"Being here at Agrisea at this time of year is really good for us because we feed the bees essential nutrients alongside our nectar substitute to stimulate the queen early," explains Pacific Coast Training Institute Director Mark Hellyer, who oversees the programme.
"It simulates the nutrient flow from outside so the queen thinks it's full-on spring and she'll start to lay early."
Taking it all in was 15-year-old Blake Haycock, a Year 11 horticulture student at Waihi College, who wants to get into farming.
"I met a whole lot of people and learned about how AgriSea take care of their bees with the seaweed feed," he said.
Mark says the Hauraki and Coromandel area has among the biggest concentration of students learning beekeeping.
It's also popular in the Bay of Plenty and Otago-Southland.
The industry isn't for everyone though.
"These guys have to get in, do heavy work shifting bees and decide after the nine months if it's the right choice for them. The first time you lose a hive it's like losing a calf, emotionally it's gut wrenching but that's primary industries."
As a hub school, Waihi College makes the apiculture course available to Katikati and Paeroa Colleges, Whangamata Area School and Hauraki Plains College to Thames High, giving all students access to bee-related tertiary education.
AgriSea is a programme partner providing research opportunities, with a test apiary feeding its bee supplements alongside control hives that are regularly monitored and tested by another programme partner, Analytica Laboratories.
Mark says there's real value having commercial companies onboard. He says the study is important since bees are responsible for so much of the food chain.
"Honey is important for New Zealand because of our manuka, but there's also pollen, wax, live bees, propolis and royal jelly.
"On the other side is the pollination services of bees. For kiwifruit and avocado, securing your pollination chain is massive. If you think of the amount of kiwifruit we have in stock just over the hills from here in Katikati, the pollination has to keep up with that."
A big challenge for beekeepers tending hives is the disease Nosema.
Mark says up to 15 per cent of New Zealand's apiary production could be underperforming because of Nosema.
"There's a real interest in trying to figure out ways we can disrupt the impacts of Nosema, a fungi in the gut of bees that inhibits them from taking in nutrients," says Mark.
Analytica Laboratories is another programme partner, providing tests for Nosema, manuka DNA and traces of glyphosate, a widely used herbicide.
Another advance is satellite hive technology by Hive Mind, which allows students to log into a website to check movement of bees, relative humidity, queen activity and hive weight this way.
"It's really top end technology. We're trying to teach best practice and practical beekeeping, but the students have these people sitting in front of them that are New Zealand's experts in honey and product testing, toxins and technology."
One of the satellite hubs is in Opoutere and another in Pauanui, among the mangroves.
"The bees love the mangroves," says Mark. "We've planted this [Paeroa] site quite heavily with early flowering hebes and corokia but they love the mangroves. You can see that from the information coming from the Pauanui site."
Bee facts
You get the feeling these guys have had to evolve and adapt throughout their journey of evolution, says Mark Hellyer, about bees.
He can't get enough of bee behaviour and shared a few little known bee facts.
"They are incredibly resilient beings evolved over a long time and adapted to some significant changes."
- New Zealand has a native bee but the two honey bees we focus on are Italian and Carniolan.
- A bee really only lives for about 35 days but a queen can live for up to five years.
- The waggle dance is pretty cool, and is how bees tell other bees where a nectar source is.
- A bee's body is covered in little hairs that create a series of rakes that rake pollen back on to baskets on its legs.
