HANNAH’S A BUSY BEE
The beekeeper creating a buzz
Iwas born and raised in Tairua, on the Coromandel Peninsula. I had a great childhood. There was always lots of swimming, beach bonfires, camping, fishing and tramping.
My husband Rory and I met at high school in Thames and we’ve been inseparable since then. I initially set out to study political science in Wellington. Rory was in Paeroa working on a dairy farm but I missed him, so after a two-month stint at a summer camp in the US, I came home and studied primary teaching at Waikato University.
We got engaged at the end of my first year of teaching and married a year later.
We were living in the Coromandel – Rory had a contract milking job and I was working as a part-time teacher and on the farm too − when we had our son Kieran in 2013.
That was followed by a move to Cromwell, where Rory got a job with a commercial beekeeper. At the same time I was teaching in Queenstown, taking Kieran with me every day, and studying for a diploma of professional photography by correspondence. We moved back to Tairua when I fell pregnant with Alice.
In mid-2016, we sold our house and spent our life savings on 16 beehives. I went back to teaching full-time and finished my early childhood teaching post-graduate diploma, while Rory (31) took over looking after the kids and built up the business. That was the start of Hunt and Gather Bee Co.
About two weeks after we bought the hives, I was stung on the hand by a bee that had flown in the window of our car. I was eight-and-a-half months pregnant with Alice at the time. Within an hour I was in an ambulance being treated with adrenaline − I didn’t stop breathing, but I was struggling!
The doctors told me I needed to carry an Epipen and to stay away from bees. I had to break the news to them that we had just bought 16 beehives!
They suspected my reaction was so bad because I was pregnant, but it has meant that I don’t have a lot of direct contact with the beehives themselves.
We started out just selling our honey at weekend markets. Now we’ve got around 200 hives and this year we produced 11,000 jars of honey, plus we’ve expanded into beeswax food wraps too.
The wraps are made with a melted blend of beeswax and resins and oils, which I paint onto fabric. They are an awesome alternative to plastic cling film and they can be reused for up to one year.
We have a small block of land outside Raglan and a shed where we operate the beekeeping business from.
We have five honey varieties − kamahi (which won silver at the New Zealand Farmers Market Awards this year), rewarewa, manuka, bush blend and our West Coast blend from Raglan. We’ll introduce kanuka in early 2019.
Kieran has a little mini bee suit and he really likes getting out with Rory to check the bees. He can use the smoker and he knows how to find the queen bee now. Alice is still a little young, but she’s really interested in the bees too.
We’ve done a few sessions in kindergartens and schools teaching the importance of bees, and our kids always enjoy coming along to those and sharing what they know.
Rory is the hunter and I’m the gatherer. He will hunt just about anything he can – deer, pigs, ducks, turkeys, goats, sheep, pheasants, fish, rabbits and possums. I was brought up pretty much vegetarian so a lot of these meats were very foreign to me before
I met Rory.
We grow most of our own veges, so a lot of my gathering is from my own garden. We freeze or preserve our summer harvest to last us through winter.
In our everyday lives, we try to make all of our purchases consciously and everything in our house is second-hand. We only use wooden hive-ware, when most people are moving to plastic frames. We also pack our honey in paper-labelled glass jars, which we buy back from our customers and refill.
Sustainability is one of the core elements of our business. Without a healthy environment, we won’t have bees, and without bees we are all in trouble.”
As told to Julie Jacobson
HANNAH O’BRIEN (30) RECENTLY WON THE NZI RURAL WOMEN NEW ZEALAND EMERGING BUSINESS AWARD