I’ve not yet travelled to Australia – Oz, as some here in Canada call it. We who have never seen Oz can only picture the place with the same sense of awe that the scarecrow had for the Emerald City. I’ve been lucky enough to see a few fascinating places, but Australia remains on my bucket list. It’s on my list partly for the kangaroos, but mostly for the honey flows.
As a child growing up among bees and beekeepers in North America, the idea of year-long honey flows under eternally blue skies held a fascination. The closest I could get to living in a honey-bee-Shangri-La has been here in western Canada. I like it here, but I’d still enjoy indulging in raw eucalyptus honey, freshly scraped from a drippy burr comb pulled out of a burgeoning 8-storey hive while a koala looks on.
Australia conjures many images. For some people, the crocodile hunter, Steve Irwin, comes to mind as the quintessential Australian. But my own legendary Australian is someone few have ever heard of – Rob Smith.
Back in the fifties, Mr Smith kept bees in Australia’s western forests. One year, he produced an average of 762 pounds of honey from each of his 460 hives. That’s right, a 762-pound (345-kilo) average. Many of his hives made a thousand pounds of honey. His bees were all in one big apiary, in a remote forest 300 kilometres south of Perth.
The unassuming flower of the Karri tree . (Credit)
Smith set up a small camp, complete with an extractor. He lived among his bees in the apiary. He extracted almost every day and put the emptied boxes back on his hives. The empties were refilled by the bees and emptied by Smith over and over again. This went on for 7 months. Finally, after months without rain, the blossoms on the karri trees dried out and stopped secreting nectar. The bees quit making honey. Rob Smith and his hives moved away.
Since then, others have claimed impressive honey crops, but I don’t think anyone ever topped Rob Smith’s production. It may be hard to believe that single hives could make 762 pounds of honey, but it has happened here in western Canada. Canada has a much shorter season, but for several consecutive years my scale hive produced over 400 pounds annually. My 
scale hive’s best day was 33 pounds. The best week was 143 pounds net gain of honey. A few of my individual hives yielded over 600 pounds (I kept track.) – that’s a barrel of honey per hive. (And there are better beekeepers here than I. I’m thinking of some of the masters around Nipawin, Saskatchewan, who ran 2-queen colonies. There were also spectacular crops in Alberta’s far north Peace River area.) One year, the average for my entire outfit was 360 pounds – but that’s still just half of Smith’s enormous crop!
Smith surely holds the world’s most astounding result for an apiary. I sent notes around Australia a few years ago to see if the legendary Rob Smith was more than a legend. From Bill Winner, a corporate Beekeeper Services Manager:
“We can confirm the average production of 346 kilograms (762 lbs) per hive from 460 hives. The beekeeper’s name was Bob Smith from Manjimup, Western Australia. The honey was Karri. The year was 1954.”
Mr. Winner adds: “This figure is confirmed by R. Manning Land Management Journal Vol 1 (5) P24-26, in a table provided as Fig 1. in “Honey production from the Karri with Redgum & Jarrah.” Stating that commercial beekeeping commenced in 1936 with reference to Smith’s crop in a box titled “World Record”.
Manjimup, Smith’s town, is in Western Australia state. About the same time that Smith was doing the improbable, other beekeepers were doing well on the other side of the continent, too. Beekeepers there often produced five-hundred-pound honey crops. This is not happening anymore, according to friends in the country. Commercial beekeepers these days may run a few thousand hives in locations where a few hundred once made those phenomenal crops. Commercialization, deforestation, and global warming have cut into those legendary crops.
Seventy years ago, the Australian National Film Board sent a crew to follow a couple of east coast beekeepers, two ex-servicemen working for a honey outfit in New South Wales. The film crew made an excellent 10-minute documentary that really gives a sense of what beekeeping was once like. But you will also see much that hasn’t changed at all – except perhaps the size of the honey crop.
Here is the 1947 video, Bee-keeping on the Move:
We are having weird, weird weather here in Alberta. It’s dry as a desert and almost as hot as one. Since January, our temperature has stayed well-above normal. Ten degrees above normal, in fact. And that’s embarrassing.
Queen Elizabeth commands tens of thousands and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day? That might be an editing error. Dan Graur, a biologist in Houston, discovered that Reuters News Service once required that all stories about “the queen” should henceforth refer to her majesty as Queen Elizabeth. Thus, instead of “the queen and her horse boarded the queen’s yacht,” reporters must write “Queen Elizabeth and her horse boarded Queen Elizabeth’s yacht.” Well, that’s good, respectful policy. In theory. In practice, it threw a spanner in the works.
We started the program inside a classroom. I made a 30-slide Powerpoint which featured bees, flowers, and children working with bees. (For a kids’ Powerpoint, use just one picture per slide and just two or three large, simple words. Don’t clutter the slide with wordy details and excess photos. This advice goes double on presentations for adults – they have even shorter attention spans.)
Benny is a big, stuffed, adorable bee. He’s a boy, just like the bees causing concern in the picture on the white-board behind me. “Boy bees, like Benny and the drones on the screen, don’t have stingers.” I used this as a starting point for bee safety. (“Girl bees can sting if they feel threatened.”) I began a quick overview of bee anatomy. Even the smallest of the kids knew that bees have three main body parts. I described the head as the brain, eyes, and mouth of the bee while the thorax is like a huge muscle that powers the wings and six legs. The abdomen (for the kids’ presentation) is mostly a stomach and a stinger. The kids were fascinated that bees have three sets of eyes. I didn’t go into the way polarized light can be sensed by a bee’s third eye, but I did touch on ultraviolet, comparing the bee’s extra colour vision with the high-pitch sound perception of their pets – something these kids understood.
The presentation continued like this. After a few more slides, the teacher dressed a child in the little bee suit which I’d brought. Meanwhile I passed around a new Pierco frame and a new small copper smoker. We talked about these, but mostly I wanted the kids to physically connect with what we were doing.
Back inside the classroom (where the children were counted), I distributed handouts with bee cartoons to be coloured and trivia questions to be answered. The kids liked these but were even more interested in the small rectangular strips of new wireless foundation I gave them. This is always a big hit because they notice the waxy odour and hexagonal pattern right away. I caution them not to eat it, but I know that some will and I know that wax is harmlessly ingested. Giving wax is better than giving honey (which beekeepers sometimes distribute) because it’s not sticky and parents are not going to call with complaints about their youngster’s blood sugar and dietary restrictions.
Brag time. We just got home from the big Calgary science fair competition. My 13-year-old won three awards. Here’s the kicker: his project was called Saving Honey with Sound. His experiment was based on sending ultrasonic energy waves into combs of granulated honey, attempting to liquefy the honey without using heat and without melting the wax comb.
Here is what I learned from him. The idea of using ultrasound to reverse granulation works, at least as part of a small-scale experiment. It may even have commercial application, but my son is not totally convinced. He used speakers which emitted 18,000 hertz sound waves at just over 100 decibels. (By the way, at such a high frequency, the sound is inaudible to humans. There is no risk of hearing damage – we asked an auditory physician before we allowed the boy to start.) After seven days, there was some liquefying. He told me that if he had bigger speakers and if he had an amplifier that could generate a higher frequency, the results would have been more spectacular. That’s what he thinks would be required in a honey operation if a beekeeper wants to extract any combs which are crystallized.
Bad Beekeeping Blog 