A bee sting all part of the job for this family
The odd bee sting is nothing unusual for the Clarke family members
THE hum for honey runs deep within the Clarke family’s veins.
For three generations they have been building their bee colony and supplying honey to the community.
It all started with Raymond Clarke’s grandfather, Clarence, who was a fisherman and bee keeper in Caloundra in the 1920s, where he started off with a small number of hives.
“My grandfather moved to Warwick in 1948,” Mr Clarke said.
“In the ’50s it was about 300 hives, which was a lot of bees back in those days.
“We work about 1500 hives. There’s about 20,000 bees in each hive.”
Mr Clarke now runs Clarke’s Bees and Honey in Warwick with the help of his wife, Anne, daughter Emma Hall and son in-law Alex Hall.
Mrs Hall uses honey and beeswax to make cosmetic products and Mr Hall is a bee keeper and Mr Clarke’s right-hand man.
Mr Clarke is very passionate about his job.
“I just like working bees,” he said.
“It’s a really good job, you work in the bush and you’re outdoors. We could be a thousand kilometres away with our bees.
“Not anybody can do it, you have to be cut out for it.”
Mr Clarke said collecting the honey required a gentle approach.
“You’ll always get stung but you just approach them gently. You use a bit of smoke, which calms them down,” he said.
“We go to the hive when they’re full of honey and we put a thing called a clearer board in there. The bees go out of it through a big hole on one end and they can’t get back in through the small hole.
“The next morning the bees are all gone out of it and we can just lift the honey off.
“At the bees themselves there’s a lot of manual handling but once you’ve stacked the honey onto pallets it’s all done mechanically.”
Mr Clarke said he’ll never get used to being stung.
“It doesn’t affect me much any more but I still don’t like it because it still hurts,” he said.
“But it’s all just part of the job. Some days you’ll get stung a bit and some days you won’t get stung much at all.”
Mr Clarke said in high production, usually during spring, the bees could produce 30kg of honey a fortnight.
“When the trees are flowering is the season for bees,” he said.
“When the season is right you can pull honey all year round but when there’s drought it’s more difficult.
“Anywhere from January/ February through to August this year we won’t produce any honey at all. But if we get rain it will be different.”
The bees are transported around to different areas,
❝ You’ll always get stung but you just approach them gently. You use a bit of smoke, which calms them down.
— Raymond Clarke
depending what trees are in season.
“Different trees flower at different times so we move our bees around depending on which tree is flowering,” Mr Clarke said.
“We lease forestry land from the government or from national park sites. On private property we make agreements to give the landholders honey or whatnot and the bees also pollinate their vegetation.
“We travel as far south as Trangie in central-west NSW, to as far north as Eidsvold. And then from the coast to the channel country in Quilpie.”
Mr Clarke said they could cart 280 beehives at a time – 140 on the back of the truck and 140 on the trailer.
“When my grandfather started he was moving them around in boat and with a barrow,” he said.
“But we use bobcats now and load them on pallets.
“In an area we might have four to six loads. It’s not often we put them all in one area. But we might put half in an area if it’s really good.
“But when I say an area it still could be spaced out over 20–40km. “You want to have them at home as much as possible because of costs of transporting them around.”
On average they check the bees every two weeks.
“If they’re doing really good we’d go more frequently, if they’re not doing as good we might not go for four weeks,” Mr Clarke said.
He said they had their bees around the Warwick and Chinchilla areas at the moment. “The blue top iron bark and the narrow leaf iron bark are starting to flower at the moment,” he said.
“But it’s very dry so I don’t know if it’s going to do anything until we get a bit of rain.” Mr Clarke said his favourite type of honey comes from the eucalyptus melliodora, commonly known as the yellow box.
Clarke’s Bees and Honey mostly sells in bulk to packers. “We also pre-pack some and sell it locally in different shops,” Mr Clarke said.
“We do a creamed honey as well. It’s honey beat up with a big mixer. Some people just love it. We also sell beeswax and candles.
“And my daughter, Emma Hall, makes some products including lip balms and moisturisers.”