Did you know Queen Elizabeth II is a fan of pohutukawa honey?
Nick Wallingford, a former president of the NZ Beekeepers' Association, has been digging deep into the industry's archives.
Photo: RNZ/Carol Stiles
Wallingford is knee-deep in a project to preserve New Zealand's beekeeping history,
He is also a beekeeping tutor, is digitising copies of beekeeping magazines dating back to 1914 and is also archiving the minutes of Beekeepers' Association meetings.
Wallingford says New Zealanders are some of the biggest consumers of honey in the world and bee science has helped save an elephant.
An interview with Nick Wallingford
Nick Wallingford Photo: RNZ/Carol Stiles
Beekeeping began in New Zealand as early as the 1830s, Wallingford tells Country Life.
"Bees actually came here with the niece of a missionary to Northland, called Mary Bumby, appropriately, who brought some colonies of bees with her from England.
"It would have taken months and I've heard stories of another early shipment where they had to pack them in ice, to try to keep the bees from flying on a boat sailing across the ocean. In order to keep the bees in the colony, they chilled it so the bees wouldn't fly so readily."
When did beekeeping become commercial in New Zealand?
"Beekeeping became commercial about 1910. It is often said that 1914-1915 was a critical year because that was the time when the country produced more honey than its inhabitants would consume. So the industry was faced with the choice of either cut prices and sell it for nothing - which is often what happens - or export the surplus. For many years the worst thing that could happen to the industry was a good crop, everybody had to get rid of it. That could wreck the industry.
"So we have always had enough for New Zealand needs, but to maintain a good price we have had to ship it overseas. So we've been doing that for over 100 years now."
How much honey do we eat in New Zealand?
"Our consumption in New Zealand has always been considered high. It's about two kilos per person. I would have to see the latest figures but we eat a relatively high amount of honey compared to a lot of other countries, probably because of the historical nature; almost everybody used to know a beekeeper in the town nearby.
"The whole concept of creamed honey is pretty much a New Zealand standard. New beekeepers learned that for a number of honeys rather than trying to keep it liquid, control the granulation so you get a nice smooth, creamy flavour out of it. Anyhow, almost all honeys will granulate but sometimes they granulate so hard you can't even put your knife into it. So beekeepers learnt to control the granulation.
"An American Professor Dyce came over here some years later and saw what New Zealanders were doing, went back and wrote a nice scientific paper on it and codified the right temperatures and the quantity of starter and got it patented. You know the Dyce process ended up paying for the Apiculture studies at Cornell University for the last 50 odd years. New Zealand got exempted from all of that, we actually got the patent overturned eventually for the fear that we would have to pay a premium to Professor Dyce in order to sell our creamed honey into England."
How do you cream honey? I don't know.
"Creaming involves taking liquid honey; honey is liquid when it first comes out of the beehive, then you introduce a starter and the starter is just other honey. That is you find some honey that's granulated the way you like it. And then you introduce a certain percentage of that into the big vat of honey and you stir the starter around. The crystals actually replicate themselves. So you're mixing in a starter honey and then you're cooling it; you try to keep it at, I think it's 14 degrees C for the time that it's actually granulating so that it can granulate as quickly as possible. Which is what makes for the fine grain.
"There are only a few honeys that don't granulate, one is Tupelo honey from Van Morrison fame. (He once produced an album called Tupelo Honey). Tupelo honey doesn't ever granulate."
Apart from creamed honey, how else has honey been sold in New Zealand?
"Another method of selling honey going back into the 1930s and 40s that was prominent in some parts of New Zealand was they would take a 60 pound can and fill it full of honey and let it granulate and let it granulate rock hard. It would be so hard you couldn't eat it easily. Take it out of the tin, and then cut it with wire the same way you'd cut cheese and they would cut it into a block about the size of a 500-gram block of butter. So you could buy a pound of honey, looking like a pound of butter wrapped in your wax paper and carry it home and hope you got at home before it got warm. That was a popular way of selling honey in cooler places like Canterbury and Southland rather than in the North Island.
"When they got home, I guess they just had to do their best to scrape it with a knife. This is depression era and afterwards so this way, packaging costs have dropped next to nothing. You can keep your product cheap enough that people could enjoy it and you can stay in business.
Has New Zealand always sold honey as varietals or was it originally sold just as honey?
New Zealand has always paid close attention to the floral sources that are available because many of them are quite unique in flavour. So areas like Canterbury, for instance, produce some excellent white clover honey, while on the West Coast - about once every seven years - there's a good Southern rata honey flow. So we've gotten to know where the flows are and when.
"We've tried to maximize the opportunities of the individual label varieties of honey...
"Not long after I first started in the industry in the early 1980s. I went to meet a beekeeper by the name of Trevor Palmer Jones. Palmer Jones was a beekeeper back in the 30s and 40s. But was more well known because he became New Zealand's chief beekeeping scientist in about 1942-1944. So he was responsible for the beekeeping science from that time until he retired in the late 70s. He and his wife were arguing in the evening, I was there. She was a very staunch Buddhist and felt that he had messed up his karma forever by killing guinea pigs. At the time to test for the presence of tutin, poisonous honey, the only way they could do it would be injecting it into a guinea pig. It turns out that he didn't like killing guinea pigs much either. He was wanting to try and find some way of bringing them back to life if you will.
"So he discovered that barbiturates were an antidote to the toxins that are in toxic honey. So in the middle of nowhere, he gets a phone call from someone who says 'my elephant is dying'. Apparently, it was common practice back in the 40s and 50s to transport circuses around on trains in the back of trucks. And two or three elephants died over the years, stretching their trunk out of their open cages and grabbing tutin leaves off the roadside and got poisoned. The circus manager had a poisoned elephant who was quite sick and went to the vet and the vet just happened to have read the story about the barbiturates. So they ended up giving him about a bucket full of barbiturates and they saved the elephant's life.
"Mostly beekeepers manage the risks related to tutin by the careful placement of their hives to keep them away from the possible production of poisonous honey. You have to be careful about what time of the year it is. Most times there are other crops around that bees would find much more preferable.
Who are some of the other names or characters in New Zealand bee-keeping?
"I suppose one of the most well-known beekeepers would be Edmund Hillary's father, Percy Hillary. Hillary's father was quite a character. He published magazines and published newspapers, he was very outspoken, a strong proponent for the type of marketing that he felt the industry needed through the 1930s. People who are absolutely focused on something, sometimes can be pretty hard to be around, but he was certainly a hard worker. Hillary's mother Gertrude was probably better respected as a beekeeper. She was a queen rearer. She raised queen bees for sale and bred bees to sell to other people and would often get called away to Northland or other places to give talks on how to be a good queen rearer.
"New Zealand got to be pretty well known and our pohutukawa honey got to be known because it turned out that the Queen liked that when she became the queen in 1953. New Zealand sent her some five-pound honey tins of pohutukawa honey. And so we made the most of that for several years of making sure that everybody knew that we were sending those to her. When Ed Hillary went to the Antarctic, the industry committed to supply all of the honey that he needed. So it was packaged up in tins and it has "Hillary's honey" written on it. I saw one of the tins not so long ago; there's an art collector up in Auckland, who had this tin of honey. She may have been under the impression that it was actually honey produced by Hillary. In fact, it was the industry trying to get good publicity by being associated with the Antarctic expedition.
One of the occupational hazards I guess with beekeepers is being stung. How do they cope with that?
"Beekeepers can develop allergies to bee stings. It probably is more a risk to family members. And beekeepers are a lot more aware than they were in years past. For instance, after working behind working hives through a day you should never bring your overalls into the house. There's small amounts of poison embedded in your overalls from where you've been working all day. So to put that clothing through the wash with your family's clothing is setting them up for an allergic reaction. So it used to be not uncommon to hear about beekeepers whose children were allergic to bees. So beekeepers are quite aware of it; quite a number of beekeepers will carry an epi-pen or an injection device. It's basically adrenaline, which could be used in an emergency if someone's having an allergic reaction."
