John Berry on Beekeeping in Hard times

With beekeepers up and down the country feeling the pinch of rising costs and honey prices well below recent highs, veteran beekeeper John Berry has some practical advice for beekeeping when the chips are down.

Despite being more a self-described “practical” beekeeper than a “business” beekeeper, with coming-up six decades in the hives John Berry still knows plenty about getting a beekeeping business through hard times.

By John Berry

Those who know me know that I am much more of a practical beekeeper than a business orientated beekeeper. Nevertheless, even I have noticed that beekeepers are struggling in the land of milk and honey. 

Hard times are nothing new, I found some old invoices from my grandfather where he was getting paid three pence a pound for mānuka honey. He survived by working two jobs, pollination and concentrating on producing high-value comb honey for the export market. Mānuka was fed back to the hives in the spring. He also built his business by buying out other beekeepers rather than making a lot of new equipment. It was cheaper to buy existing gear than to make it yourself. 

This was still pretty much the case when I first started work around the age of about five, making up cardboard dividers which kept the comb sections separate in the boxes. By the time I started work full-time at the age of 15 I was reasonably proficient in nearly every aspect of comb honey production, as well as extracting and packing honey. I was doing pollination in the evenings (assisting not driving), helping melt out old combs in the winter, and was an expert at removing the old wires from the frames and then rewiring them for further use. Some of those frames were recycled four or five times before meeting their fate in the woodfired boiler.

Wax was an important commodity for beekeepers in those days and I can remember my father telling me how, when prices were really high during the Korean War, they had melted out nearly all of their drawn combs and just put in a tiny strip of starter foundation. Many beekeepers used to store up their wax and only sell it when they had a bad honey year.

DIY

I also spent a lot of time in winter working in the woodwork shed. At the start I was helping Mr Taylor, a World War I veteran who still suffered from gas poisoning. We used to cut simplicity frames on a gang saw, which came out of a steam driven sawmill. I still use this saw.

Initially we didn’t make boxes, we only mended them, but with beekeeping becoming more profitable, especially after the abolition of the Honey Marketing Authority, we started making our own boxes as well. Everything was made from cheap offcuts from a mill that made pallets and bins. A lot of those boxes are still in use today. 

What I’m trying to point out is, we survived by doing everything possible in-house and spending as little as possible to do it.

Pollination was and still is very important and it became even more so with kiwifruit. It would be stretching the truth to say I always enjoyed doing kiwifruit pollination, but it paid a lot of bills and even allowed us to upgrade from vehicles that had hauled wood for Noah’s Ark, to trucks with power steering. They didn’t leave you feeling like someone had stuck a knife between your shoulder blades by the end of the night.

Boom Years

Things got slowly better over the years, but there were still bad years with no honey and some pretty serious price corrections. The current downturn is not the first time I’ve been offered hives for free.

The start of the mānuka boom pretty much coincided with my brother and I going into business for ourselves, but we still did pollination, made all our own gear (even veils) and ran at least 2000 hives initially – with no help, except from our wives. You had to run that many to survive and, to run that many, you had to be very efficient and only do what was needed. The secret was to do what was needed when it was needed, and we mostly got that right. 

“It would be stretching the truth to say I always enjoyed doing kiwifruit pollination, but it paid a lot of bills and even allowed us to upgrade, from vehicles that had hauled wood for Noah’s Ark, to trucks with power steering.” – John Berry.

What followed were the golden years and we were able to pay for some extra help. Varroa put a bit of a spanner in the works, but by then we had no money worries and

we ended up downsizing by 25% to help keep up with the increased workload. We even started buying ready-made frames and boxes, but ended up going back to making our own frames because we preferred them.

Cue the last decade, with beekeepers outbidding each other for already crowded mānuka sites, followed by dropping production and increased costs. Gone are the days of ‘looks like mānuka, smells like mānuka, tastes like mānuka, probably is mānuka’. All honey now seems to be tested for every expensive test going. It doesn’t make it taste any better, just more expensive.

It was all still doable until dropping honey prices coupled with varroa and suddenly it became a major problem. Some beekeepers are still surviving reasonably well, but many aren’t.

Alternate Income Sources

There are of course some alternative sources of income other than honey. Nucleus hives would seem like a bad bet given the precipitous drop in hive numbers. However, if you factor in varroa and how it is currently decimating beehives, especially amongst the hobbyists, there is still quite a healthy demand – although not $1000 a pop like some went for a few years ago.

Propolis is certainly worth saving if you are doing some box scraping. I don’t know the economics of propolis mats, and it may be quite good, but it is another piece of gear that has to be removed from the hive every time you work it, which costs time.

Pollen traps are expensive and require regular visits for collection. I have known many beekeepers who did well for a while, but it is a very limited market and is easily oversupplied. There are heaps of older beekeepers with stacks of pollen traps slowly rotting away somewhere out the back of the shed.

Pollination absolutely can be a moneymaker and around here (Hawke’s Bay) you could potentially put one hive into five different crops in a season, but it is a big commitment, takes a lot of time (at night) and, unless you’re willing to shift by hand, you need some fairly expensive equipment. You have to have good hives and, no matter how good a beekeeper you are, not all of your hives will be up to standard. There is also only so many hives you can move in a given period and sometimes everyone wants them yesterday.

Having said that, with the large drop in hive numbers (and a lot of what is left knocked around by varroa), we can probably expect a shortage of pollination hives. Just remember, demand does fluctuate. In Hawke’s Bay we used to put out more hives in green kiwifruit than we did in apples (and we did a lot of apples) and now green kiwifruit are quite rare in The Bay.

Comb Honey Conundrum

Unless you live in the deep south, forget about comb honey. The Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) have set the level of acceptable tutin in comb at the point of detection, which means that if a bee flies past a plant your comb will fail the test. All right that might be a slight exaggeration, but not by much. The level now is 1/70 the original level and, despite several letters from me, I have never had a satisfactory answer as to why this is so. They say it is for safety, but you were still allowed to sell any honey you had already packed at the old level. So, either it was safe, or they didn’t care if a few people got poisoned. My guess: it was safe.

I still persevere with comb honey in a small way, but only because I’m bloody-minded, not because I make much money at it. Don’t get me wrong, I fully support the testing of honey for tutin, it should just be set at a safe level, not the level of detection.

Keeping hives reasonably close to home and in defined areas will help reduce travel costs and time, and also means you only have to see some of your hives to have a reasonable idea about what’s going on in the rest.

It helps with workload and evening out seasons if you have hives in at least two different types of country i.e. wet and dry, or pasture and bush. 

And don’t piss off your neighbouring beekeepers. You may need their help one day and you certainly need their friendship.

John Berry is a retired commercial beekeeper from the Hawke’s Bay, having obtained his first hive in 1966, before working for family business Arataki Honey and then as owner of Berry Bees. He now keeps “20-something” hives.