A survey released this week estimated 13% of the country’s almost half-a-million bee colonies were lost last winter — about 63,000 colonies.
There was an increase in colonies dying from varroa mite — an external parasite that can weaken or even destroy colonies.
Otago Gold Honey beekeeper Carlee McCaw said varroa was becoming a bigger issue for honey producers, but there were many variables in keeping bees healthy.
‘‘It doesn’t matter how well you take care of them ... part of it is you just kind of do your best to look after them but they’ve kind of got to manage themselves to a certain extent, especially over the winter period.’’
She said there were only so many treatments to fight the varroa mite and beekeepers had to be careful not to use too much of one as the mites would become resistant to it.
She estimated work had at least doubled over the past few years for beekeepers.
‘‘You can’t afford to just leave them for a few months and just go back and check. You’ve got to be constantly looking at them.’’
The honey season had not been great in the South this year, she said.
‘‘So the hives are potentially not going into the winter quite as strong. Interestingly enough, though, that doesn’t necessarily indicate that we’re going to struggle with varroa because we’ve seen super-strong, really healthy-looking hives be completely gone come springtime.
‘‘And other hives that you go, ‘oh, that’ll struggle to survive’, are going great guns by the time you get down to spring.
‘‘All you’re doing is trying to manage nature in a particular direction, and we all know that managing nature doesn’t work particularly well. So we do what we can.’’
She said many people had got into producing honey in past years, with mānuka a particular favourite, but it was not alway a success.
Others were wanting to have a hive to help out the environment. But there were rules to follow and she questioned whether they were fully complied with.
‘‘I certainly think that whole promotion of getting a bee colony, put it in your back garden, we’ve all got to save the bees — actually didn’t necessarily do us any favours unless people were doing it the right way.’’
Plenty of research was being done to find a way to combat the varroa mite.
Russell Marsh, of Marsh’s Honey in Ettrick, said every beekeeper in the country would have been affected by the varroa mite. The country was still in the early days in trying to understand the mite.
Varroa mite, an insect parasite, arrived in New Zealand in April 2000.
The mite had increased the workload for beekeepers, which was continuing to climb.
‘‘You’ll never get rid of it. You have to do a lot more. We’re already dealing with climatic conditions and price fluctuations and things like that but then you go and load varroa mite on top of that. It’s certainly put the whole industry under some pressure,’’ Mr Marsh said.
A third-generation beekeeper, he said he did a lot more intensive work than his grandfather or father.
‘‘It’s time-critical now, much more than it used to be in the old days. Like my grandfather — he kept his honey supers on for a long time before he extracted them.
‘‘But now we can’t do that because we’ve got varroa mite and we need to be managing the hive accordingly at that time of year. So we have to process a lot earlier than what we normally would have.
‘‘Now it’s either the owner-operators working a bit harder, or you’re employing a bit more labour to get through it.’’
