There’s always a buzz of constant noise around a big city, and Auckland is no exception - traffic sirens, alarms, cheering at concerts, cruise ships docking, cars revving.
It is estimated that there are now as many as 1000 hives in the city. Each hive houses up to 60,000 bees, not all of whom are flying in and out of hives every day.
There are no council restrictions on keeping bees in the city. The only criterion is ‘no nuisance’. So aren’t the possible thousands of stings a potential nuisance?
Ponsonby News spoke to Julian McCurdy, Managing Director of Beezthingz. They have supplied nearly half of the bees in Auckland. Julian’s company leases or sells hives, and professional beekeepers contract to look after them, at least until such time as residents can look after them themselves.
There are few nuisance issues around hives in the city, Julian told Ponsonby News. So long as you keep hives out of a direct line to a neighbour’s deck or outside light, keep them at least 1.5m inside your boundary there should be few problems. Bees in the city thrive, says Julian, because there is plenty of food, and each hive produces up to 30kg of honey each year. Suggestions of bare feet and bee stings never entered the heads of those of us brought up with bees all around us. It is their relative absence in recent years that has invited the questions of safety for children and pets. Just be respectful is the catch cry.
Beezthingz has hives in a number of city schools, including Richmond Road and Newton in the Ponsonby News area. Children learn how to look after the hives, jar up the honey, design the labels and sell the honey as a fundraiser.
With his other hat on, Julian McCurdy runs BuzzTech, which is a beehive management technology company. The company has produced its own software sensors to monitor the health and strength of hives. This, statistical data can be used by people, including school children, to chart their hives' progress and measure the effects of climate change throughout the year.
We asked Julian about disease, and he admitted we’ll never get rid of varroa. However, he told us American foul brood is the biggest health threat our bees face. Hives are carefully monitored, and if found, foul brood immediately results in hives being burned to the ground to prevent spread of the disease.
Other sources of urban bees are the French Cafe, Lot 23 and the Langham Hotel. Beezthingz has plans to put hives on six more central city roofs.
There are 10,000 bees on the roof of the Auckland Town Hall. These hives were gifted to the city by the National Beekeepers Association in 2010.
Maureen Maxwell of the International Beekeepers Federation said it was important to take the issues of bees and pollination seriously. Without bees two thirds of the country’s food production would be wiped out.
Taking the pollination issue seriously is Andrea Reid and friends who have set up Pollinator Paths to enhance pollination throughout Auckland. They began with a patch in Hakanoa Reserve in Grey Lynn, and are planning a Butterfly Farm along the roadside by Mitre 10 in Westmoreland Street off Richmond Road. They will plant swan plants, nettles, clover to attract monarchs and other butterflies, and muehlenbeckia will grow up the wall of Mitre 10. It is not only bees that are critical to pollination.
Ponsonby News spoke to Warren May, owner of Mitre 10. Warren is not opposed to using the strip along Westmoreland Street, outside Mitre 10 for a Butterfly Farm, subject to ensuring his customers do not get stung, and his garden centre plants are not gobbled up by visitors from the roadside. We pointed out to him it would be largely harmless but attractive butterflies.
America is having pollinator problems with monoculture development, trucking bees all over the states to pollinate crops. Colony collapse is a problem, as bees get weak and sick and don’t eat properly.
Pull bees and other pollinators out of our ecosystem and you threaten the universe.
Farming bees can be very rewarding, the honey is delicious, but for the health of our ecosystem it’s a great environmental project to get involved with. (JOHN ELLIOTT)