the Nelsons, but they are determined to keep supplying local shops with their famous locally produced honey.
Though the drought has prevented many trees and plants from flowering in recent years, John has worked tirelessly to find the best pollen for his bees and keep them well fed.
His father, Michael, passed away seven years ago, but had instilled in John an intimate understanding of bees and honey production, developed after half a century in the industry.
Nelson’s Honey, a business which has supported the family for decades, was born when a young Michael Nelson started keeping bees as a hobby.
His wife, Marlene, describes how he carved out a career and a life for himself through his bees.
“He was working at a shop here in town, a big department store where the IGA is now. He was there all week and Saturday mornings, but then for most of the weekend he’d work with the bees,” she recalls.
“At night he’d be in the shed working till midnight, so decided something had to give and in 1970 he went full time bee keeping, and did that till he died.”
At peak production, the Nelsons owned 1300 hives and produced almost 200 tonnes of honey per year.
They supplied 90% of their honey to Capilano and the rest was sold locally, but their bulk production put them in the top ten percent of Capilano’s producers.
All honey currently produced is processed in their back yard in Boggabri.
After his father’s death, John managed to continue at full production for several years before eventually downsizing due to time and labour constraints.
Employees went in search of larger pay cheques in the area’s growing mining industry, and John couldn’t spare the time and effort required to retrain new staff.
He was also trying to juggle a job in the mines with bee keeping, so decided to stop producing bulk honey three years ago.
“We’re not full time at the moment, but it’s bigger than a hobby, we’ve still got all our local customers in Tamworth, Gunnedah, Boggabri, Narrabri and Barraba, as well as people coming to the door.”
As with any agricultural industry, droughts take their toll on bee keepers, and this was another reason behind the decision to downsize.
“I was sick of being away going over to the coast and up to Queensland.
You travel a fair way with them when you have to,” John explained.
“The droughts force us to go to the coast if there’s nothing flowering here and we need to keep cash flowing.
“We did have times when we had to feed them sugar syrup, a kilo of sugar mixed with a litre of water, you have to give them enough to store as food.”
The drought has lowered national honey production, which has had a positive effect on the price.
The price per kilogram for bulk honey has shifted from $3 up to $4, while honey sold at the farm gate is worth $7 per kilogram.
Droughts come and go, but an ongoing issue for bee keepers is the challenge of co-existing with farmers in the region and keeping lethal insecticide sprays away from hives.
Despite their best efforts, disaster struck the Nelson’s hives last summer.
John had installed the hives in a dry river bed near Boggabri, following the honey flow provided by the nearby River Gums.
The trees were one of the only species flowering at the time in the area, and were also ideally located close to water and to John’s house.
He arrived at the site to find handfuls of dead bees piled out the front of their hives, and they continued to die for days afterwards due to the residual properties of the spray used, John said.
An investigation conducted by the Environment Protection Authority (EPA) failed to establish if spray had drifted onto the bee hives or whether the bees had died after foraging further afield.
The origins of the spray also remained undetermined, so the Nelsons were never compensated for their losses.
Marlene says this wasn’t the first time their business has been devastated by chemical spray.
“Sprays have always been a problem, back in 2002 I remember Michael ringing me to say we’d just lost 250 hives out at Merah North due to cotton spray. there wasn’t one live bee left out of 250 hives,” she said.
“When they got sprayed last year that was nearly the end of us.”
John accepts there will always be risks associated with keeping bees in a farming area.
“You’ve just got to be out of the sprays’ way I guess, there is this cotton map to show bee keepers where spray is happening. They will usually ring you up to tell you and you’ve got to move straight away,” he said.
Despite the challenges, the Nelsons love what they do and plan to continue operating the boutique style honey business.
They have mastered the fine art of bee keeping and are well acquainted with the nuances of producing the best honey.
“It takes a lifetime to learn all the different sorts of trees, the time they flower and be able to pick the sites. There are 22 varieties of stringy bark trees alone,” he explains.
“Every tree and plant have different flowers which change the flavour, colour and moisture content of the honey. For example, canola causes honey to candy more quickly and everyone reckons yellow box trees produce the best tasting honey.”
Just as cattle and sheep breeders are careful to use good bulls and rams, the temperament of the queen bee can make all the difference to the success of a hive.
Cranky queen bees can cause the bees to swarm too much, reducing honey and bee production, which means queens are bred to be quieter.
“A lot of people don’t know how much goes into keeping bees, it’s not just a case of getting honey, it’s replacing queens every 12 months, queens lay hundreds of eggs each day, more bees more honey, as the queens get older they lay fewer eggs.”
Apart from keeping the art of bee keeping alive, Marlene also has sentimental reasons for continuing to make honey.
The bees were her husband’s lifelong passion, so she feels continuing to produce honey would help keep his memory alive.