Hives lost: 'I miss our bees'

Last updated 12:21 05/08/2015

MARINA STEINKE

As a small hobbyist beekeeper of 20+ years I can say it's a wonderful hobby to have your own bees buzzing around.

When I look at them - how tiny these creatures are and how tiny their brains must be - I can hardly believe what a wonder of nature they are.

Yes, I've been stung, and it hurts. A crunched-up plantain leave is what I put on and it immediately soothes the pain and also prevents excessive swelling.

Our two or three hives were in a secluded valley on Banks Peninsula and the kanuka honey we got was absolutely delicious. It's lovely to have something as special as unadulterated honey to share with friends and family.

For some 12 years we got good crops of honey and as a bonus our bees made sure the fruit trees cropped well, too.

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Over the years we, and many of our neighbours too, left some of the steeper hills to revert to kanuka and regenerating bush.

This did not escape the eyes of the big commercial beekeepers. It didn't take long and truck loads of hives were ferried in when the first kanuka flowers appeared around the middle of December. The area was flooded with bees. As soon as the kanuka finished flowering the hives were ferried out of the area to work somewhere else.

There are different strains of honey bees available in New Zealand. We had the orange ones who are very placid when working the hives but they are not the best honey collectors, especially when the weather is not ideal.

Our bees could not compete with the invasion of bees bred to collect honey no matter what. Our hives got robbed and a honey crop became something special, but they still pollinated our fruit trees.

When varroa (a parasitic mite that attacts hony bees) hit the South Island and then Christchurch we thought it would take a while until it spread to our secluded valley. How wrong we were.

We lost two of our three hives during the first year of varroa incursion. The bees were fine, activity was high one weekend, and a fortnight later two hives were dead and the third was dying.

I got help from AsureQuality. Tony, one of their inspectors, came out almost immediately. He confirmed varroa, also sac brood, showed me how to treat the hive and it survived and thrived.

Three years later, we again had three hives. Then came another phone call - AFB (American Foul Brood - a serious bacterial disease). An inspector had checked our hives due to AFB cases nearby and ordered us to destroy one of our hives as it had early AFB.

Destroying and then burning a hive was the cruelest thing I ever had to do. All entrances to the hive had to be blocked and petrol poured over the bees. The noise they made when they died will forever be etched into my memory.

Our other hive and the nucleus were AFB-free at the time so we hoped and continued keeping bees.

However, a year later we lost another hive to AFB and another few months later the remaining two hives were infected. All had to be destroyed.

The search for the source of the AFB infestation is still on. It has been an ongoing problem in our area, not only for the hobbyists but also for the commercials who are counting their losses.

The most likely source is unregistered hives, kept by a very selfish person who thinks they know better than anyone else and doesn't want to pay their levies.

While the AFB source persists we won't invest in a new hive.

I miss our bees.