No two seasons are the same for apiarist Neil Bingley, who follows flowering eucalyptus to feed up to 50,000 bees in each of his 1700 hives.
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With his brother David and son Brett, he works his bees within a 400-kilometre radius of Canberra on yellow box eucalyptus, crops and weeds. He says a bee visits up to 500 flowers to fill its honey sac.
On ideal flowers, the honey flows. But early flowering and poor pastures this season have left lean pickings. The Bingleys worked ironbark species beginning with grey ironbark on the south coast, broad-leaved ironbark and finished on mugga ironbark at Parkes.
Ordinarily the bees will slow down and begin to cluster in March, but this autumn has been anything but average.
"We have hives at Sutton Road; we fed them with sugar syrup in February. We normally give them a feed and they are right till spring,'' Mr Bingley said. "But it's been so warm, they have consumed all that and we have had to feed them twice.''
Instead of contracting and clustering for winter, they have been moving about and burning carbohydrates.
Poor seasons and rigorous weed control have stripped much of the countryside of protein-providing weeds and the price of honey has jumped by more than $1 to $4 or more a kilo.
Although the Bingley's production is down about 20 per cent, it is far better than many other producers in their industry.
''There's other guys I know who have hardly turned an extractor this year,'' Mr Bingley said.
NSW Department of Primary Industries technical specialist, honeybees, Dr Doug Somerville, says poor seasons have caused supplies to fall as well as fewer people in the industry.
"We have lost about 30 per cent of commercial bee keepers on our registration system in the last seven years. There is a tendency for some guys to get bigger, which is an agriculture industry trend, but that creates problems because it's really hard to find people to work in the industry, because bees sting.''
Once the primary source of production, Paterson's curse had succumbed over the past five years to bio control agents.
"The amount of Paterson's curse honey produced and delivered to big packers has become a trickle, '' Dr Somerville said.
Mr Bingley said it was too late to feed bees any more this season because the weather was cooling. They would not eat and would instead cluster until the shortest day, June 21.
''You can nearly bet your house on it that the queen will start laying again after the 21st of June, '' he said.
''This coming year I can't see much prospect on eucalyptus. With the warm weather over the last six months, everything has flowered a month early, eucalyptus and all.''
Returning from Parkes he saw yellow box eucalyptus between Goolagong and Cowra flowering, knowing it was the wrong time of year.
"You can have nectar in a flower and if it is the wrong make up of sugars, bees don't work it. It's like having water in a cup.''
Bingley's bees will pollinate almonds near Darlington Point in the Riverina in August, and many other apiarists will head to the Murray River region to pollinate a huge spread of almond orchards.
NSW Apiarists Association vice-president, Mr Bingley supports increasing a levy on honey producers from 2.3 cents a kilo to 4.6 cents to fund better bio security and scrutiny of the industry.
He said governments were scaling back involvement in the industry, which was being left to support itself.