Be kind to humble honey bees working for you

SWEET AS: Bee Aware Month is creating a buzz among local beekeepers.PHOTO/FILE

Northland honey farmers don't need much excuse to wax lyrical about the virtues of bees - so Whangarei Bee Club's several hundred members are taking September's Bee Aware Month in their stride.

The club gets a buzz over any opportunity to help promote and protect the humble honey bee, says spokesman and past president Kevin Wallace.

The national awareness week comes with the theme, Be Good to Bees."It's totally critical that everyone understands how important bees are and we look after them in hives because they no longer live in the wild," Mr Wallace said.

There has been a massive resurgence in backyard beekeeping, he said.

The Whangarei Club has 378 members, with over 100 regularly attending its monthly meetings. Members range from commercial beekeepers to students and people who can't keep a hive of their own but still want to practise beekeeping.

The club has 15 training hives for newcomers to learn with, a rent-a-hive system, a honey extraction plant at its Okara clubrooms and even its own ' bee zone', an area it keeps hives and "farms honey" around the Whareora Hall.

Members meet at the hall on the first Saturday of each month, at 10.15am.

Last year the club's turnover for honey alone was $138,000, with sales of other bee-related items on top of that.

The club is also involved with a Hives in School initiative in partnership Northland schools, which not only teaches children about the care of hives and bees, creating the next generation of beekeepers, it reinforces to a new generation of beekeepers how to care for the environment sustainably.

Internationally the bee population has decreased significantly, which has far reaching effects due to bees' key role in pollination.

While bees here are faring much better than those in other countries, problems affecting the population include the varroa mite and use of chemical sprays.

National Bee Association chief executive Daniel Paul said bees support the country's agri-industry exports to the tune of over $5 billion annually, help grow one third of all the food Kiwis eat and help home gardens flourish.

"We need to plant bee-friendly plants for them to feed on, be careful with our use of pesticides and insecticides and we mustn't bring honey or honey products from overseas into New Zealand," Mr Paul said.

Those products could contain biosecurity pests that put a large percentage of New Zealand's economy, biodiversity and jobs at risk, he said.