Heart of the Nation: The Tarkine
Harvesting prized leatherwood honey in the Tarkine rainforest, envloped in a cloud of bees, is all in a day’s work for Robbie Charles.
In the wild temperate rainforest of the Tarkine in northwest Tasmania, the leatherwood trees are in full bloom right now. The air is thick with the scent of their white flowers, heavy with nectar, and the European honeybees tended by Robbie Charles and his team are having a ball. Every summer they move 1600 hives – each one containing 80-100,000 bees – into the Tarkine to make leatherwood honey, the flagship product of his family firm Blue Hills. Disturbing the hives to remove the stuff sends clouds of agitated bees into the air. Can he describe the sound? “It’s like a roar,” he says.
The 59-year-old, pictured (though exactly where is difficult to say, for obvious reasons), has been in this game since he left school at 15, and he’s still clearly enamoured by it. “I just feel at peace with the bees,” he says. Outside of the three-month honey harvest season he breeds queens, the fertile females that preside over hives (honeybee society can be thought of as a sort of communist matriarchy). Upon reaching maturity, each queen will embark on a single “mating flight”, releasing wafts of pheromones that drive the drones (male bees, which are good for sex and nothing else) wild with desire. On that single flight she’ll collect enough sperm to last for the next seeveral years, churning out 2,500 eggs a day at her peak. In case you’re wondering, all the bees pictured here are “workers” – sterile females that do all the hard yards of foraging and processing nectar, nurturing larvae and protecting the hive against threats.
In a good year Blue Hills produces about 100 tonnes of honey, much of which is exported, says Robbie’s wife Nicola, who runs the office. “The leatherwood honey is aromatic and spicy, and prized for its medicinal properties,” she says. Growing up, she and Robbie were next-door neighbours in the little town of Mawbanna, near Stanley; they now have two grown-up children who work in the business. There’s a long-running joke in the Charles family that started when the kids were little: Robbie has a habit on road trips of jumping out of the car to check on his hives without any sort of protective gear. “They all sit in the car taking guesses and making bets about how many stings I’ll get,” he laughs.
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