How did honeybees get to New Zealand?

When Mary Bumby brought European honeybees to New Zealand in 1838 she became our very first beekeeper.

Bumby made the six-month sea voyage carrying two hives of live bees from England eventually landing in Hokianga.

Outside of bee-keeping circles, little is known about Bumby, but a new novel aims to shed some light on the pioneering apiarist.

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In Miss Bumby’s Mission, Auckland novelist JM Laird, tells her story.

Laird, a hobbyist beekeeper herself, used Bumby’s diaries, letters and historic records to tell the tale.

“When I first found out about what Mary Bumby had done, travelling from England to New Zealand on a sailing ship with two hives of bees, I couldn't really understand how she'd done it or why she'd done it,” she told RNZ’s Nights.

Bumby and her missionary brother John left England in 1838 for New Zealand.

“That's before the Treaty was signed, and having two hives on a sailing ship going through the equator, where it was hot, going into the southern seas, where it's really cold. All that water that would have washed on board, it's still incredible that they managed to do it,” Laird says.

Although Laird had no information about how Bumby kept her long-distance bees alive, she has made some educated guesses.

“I decided that she would have had to keep them supplied with sugar syrup.

“She also would have left a lot of honey in the hive when she took it. They left at the end of their summer, when beekeepers usually take the honey away from the bees and use it for our own purposes.

“She would have left the honey in the hives so they could then raid it themselves and eat it up as they needed it."

Making the journey was an act of considerable courage, Laird says.

“To come to a land that she really knew nothing about - she'd heard various stories - but this was shortly after the Musket Wars. So, it was still a violent place.

“The Bay of Islands was known as the hell hole of the Pacific. It was not a particularly enticing place to come to.”

Initially, Laird planned to write the novel in the third person, she says.

“I tried writing it as a novel, looking from the outside in, and it felt very remote, because I was talking about somebody from a completely different time, 180 years ago, and it felt like I was just reporting it.

“And so, then I had to think again, and I wrote it as if I was looking out of her eyes and experiencing the conditions that she was in.”

European honeybees must have been of value for her to nurture them over that long sea voyage, she says.

“In those days, it wasn't just the honey that was important. It was also the wax.”

Thanks to Bumby, New Zealand now has world-famous honey, she says.

“We've got pohutukawa honey, thyme honey, rata honey, clover honey.”

Perhaps our most famous honey now, was thrown away back in Bumby’s day, she says.

“Manuka honey that has become so popular was throwaway honey because it tasted too strong, and it was very hard to get out of honeycomb.”

Miss Bumby's Mission is published by Northern Bee Books.