Tauranga City Council deals with 34 complaints about bee poo in two years

Tauranga City Council aims to simplify handling complaints about bee excrement from urban hives. Photo / Duncan Brown

By Rowan Quinn of RNZ

Tauranga City Council wants to make it easier to deal with complaints about bee poo.

It investigated 38 complaints about urban hives in the past two years – 34 of them about excrement.

The poo could create a waxy substance that was hard to get off outdoor furniture and decks.

The council’s animal service manager Oscar Glossop told a meeting complaints could be difficult to investigate and act on.

“It’s very hard to prove the bees are a nuisance and are coming from a specific place once they get to a certain number. Most of these complaints come in around spring time when bees generally are at a high activity rate.”

The rules meant staff had to decide whether to remove hives or leave them.

That could lead to lengthy appeals.

Proposed changes would allow for a more proportionate response, including education, which could avoid staff being pulled into drawn-out disputes between neighbours.

“It would take away an expectation that we would be dealing with bee poo for 163 hours in the last two calendar years of staff time, and instead make it when it was an actual issue,” Glossop said.

A council paper said urban beekeeping supported food security and biodiversity.

The rules allowed backyard hives as long as the bees were not a nuisance or causing safety problems.

The public could have a say on the proposed changes in June.

They were part of wider changes to the Keeping of Animals Bylaw.

- RNZ