‘The hum of the bees is the voice of the garden.’
ELIZABETH LAWRENCE
It’s mid-spring – swarm season – and one of our hives has swarmed, thankfully on the edge of one of our raised vege beds. Last year they congregated in the neighbour’s plum tree, hanging from one of its branches in a frothing mass. Much precarious balancing on ladders followed, until the swarm could be collected and housed in a new bee box.
The neighbour is good-natured about it though. We give her jars of honey every year and she gives us bags of plums from the same tree the bees pollinated in September.
I’m an observer in all this – my partner is the hobby beekeeper who devotes the necessary hours to checking through the hives, treating them for varroa and fretting about them. We’re all fascinated by them though – their buzzing is backdrop noise to our small suburban garden. One of my son’s classes comes to visit the hives and they write thank you letters saying they were scared of the bees at first but that the honey was delicious.
Honey bees () may not be native to Aotearoa but we are obsessed with them. The tiny creature has pollinated our cultural subconscious, thanks in part to the 20,000 or so tonnes of honey we produce each year and our $6.4 billion horticulture industry, which would be significantly less
