Better Beekeeping for Better Honey
Better Bees is Australia’s oldest bee breeding program, established to generate more productive, less aggressive bees for the Western Australian bee industry. These are the kind of bees that you could have in your garden and run past with a mower without them attacking you.
According to Kev, bees from the Better Bees program also produce a higher-quality honey for a number of reasons. Firstly, they have a more continuous work rate – more bees in the hive collect more honey daily so it comes into the hive at a higher rate, rather than coming in a trickle. The whole process is more effective. And, because they’re so calm, they don’t run around on the frame so work on producing great honey, rather than being distracted by what’s going on around them. They are also more hygienic, keeping their hive very clean, which translates to much cleaner honey with less impurities.
You can tell the difference between Better Bees brood stock and other bees by their great colour and strong brood pattern. They have very distinguishable yellow stripes, whereas the darker bees tend to be more aggressive.
We joined the Better Bees program in 2019. Esperance Honey is proud to be one of a handful of members recognised for the excellence of our breeding stock.
Each year, over two months, we travel from our apiary located in Esperance to Rottnest via Fremantle. The first trip is for our annual general meeting, where we make plans for the coming breeding season. The second trip involves us taking up our drones, then the queens. The fourth and final trip is to pick them up after mating.
While Rottnest is obviously a very relaxing environment to have the breeding program, it’s not all pubs and Quokkas when we visit – Rottnest was the location chosen for the program because there are no feral bees, so no chance that the integrity of our breeding program can be compromised. A lot of hard work goes into preparation for the trips with our internal breeding program. Once we’re there, we’re focused on making sure that the bees get the best care possible. Though it’s fun being there with a great bunch of beekeepers who share our values.
Kev just came back this week from our initial meeting for the 2020 program. An exciting new development is that we will start using an app developed by one of the other beekeepers in the program to track the raw values of what the queen behaviours and characteristics are. This will allow us to create more traceability in the stud line and understand more about the genetic diversity of bees.
Our local queen breeding program for 2020 started off with a bang! This past week, our beekeeping team grafted 17 bars of queen raising cells to raise queen bees with high quality genetics. Once hatched, they’ll be mated with our own drone stock and then transferred into honey production hives as mature queens.
In other news – the season has finally started to break! We’ve had a lot of rain this week and more anticipated. And flowers, carrying large yields of honey, have started to blossom everywhere.
Bring on the honey flow and the new cycle!