Any kid who has a play date at Cooper Mowbray’s house is in for a surprise. Rather than sitting down to play X Box, or kicking a ball around, he or she will be taken out into the back yard to meet several thousand of Cooper’s friends!
“They love meeting the bees,” says the Marist Herne Bay student. “Mum opens the hives when our friends are around so they can learn about them. When they know more about them, and see inside a hive, they go from ‘I’m scared of bees’, to ‘I love bees!’ Obvious question: Do you get stung?
Coooper staunchly defends the bees. “The only stings we’ve had are when we’ve been barefoot in the grass, and stood on a bee, and that’s our fault, not the bee’s,” he says. “We’ve never been stung when working with the hives. Even before we had hives, we’d get one or two stings each summer, so getting the hives hasn’t increased our sting rate at all.”
The family’s love for their bees was demonstrated when Cooper’s big brother Reuben was stung. When a bee stings, it dies, so Cooper was more worried about the bee than Reuben. “Oh no, you killed our bee! How mean!” And how do the neighbours feel about several thousand busy invertebrates moving in next door? Aren’t they concerned about their property value?
Cooper’s mum Stacey explains: “They’ve been great. Unfortunately quite a few bees drown in their pool, which is the most annoying thing for them. Sometimes they try to fish them out and save them. They’ll of course be getting the first pot of honey when we harvest some. Most of our other neighbours don’t seem to have noticed we have hives, which is how it should be. They’re just a natural part of the environment.”
So how did the family interest in bees begin?
Stacey did a course at MIT last year and got her certificate in apiculture. Shortly after, she bought two colonies of bees from Peter Alexander from Waiapi Apiaries.
(picture Stacey coming home after popping out to do a bit of shopping: “Hey everybody, I’m home! Can you come and give me a hand with these?”)
Stacey wanted her boys – Reuben, Cooper and Tom – to learn about bees. To know that bees have a vital role as pollinators, that they aren’t something to be afraid of. If you stay calm around bees, you will almost certainly not get stung. After all, bees have a vested interest in not stinging because they don’t want to die. If you do get stung, you should flick the sting out at the base with your fingernail, rather than pull it out by the sack, which only squeezes the venom into you.
Her passion for her bees soon transmitted to her boys, and Cooper in particular was hooked. He helps whenever his mother opens the hives, by holding the frames, taking close up photos, and using the smoker. He loves to see the bees go about their business, watch them on their flight path out into the community and back, carrying the pollen on their hind legs.
He’d love to be able to see the bees communicate. “Inside the hive, they do an amazing waggle dance which tells their sisters – all worker bees are female - where a nectar or pollen source is,” says Cooper. “They’re so smart they don’t even need a GPS system! This dance gives all the information the others need to find it – direction, distance and how much food is there.”
Perhaps the bees can sense how much Cooper cares for them. He seems to have a natural way with them, staying so calm that he happily holds the bee-covered frames, something that would induce terror in most people, with his bare hands. Indeed, he wants his own colony in the future, and top of his Christmas wish list not a fancy computer game or Ronaldo soccer boots, but a bee keeping suit.
Cooper and his brothers gained much satisfaction in helping plant the Hakanoa Reserve Pollinator Path, a great initiative which turned unused land into pollinator parks, and they’d love others to do more for bees too.
“If we all planted something flowering in our back yards we would make life much easier for bees,’ Cooper says. “Then they wouldn’t have to fly so far, because all the flying and carrying pollen is tiring for them. Even a big pot of lavender would be a nice gift for your local bees.” (BILLY HARRIS)