Bushfire and drought force thousands of beekeepers south

Beekeepers are moving their hives down from Queensland to Victoria in droves in a desperate effort to keep their colonies alive.

Moving home: Queensland beekeeper Bryce Jensen unloads bees at their temporary home at Lancefield. He has since left for Hamilton, in Victoria’s Western District, in search of more flowering trees and warmer overnight temperatures. Picture: Zoe Phillips

BUSHFIRE and years of drought have forced beekeepers to move as many as 10,000 hives from Queensland to Victoria in a battle to keep their bees, and livelihoods, alive.

While the industry is yet to compile numbers, an early estimate has put the southerly migration of hives at between 6000 and 10,000, but Australian Honey Bee Industry Council chair Peter McDonald said that figure could be much higher.

He described beekeepers’ long-haul trip in search of flowering forests to feed their bees as an act of desperation.

“They’re running a business. The further you have to move your hives, the greater the cost. If you have flowers close to home, you stay there. It just makes good financial sense. These are desperate times because of the impacts of fire and drought,” Mr McDonald said.

Queensland beekeeper Bryce Jensen, who runs Jensen Beekeeping at Kingaroy in southern Queensland, left home in October heading for the southern states when his hives started dying.

“A lot of our forests are severely degraded after a few years of below-average rainfall. The trees started to die and then my hives started to die. We probably lost 5-10 per cent of our colonies before we left Queensland.”

NEWS: Jensen BeekeepingBees arriving at their new home in Lancefield. Unloading bees at dawn.Pictured: Bryce the beekeeper. PICTURE: ZOE PHILLIPS

Initially his plan was to relocate his 900 hives to the Snowy Mountains or East Gippsland. Fortunately – considering the path fires took over summer – he chose the Riverina in NSW, but it was overcrowded with other beekeepers also looking for a food source so he headed to Hamilton in Victoria’s Western District.

Mr Jensen said he spends two weeks with his hives before taking the honey back home to process, with transportation costs wiping out any profit.

“We’re keeping our bees alive and our men employed and paying bills. We can’t let our girls die because if you lose your bees you’ve lost your whole business,” he said.

Goldfields Honey owner Joh Lockwood, a major honey packer supplying supermarkets across Australia, has moved about 4000 of his hives from Orange, NSW, where the business is based, to various sites around Ballarat.

“I move a lot, chasing flowers, but because the south coast (of NSW) was burnt and NSW is in such bad drought, we had to go further afield to find food for the bees,” Mr Lockwood said.

“We might not have made profit doing it, but its been so tough we have to go down there (Victoria) to keep the bees alive and healthy.”