Meet the beekeepers at Tocal

We will be in our usual place under the eaves of the dining hall.

Members, experienced and beginners, will be there to talk to you about bees and beekeeping.

If you are contemplating venturing into the hobby, talk to member beginners because they know better than anyone what there is to do and learn and they know what the club provides in terms of support, mentoring and structured teaching.

There will be honey for sale and you can try it before you buy. You are guaranteed to like it because it is untreated, just filtered.

You won't find a varietal honey, honey from a particular floral source because bees of amateur beekeepers keep their bees in one place and the bees forage on a variety of flowers.

We put the bees in a good spot and tell them, "Now you go and find it". And they do, but they do not discriminate. On an individual foraging flight they focus on one variety of flowers, but there are many bees and many flights to exploit the available sources of nectar and pollen in their four or five kilometre range. Some 400 trips are needed to produce one teaspoon of honey!

An amateur's honey is therefore a blend – but it is blended by experts, the bees. Professional beekeepers take truckloads of bees to where the honey flow is, to a forest of eucalypts in bloom, to a canola crop or an orchard so they can boast that a particular batch is dominantly from that floral source.

A highlight of the field days is the Friday school day, when kids of all age groups visit us in numbers.

We hope we entertain and enlighten them but they certainly entertain us. The youngsters with their eager faces ask searching questions, like (pointing to the live bee display case), "How do you get them in there?".

Or, when told that the queen bee is the mother of all the bees in there, "How does she remember all their names?". 

With the rapidly growing interest in Australian native bees there will be information available and colourful posters to buy.