John Berry on: Rewarewa

Veteran Hawke’s Bay beekeeper John Berry goes down memory lane, exploring the sights and smells of the nectar-abundant rewarewa tree and the bounty it provides bees and beekeepers alike.

This rewarewa was budding up unusually big for May.

New Zealand Honeysuckle. Knightia excelsa.

I was looking at a young tree in autumn, maybe 15 years old, and it was covered in buds. They were unusually big for the time of year (early May, see photo). Other trees in the area had tiny buds, much more typical of autumn. However, I have seen trees in full flower in the middle of winter right by the water’s edge in Tairua harbour.

The Rewa Calendar

I love this dark, rich, red honey and I used to love producing it. It doesn’t flower prolifically every year and you roughly get one poor season, two moderate seasons and one really good flowering every four years. Unlike many honey crops you can see the buds months in advance and at least have an idea of what potential is going to be.

One area in particular I knew very well. I knew which trees flowered every year and which ones only put on a show in a bumper year. Generally speaking the bigger the trees the more reliably they flower. Just because you had buds didn’t mean you got a honey crop of course.

Rewarewa flowers earlier, October-November, than most honey crops and so is impacted more by variable spring weather. I have seen many seasons ruined by continual rain. I can also remember one year when the weather was just too perfect and the nectar was just too dry for the bees to collect. We had a few light showers right near the end and they did put on a box. I have also seen most of the buds blown off the trees. That might sound far-fetched, but that year we saw the prickles blown off gorse bushes. They were stripped on one side and, if I hadn’t seen it myself, I wouldn’t have believed it.

Rewarewa has an unusual flower and is not closely related to anything else in New Zealand. It is a coloniser species and you often see the emergent trees coming up through mānuka and kānuka. It can however grow into a fairly large tree and I have seen a trunk close to a metre through. It is a very decorative timber, although difficult to season.

Here in Hawke’s Bay vast areas were cleared and burnt for conversion to pine trees. Beautiful regenerating forest and its destruction was stupid and thoughtless. I used to occasionally help my uncle over in Rotorua and there were some huge rewarewa forests out the back of Mount Tarawera that had been growing since the 1886 eruption. Perhaps the only good that came from its destruction was the awakening of the conservationist within me.

When it Flows You Know!

The first time I ever helped take off honey properly was from hives up the back of Kawarau. They were chocka full of rewa and we got 200 boxes with three of us. I was about 14 and between the heat and the heavy boxes, it just about killed me. I was helping Wick Baker, a man who worked for my uncle and a wonderful mentor to me. I loved every minute of it.

Between erratic weather and flowering you really only get a good crop maybe once in four years, although I have seen several good crops in a row. Unless you have seen a rewarewa honey-flow, it’s hard to imagine. There is none of this visiting dozens or hundreds of flowers for the bees to get a load. Each flower cluster has around a teaspoon of nectar and the bee simply lands on the flower, has a quick slurp and goes home. The flight of bees around the hives is unbelievable, but by lunchtime has often quietened down as they have so much fresh nectar they can’t process any more. The brood nest gets so clogged out with fresh nectar that the queen can’t lay and my father told me that when he camped beside an apiary one night they were still humming madly at 11 o’clock at night processing all that nectar.

It is the only honey I know that I don’t like fresh, it has a strong overpowering odour which fortunately goes away after a few days. I don’t remember why but, many years ago, I had to shift a truckload of bees up the Coromandel in the middle of a rewa flow. It was a warm evening with a gentle breeze and if you stood on the downwind side of the truck it became hard to breathe and you felt like you might faint. Powerful stuff.

Rewarewa, aka New Zealand Honeysuckle, or Knightia excelsa to the botanists, an abundant nectar source when conditions are right in spring.

I have seen hives full up when the nearest trees were over 8km away. I have taken two full boxes off hives and checked them a week later and there were two boxes full again (but uncapped).

You would think that bees would work this in preference to anything, but up the Coromandel where the mānuka flowered at the same time they would often take that instead. In those days rewa was a real bonus because you could A. extract it and B. sell it, unlike mānuka which was just used for feed.

Rewa is an extremely dry honey and can go below 14% moisture, which can make it very slow to extract. It has virtually no pollen and for a while this made it very popular with the cowboys who liked to stretch out their mānuka supplies. It makes a very nice comb honey, but make sure you give them plenty of drawn comb so they have somewhere to dry out the nectar. Get your boxes on early, a few days late and every hive will be swarming.

Running out of Steam

Perhaps my favourite apiary was called ‘quarry’. It was over three hours from home, including half an hour down a very steep, unmetalled, farm track. If you know where the Black Stump is, it’s a fair way past that. It was Dad’s biggest site, with 50 hives and, in a good year, they would get three or four boxes of rewa followed by mānuka and occasionally tawari, plus a bit of clover.

I once ran out of steam trying to take a full truckload out and had to stop halfway up to unload half onto the ground, drive to the top and unload the other half beside the road then drive back down the hill and reload again. After that I took to taking two trucks at once and we would often get three-quarters of a load each before topping off at another apiary on the way home.

I turned 69 today and I am seriously thinking about hanging up my hive tool, but I would still love to do just one more big rewarewa year.

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.