Revolutionary Beekeeping success to be celebrated

Revolutionary Beekeeping owner Grant Engel.

The success of Kerikeri inventor Grant Engel and the 50th anniversary of the National Agricultural Fieldays next month will be celebrated in the Bay of Islands town on Saturday.

Fieldays' officials will be at the Old Packhouse Market in Kerikeri Rd from 8am-1.30pm for a free sausage sizzle, family-friendly activities and games.

Radio host Jamie Mackay from The Country Show will MC the celebration and Doug Avery, author of The Resilient Farmer, will be speaking at the event — the third in a series of build-ups happening across the country for Fieldays at Mystery Creek near Hamilton on June 13-16.

Grant Engel's story debuted as a 30-second television commercial during Country Calendar on TVNZ 1 on Sunday.

When he was growing up on a dairy farm in the Wairarapa, bees were the furthest things from his mind. Now, they're his livelihood and the inspiration for his business.

Engel is the brains behind Revolutionary Beekeeping, a mobile stainless steel harvester that enables beekeepers to extract honey straight from the hive, instead of the more traditional method of transporting frames from hives to an off-site processor.

As a child, Engel visited Fieldays and was inspired by the agricultural inventions and new technology on show. He decided that when he grew up he'd someday return with an invention of his own.

Years later, after moving from Wairarapa to a dairy farm in Kerikeri, Engel couldn't help but notice the region's focus on bees and honey.

He started dabbling in beekeeping, and got to thinking.

"I realised that taking honey away from the hive and processing it was much like getting a dairy cow and driving it to a shared facility where it was milked and then taking it back to site — it didn't make a lot of sense.

I thought I could come up with something different."

Engel did come up with something — a device enabling beekeepers to harvest honey by putting each hive frame through a machine quickly to extract honey, right next to the hive. Harvesting honey on-site also removes the risk of spreading disease between hives.

With a prototype under his arm, Engel entered the Fieldays Innovation Awards in 2013 and won the Launch NZ category for products ready for commercialisation and launch to the New Zealand market.

Since 2015 Revolutionary Beekeeping has taken off. The business has hives and beekeepers across the country, from Northland to Canterbury, with support from big agribusiness organisations including Landcorp and sustainable dairy farming fund Southern Pastures. It has also expanded into collecting and brokering honey directly from commercial beekeepers, enabling them to make profit from their honey.

Engel says the success is largely down to being on the same wavelength as their customers. "They want beekeeping that protects the health and sustainability of bees, and so do we. That's really important to us."

Engel is also passing his passion on to the next generation of sustainable beekeepers, his daughters Isla, 8, and Belle, 5. "They're really curious and interested. They have a hive each and little beekeeping suits, and they're always saving bees inside and letting them out."

Fieldays CEO Peter Nation says Engel's story is one that resonates with him.

"So many families and young children attend Fieldays every year, and you see them walking wide-eyed through the Innovations Centre.

"Like Grant Engel, we expect that in a few decades' time, those kids in gumboots at Fieldays will be the same ones showcasing an invention that could change the face of our industry."

National Agricultural Fieldays will hold its 50th anniversary on June 13-16.