ELAINE REEVES

WE’RE all familiar with the image of beekeepers puffing smoke at hives as they collect the honey. The idea is to calm the bees so they won’t be aggressive and attack the hive raider.

It works because the bees respond to the smoke as if there were a bushfire approaching. Cripes, they think, we will have to be moving to a new home. They start storing up as much honey as they can to establish a new hive and in the meantime, hunker down until the danger has passed.

What, I wondered, has been the affect on bees and honey production of so much smoke around from real bushfires for so many weeks.

I discovered this is not just a story of a fire emergency. This catastrophic season for our honey industry began before the bushfires and its affects will continue for years to come.

Hives have been lost. Yves Ginat of Miellerie Honey has lost 20 hives near Lake Pedder. He says for about 15km Scotts Peak Rd is burnt out on either side.

Two years ago, Robbie and Nicola Charles of Blue Hills Honey, at Mawbanna in the North-West, lost hives and all but 20 per cent of their income to bushfires. Tasmanian Beekeepers Association president Lindsay Bourke says once again Blue Hills has lost hives to fires.

Beekeepers have been unable to get into areas such as the Florentine Valley or the forests around Geeveston, and have not been able to check how their bees are faring.

Seventy per cent of the honey produced in Tasmania relies on leatherwood trees. They are unique to our island and flower reliably in January and February. And unlike mainland apiarists, ours have no other flowers to move their hives to after the leatherwood tails off in March each year.

But things were not going well even before the first dry lightening struck the ground. January broke records for heat and dryness — we had about a fifth of the average rainfall for the month.

Leatherwood is a temperate rainforest forest tree. It likes a little dampness.

But says Lindsay Bourke: “The forests are dry, it crackles under your feet.” Leatherwoods did not begin their predicted flowering in early January.

Lindsay said he explored forests in the north last week and is hoping that leatherwoods above 600 metres “might yield something for us” because lower down they are not producing nectar.

Yves Ginat said flowering was sparse in the south and on hot days the nectar dries before bees can get to it.

Yves, who has been beekeeping for 18 years can’t remember a worse season, nor can Peter Norris, president of the Southern Beekeepers’ Association who has been collecting honey professionally for 15 years.

Lindsay remembers 1982, when the leatherwood crop was down 70 per cent.

Yves says he can rebuild hives and struggle on with only 10 or 15 per cent of his usual income for the year, “but the big loss is the loss of the wilderness”.

It might take five to eight years for vegetation for wildflower honey to come back, 15 or 20 years for good tea-trees (from which comes manuka honey) but hundreds of years of leatherwood.

Leatherwood trees do not take hundreds of years to mature, but they are very particular. They prefer acid soil and ash leaves the soil alkaline.

They also like plenty of light and after a fire eucalypts quickly spring up, blocking the light.

Peter says he has seen ground that leatherwoods should absolutely love where none have grown since the 1967 fire went through. Until a forest giant falls and creates a clearing, the leatherwoods will not grow up.

Beekeepers would like to see only selective logging in leatherwood areas — rather of clear-felling, burning and sowing, which has been the practice since 1964 and, says Peter Norris, contributes greatly to the dryness of the forest when each of 150 eucalypts per hectare consumes between 80 and 200 litres of water a day.

Under the watch of governments of every stripe, forestry has seen the reduction of the original leatherwood resource cut back to about 20 per cent.

These fires have lost forestry about 50 years of production, which will put more pressure on the trees that are left.

Beekeepers are pessimistic about leatherwoods being saved for them. All of which makes the coming hike in the price of leatherwood honey the least of our worries.