Ben is back, with a new edition of the Bees with Ben podcast! A scheduled break of around 2 weeks
quickly turned into over 3 months, with a hectic season that really finished with a bang. In fact, Ben has
just pulled the last boxes of honey from his hives, with a fantastic season of mealy stringybark
(Eucalyptus cephalocarpa) in the Yarra Valley. Stringybark honey is relatively slow to crystallize, and
Ben has a good income stream selling honeycomb. Much of the demand is in late winter and early
spring (when people start to get hay fever), so to avoid crystallization during storage (crystallized
honey has a sandy texture and is not as attractive on the shelf), Ben freezes the honeycomb, which
does not denature the product and results in perfect honeycomb once thawed.
Ben has also recently been busy controlling European wasps around Melbourne. These pests not
only have a painful sting but can give the local honey bees a hard time. Fortunately, they have a very
limited foraging radius - only about 150 metres - so it is not usually too difficult to locate their nest
sites. European wasps are extremely invasive, and a colony is capable of producing around 50
queens. Plus, they love warm weather, and with Australia heading into a new phase of el nino, it’s
likely to be a very busy season ahead.
After 3 years of wet and windy la nina weather patterns, Australian beekeepers are all too familiar
with the need to provide supplementary food to bees, so it is particularly appropriate that Ben’s
guest in this episode is George from Mineral Bee (www.mineralbee.com.au). Although now a
resident of Sydney’s northern beaches, George originally hails from Limerick in Ireland; he
remembers being fascinated by his neighbour’s beekeeping activities, and acquired his first hive at
the age of 8. He explains that in Ireland, honey bees hibernate during winter, and the hives are
constructed somewhat differently to cope with the colder environment. Irish bees are adapted to
the climate and are quite black and a little more aggressive than Australian honey bees. In Ireland it
is impossible to avoid supplementary feeding, but sugar syrup alone has none of the minerals and
trace elements present in honey or pollen; Mineral Bee was born out of a desire to create an
additive which would make sugar syrup equivalent to honey. Rather than use synthetic ingredients,
an entirely natural and organic product was developed using minerals and trace elements sourced
from seawater. These are carefully extracted by a process which avoids denaturing or degrading
these essential substances. The result is a product which, when added to sugar syrup or drinking
water at the rate of 10ml per litre, mirrors the mineral and trace element content of pollen and
honey. And the bees love it!