Outlook still sweet for manuka

KiwiBee Whanganui manager Carlos Zevallos holds a comb of honey while to the rear is Ezequiel Bellone. Photo/Stuart Munro

Manuka honey continues to have a great future and Comvita is looking for more Wanganui suppliers and planting plots with special varieties of the New Zealand tea tree.

The air was full of bees and smelled deliciously of honey when the Chronicle visited Comvita's KiwiBee Whanganui shed in Pauls Rd, Wanganui.

Natural products and beauty company Comvita is in its second season there since buying Paul Sergent's Kiwi Honey operation.

However, this summer season was looking pretty average, Comvita chief executive Brett Hewlett said. The previous one had been good while the year before had been abysmal. Productivity tended to go in a three-year cycle.

The company is in expansion mode - it already has 5000 hives out in the wider Whanganui region and is looking for more sites, and more landowners - including farmers who want hives on their properties over winter.

It's also always keen to talk to young people who want to work in the industry.

"We can offer some pretty good career paths."

The honeyshed in Paul's Rd was abuzz last week, with hives arriving and beekeepers pulling out frames of honey and scraping off excess wax and foreign bodies. The frames go to a Longacre extraction plant, where the honey is separated from wax and then filtered.

It's put into 330kg drums and sent off to Comvita's main base in the Bay of Plenty for further processing.

This is a busy time. Most of the company's 15 Wanganui staff are out in the countryside in utilities, trucks and four-wheelers, tending hives and retrieving honey.

When Comvita bought Kiwi Honey, it had 3500 hives. Now it has 5000, at 150 sites belonging to 50 landowners.

Owners are usually paid a fee and given a share of the harvest. The size of their fee depends on the quality of the site on offer. The best sites are secluded, dense with manuka and not shared with other beekeepers.

Generally speaking, manuka flowers in January, but KiwiBee Whanganui manager Carlos Zevallos said there was a lot of variation in the region. Flowering in parts of the Kauarapaoa started in early November and had already finished. In the Waitotara, it was still going on and had not peaked at Stratford.

The amount of nectar depends on night and ground temperatures, and on flower intensity. The Paraparas had a poor season this year, because flowering occurred while it was cool and windy.

Beekeepers have to keep their hives healthy. The varroa mite reached New Zealand in 2000 and can destroy entire hives. KiwiBee Whanganui keeps mite numbers down by chemical and organic methods, alternating methods to prevent mites building up resistance.

Mr Hewlett is confident about the future for manuka honey.

"If it's a fad, it's been a fad for almost 20 years, it's still growing and we still have a shortage of supply."

Manuka has become an important resource for hill country farmers, especially as forestry returns are not reliable. Cleared hill country reverting to bush tends to be under manuka for 10 to 20 years, then it is overtaken by other species such as kamahi, kanuka and rewarewa.

To ensure supply, Comvita is planting particular varieties of manuka at some sites, including one near Waverley.

Mr Hewlett said there were 32 manuka subspecies and they could be interbred - combining early flowering with tolerance for wet soils.