Time to bee nice, honey

Around the world, honeybees are in decline. And with the steady journey south of the varroa mite, we in the South will soon need to take action to keep things buzzing along. Janice Murphy finds out we can all help.

For two summers now, I have been looking for honeybees on the lavender bushes. I haven't seen a single one, although there is a plentiful supply of bumblebees.

So where are the honeybees? Varroa mite, the introduced pest that has decimated northern hives, hasn't yet reached Otago, and colony collapse disorder, the bee world's equivalent of Aids, is not known in this country.

There is plenty of manuka and kanuka around our 6ha property, along with other native trees and gorse. We also have clover (red and white) and lots of other flowering plants, and we don't use pesticides. Our place should be about as bee-friendly as it gets.

So where the bloody hell are they?It's a question people are asking around the world as bee numbers continue to decline. Some blame cellphone towers. Some blame genetically modified crops. Others say the cause is more likely to be due to indiscriminate use of pesticides.

Honeybees have been kept in New Zealand for more than 150 years. They were first brought here by English missionaries and the first New Zealand beekeeping book was published as early as 1848.

Those early bees were from northern Europe, but the honeybees we see now are Apis mellifera, Italian honeybees, which were imported from the US in 1880.

Farmers and home gardeners alike rely on the trusty honeybee to pollinate their crops. Without the hardworking hive-dwellers, yields fall dramatically - Federated Farmers estimates about $3 billion of New Zealand's GDP is directly attributable to intensive pollination of crops by bees.

Indirectly, bees are also good for the soil. They pollinate the clover which in turn locks nitrogen away in our soils for other plants to use.

Recently, dressed from head to toe in white overalls, hard hat, netting and gloves, I nervously followed beekeeper Brice Horner as he showed me some of his hives.

Bees bounced off my hard hat as they divebombed us, the intruders. Others crawled on my overalls, but I just moved calmly on and if any of them gave their lives to sting me, I didn't feel a thing.

Fascinated with the working of the hives, I soon forgot to be scared of stings. The queen crawled around laying eggs, which is pretty much all she does, while a procession of worker bees - all female (the males, called drones, exist only to mate with the queen) - flew to and fro, dropping off their collected nectar and pollen.

Other workers looked after the eggs laid by the queen, carried out a bit of hive housework or made sure the honey was kept at the right temperature.

"Look behind you," said Brice as I stood sweating inside my protective gear, watching him remove honeycomb from the hives. A cloud of bees was hovering at my back, unsure of what to do since I was blocking their established flight path. I stepped aside and they buzzed back into the hive.

I was not the only problem for the flying bees. When the hive is disturbed, many bees take flight that have never before left the hive, so do not know their way around. To help them, the others gather at the hive entrance, and use their wings to fan the queen bee's pheromones out, creating a scent trail the lost bees can follow home.

It hadn't been such a good season for honey, and Brice was planning to feed his bees to make sure they had enough to live on through the winter.

The hives will depend on that stored honey. There are not many flowers in winter and even if there were, honeybees only take to the air when the temperature is more than 10degC.