Take Five With Esperance Honey - Kevin Macneall

Many of you will be familiar with our honeys and what we stand for but for those who don’t know, and to give all of you a little more insight, we thought it would be valuable to introduce you to Kevin Macneall, the founder of Esperance Honey. Kevin grew up with a love of nature from a very early age, a love that he continues to nurture through Esperance Honey and his dedication to growing the awareness around some of the environmental issues specific to our local area.

Tell us a bit about your background – where did your interest in nature come from?

I grew up with nature and my parents were always deeply involved in nature, and so were my grandparents with their farming background in the early days in Denmark, when they cleared all the land by hand. When I stayed on the farm as a child, that was what we were immersed in. Walking through the Karri forests, hunting yabbies and camping as a child with Mum and Dad on really wild beaches, remote places that were hard to get to… it was awesome. 

How did you get started with beekeeping? 

When the fishing industry started to collapse, my mind was already moving into other areas and Vince Evans had some bees, so I helped him out a few times. Then we had a swarm in the house, so we cut them out of the house, and I had my first hive. It sort of just happened from there.

I know that Esperance Honey was a part-time gig for you for a few years – when did you decide to make it your career? 

That transitional stage took quite some time. I mucked around with a few bees and then slowly got bigger and bigger and it wasn’t until I had about 100 hives that I had been slowly building up… So, the effort got put in and it took us a little while still but finally I started getting some big hits and started moving forward with it. 

I was a commercial fisherman before, so for me to leave the ocean was a big step on its own, I didn’t think I’d ever, ever leave the ocean. And then I played around with some market gardening, but my property would go under water in the winter, so I still had a winter period that wasn’t productive commercially. 

The bees, though, just kept re-inventing where they were… and then my mate wanted to come with me, so I had my first employee and that’s when it really turned around to double the output of work effort. 

You had two people doing the work of caring for the colony and moving the bees…? 

Yeah, and we had three loads of sixty. Everywhere we went we got three lots of good honey, it didn’t seem that difficult. So, we just kept going, we just kept building hives the whole time. 

So, lots of years building on hives?

From three loads of sixty hives, the pivotal time when we really started ploughing forward came when John Davies retired, and I bought his truck. And then because we had a truck, we could start moving 180 or 200 hives at a time plus tons of water. Then we were totally mobile right throughout the state and that’s when we started taking on big honey flows anywhere.

Were there any difficulties you faced at this point, when you had the truck and good honey coming in? 

Yes. Even though we had good hive numbers, the quality of our bees could have been better because we were buying queens in. The biggest difficulty we had was actually realising that we needed to start our own breeding program. And once we got the breeding, once we got the mental understanding of “Right, we have to start breeding our own queens,” once we started doing that, it was full steam ahead in every department. 

Just that one thing really made a big difference to your whole system?

Yeah, so queen breeders always have a line-up. You’ll buy your queen, wait and then you get what you’re given. They come down by post, so they were well-travelled and some of them weren’t quite the liveliest by the time that we got them. We found that the take and the longevity that we were getting out of them really didn’t relate back to the dollars that we were putting in to purchase them. And John Davies and Steve Davies sort of pushed us into the point and Roger Stchabotar showed us how to graft and said, “this is the path you need to take,” so that was the path that we took. We started breeding amazingqueens! By the hundred! 

How have your expectations been met through that change, looking back from now to when you realised that breeding the queens was the next big task?

The first queens that we started pulling out were just, so exciting! And to see the grafts all work and see the cells all get raised out properly, drawn out properly and fed properly and then to actually go start catching the queens as a weekly task was just so awesome. And to go and catch 100 queens in a week to put through your system was just… we were just seeing hives filled with bees. 

What does it mean for your system now to have your queens producing so well and of such high quality?

That process took quite a while as well, to get the bee quality up to where it is now. We started buying queen bees from the Rottnest breeder bees’ program. We moved into buying some stud line bees and really getting the quality. And then we were using the best out of our own system and then the stuff that we were grafting from was so beautiful that the whole system has just moved forward in a huge way. Yeah.

The high-quality bees, amazing quality floral sources, that’s all feeding into the quality of the honey that you’re producing?

Yeah, the final result is just having gorgeous bees that produce the best honey in the world. And the breeding is the start of everything – once you’re breeding good bees and you get onto good nectar; you produce incredibly good honey. The bees bring it in quick, they dry it out and it ends up being as good as you can get. And we’re talking mono floral sources of honey as well, not mixed. What I mean by that is, where we go for the Redgum, it’s the majority of the flowers, 90% Redgum, so it’s pretty easy to get a pure redgum honey. It’s the same thing up in the Goldfields, we have some pretty heavy flowerings. For example, the Merrit and the Stricklands Gum, it’s just an individual species that flowers during a distinct period and you can really target the best. So you monitor when it’s going to start, when the first buds open and it’s going through its’ cycle. Yeah, and just get the best honey in the world. 

Today, Esperance Honey provides an income for yourself and two other full-time staff members. Yet there seems to be some uncertainty around the security of your floral resources. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Yeah, I have two wonderful staff – Jeremy Black and Tyler Boon. I think between us we’ve got five kids still in school. They’re both full time and they really do a wonderful job. Tyler’s about to get his truck licence so I’ll have my third truck driver – everywhere we go, we like to have two truck drivers. 

And the floral sources… we’ve had some terrible droughts. We’ve also got some really high incursions of dieback. But really, the biggest thing is these fires. Not getting fires put out and prescribed burning. There’s not enough respect for what’s left of the woodlands, because it’s a very small area and we’re actually moving toward a time when we might not have a lot of it left. The age of it is so old that the recovery period of it is a really long time. 

And with the Mallee fields, backing onto the farmland, some of them are really unique, with a whole heap of Mallee fowl and other fauna. The prescribed burning there is really, really tough to see because the recovery period for that could be over 40 years or more and the likelihood of it being tampered with again prior to its maturity is really very high. 

The banksias along the coast as well, there’s only very small pure stands of Banksia speciosa, which hold some of the biggest colonies of honey possums and birds and this is getting tampered with too, by prescribed burning. I don’t think the resources have really been looked at correctly and the management is fading towards white man suppression of the bush. 

What’s your response to the news this week that WA will be the first state to have a fire training program?

Very good. I don’t think we need much more fire, but I think it’s very scary because from what I’ve seen… we all need some training. What we need is each site to be assessed on its’ own merits because there’s some rare flora and fauna out there now that’s just got nowhere to live. It doesn’t matter who burns it, it’s still burnt.

It's certainly heartbreaking to observe. 

Some parts of it, the only way you can talk about it is, the bush is being destroyed. The honey is just a secondary thing for the environment. If you don’t have honey, the wildlife is going to struggle, it doesn’t matter. Even if the trees are there, if they’re not producing, the wildlife is starving. The Chittick at the moment is suffering dieback everywhere we look and just to lose that one species of plant, there’s just thousands of acres of it that’s dying, the birds and animals that feed off that will really suffer.  

What are you doing to overcome this challenge? Is there anything that anyone else can do to help out? 

I’m always constantly talking with DBCA and sort of trying to get the awareness level of what we have going. Also, always talking to the farmers to be aware of what they have around them as well – how old it is and how old it should be. I’m just taking a lot of photos and talking to as many people as I can. I think… it’s just awareness, I’m trying to create awareness of what we’re doing with Esperance Honey, of the quality of the honey that we’ve got, just trying to share the knowledge that we have with the general public. 

And hopefully, there seems to be more awareness of what’s happening all the time and farmers are slowly coming on board as well. With these droughts, everyone seems to be thinking, it’s getting hotter and it’s getting drier. We need to cover this land and we need trees to cover it. 

Climate change is becoming a more accepted conversation?

Yeah, there are very, very clear signs – anyone can go out there and have a look at it, walk through a thousand acres of burnt bush in the middle of summer on a 40C day and basically, you will get cooked. That’s what it’s like for the wildlife, for the whole ecosystem. When you walk through it and it’s covered with tall timbers and you can sit down and have a snack, not even bust a sweat and it’s all shaded, nice and cool, with lots of birds and wildlife. But if it’s burnt black, the temperature rises, dust and dirt, it’s unliveable for many, many years until it finally gets its canopy back. 

Are there any other avenues for you to raise that awareness and communicate about what’s happening?

There’s a few associations starting to get on board too, like The Mallee Fowl Association, they’re very open to caring for the old bush. Denmark Environment Centre is getting them on board and getting a bit of a push. In Esperance there now is the Esperance Climate Action Group.

Do you think it’s something you need to be concerned about for the longevity of your business? Is that the main driver of you getting behind this and all the time that you’ve spent on this? 

My passion for this is definitely deep and I’ve spent many nights awake thinking, “how can we better manage this bush? There has to be a better way to look after this environment.”

But it’s so technical nowadays – we’ve got very, very little old growth bush left and some of these areas really need to be fire free now for generations. Once you’ve burnt that… you know, these prescribed burns they’re doing with helicopters and fuels, it’s just heartbreaking, really. The fires are too big.

For the beekeeping, it’s definitely a major driver. But my heart really goes out for the wildlife as well. We’re the canary in the goldmine: if the beekeeper dies, there’s no way the wildlife is gonna survive. I mean, if I can’t run bees in that bush, the wildlife is struggling. 

Tell us a little bit about what the future holds for Esperance Honey – what is your vision for the next five years?

Every day, the more knowledge we get, the better we get at creating honey and managing our bees. We just wanna get some of the visions that we see of the environment and some of the beautiful honey that we bring out of the environment to everyone. There’s no way we’re gonna stop. Esperance Honey is gonna keep going, keep ticking away, a day at a time… beautiful honey for everyone to have and an awareness of how special our environment is down here. It’s very, very unique. We’ve got endemic species of eucalypts in very small pockets but they’re producing incredible honey and we’re still collecting that. Banksia speciosa is found nowhere else in the world but here and we’re housing the largest population of honey possums in the world. 

We’ve got lots of stuff coming in the pipeline; young kids who will hopefully start beekeeping. A new processing facility in the pipeline with a tasting room. Some great honey.

Any particular honey that you’ve got your eye on? 

Actually, a couple of excellent little bits and pieces are coming up… but I’m going to keep them under my belt at the moment. It’s been really tough because we’ve had two particularly difficult years of drought and the northern areas above us, between Esperance and Kalgoorlie are very dry, very scary to see how dry that country is up there. So, we’re actually a little bit unsure of where our next big honey flow is gonna come from, but we have our ears to the ground as we speak. There will be some surprises for us, but once we get it, it will be a lovely surprise for everybody.