Busy as bees

THE FIFTH GENERATION OF A WAIRARAPA BEEKEEPING FAMILY IS PRODUCING HIGH-GRADE HONEY FIT FOR THE BREAKFAST TABLE AND THE MEDICINE CABINET

P HOTOGRAPHS

Greytown Honey comes in glass. “There was no one else using glass when we started,” says Karly. "Ben was in kindy then and was learning about plastic’s effect on the environment, so I didn’t feel it was the right thing to use the cheap option and pack in plastic.”

ALEX AND KARLY POLASCHEK’S Wairarapa home, just past the landmark Tauherenīkau pub, has been overtaken by bees. Within its walls are stacks of colourful fabric squares ready for spreading with amber-hued beeswax, boxes crammed with glass jars of creamy honey, and various stickers, testers and sample pots, all of which create the domestic muddle familiar to small-business owners.

“It’s our office that’s the worst, especially as it’s market season,” says Karly, edging into the small room crammed with bee-business paraphernalia. “I’m working from the sofa.”

Together, Karly and Alex (and their children, Kate, 8, and Ben, 10) are Greytown Honey, producing various grades of awardwinning mānuka, wildflower, kāmahi, and multiflora honey, along with a range of cosmetics, candles, lozenges, and wraps.

While Alex is new to bees - he was a machinist in the air force - Karly is her family’s fifth-generation beekeeper. The family’s early20th-century entry into beekeeping is a little lost in time, but Karly believes it starts with an underage great-great-granddad who wanted to have a few pints. “I remember Dad talking about how, back in England, Aaron Simmonds made honey mead to sell to the local pub so they’d let him drink.” The love of bees passed through the generations, including to Karly’s builder dad, John Simmonds, who took up bees as a hobby, going full time after a stroke, from which he largely recovered.

Nine years ago, Karly and Alex moved to Greytown to help John run his honey business, Simmonds Honey. “We came with the view that we would work alongside him, with him mentoring Alex. But with us here, Dad loved beekeeping again, so we started our own business.”

John gave the couple 20 hives, which they split and split again; today they have 1000. When the hives are full in summer, that’s about 80 million bees under their care, which isn’t many - apparently. But it’s enough to be more than a full-time job; one Alex and Karly largely fulfil themselves, occasionally calling on seasonal labour during the honey harvest, which can stretch from November to March. If awards are anything to go by, they’re nailing it: Greytown Honey won three gold, two silver and two bronze medals in the 2019 Outstanding New Zealand Food Producer Awards, with its kāmahi, mānuka 200+ MGO and 400+ MGO honeys winning gold.

Their success is even sweeter, given that a good harvest is entirely weather-dependent. A warm summer means the trees and flowers

produce lots of nectar, while a chilly one means less. “If you compare honey with other farming, a sheep farmer’s returns are dependent on lamb prices, but they will always have lambs to sell. For us, we also have price fluctuations, but in a bad season, we’ll have almost no honey to sell. The last couple of harvests weren’t amazing, and one recent summer was so hot the mānuka bushes went into survival mode and dropped their flowers,” says Karly.

Happily, the past harvest was good as the Wairarapa had an abundance of nectarproducing blooms. Their hives produced 29 tonnes of honey - about twice the harvest of the past few years, which was collected, pricked, filtered and creamed. “We couldn’t get the honey off as fast as the bees were bringing it in,” says Alex. A lot of it tested as monofloral mānuka, significantly upping returns.

But an already tough job wasn’t helped by the Covid-19 lockdown, imposed when the harvest was far from finished, and the Polascheks’ seasonal labour opted for a repatriation flight to Germany. “We had to push on alone. My mum was in our bubble, so on big days the children stayed home with her and Alex and I got the honey off and processed. With all our farmers’ markets cancelled, it was doable with just the two of us,” says Karly.

After lab-testing each batch’s chemical markers to decide the dominant pollen [see above], Alex and Karly taste them to decide what honey will be bottled into glass and sold under their premium Greytown Honey brand. The rest is bulk-sold to other honey suppliers for export. The pair want to sell more of their own honey to reduce the risk of relying on bulk sales, partly by expanding overseas markets and launching a new cardboard-clad supermarketready brand, New Zealand Eco-Honey.

“We packed our first honey in 2011, offering a very basic range, and concentrated on bee health and building our knowledge,” says Karly. “Then we built our own honey factory, with all the necessary compliance, and spent another year further perfecting our honey processing. We finalized our Greytown Honey branding, which is focused on the gift and tourist market. Then, for the past couple of years, we’ve concentrated on the lifestyle shows, talking to our customers and getting feedback. This year, along with our Eco-Honey brand, we were going to go all out for the export market, starting with Australia, Germany and Japan.

“We are getting some honey into Japan, and we are still planning to launch New Zealand Eco-Honey, but Covid-19 has made it significantly harder to get traction.”

Ten-year- old Ben takes an active part in the family’s bee business and has his own hives, saving his sales for future flying lessons. The smoke masks the pheromones the bees secrete to indicate the colony is “under attack”, allowing beekeepers to work without coming under attack themselves.