"Now that we're in spring, we'll be doing a honey harvest - which is fantastic," she said.

Only now are beekeepers starting to assess the damage of three dry seasons.

Her enterprise, Bulwarra Bees, was badly hit by the drought - but now the rains have brought flowers and the bees have brought honey. A complicated and wonderful ecosystem has resumed.

"We had no honey because there was no rain. No rain so no flowers and no nectar," she said.

Nectar is the sugary substance which bees suck from flowers and take back to the hive to process into delicious sweetness - but no nectar, no honey.

But now the nectar is back, particularly the blooms on the eucalypts near the hives overlooking Bowral on the Southern Highlands.

It's been a hard slog.

"It was around about August last year when we first noticed. We went to extract some honey from the hives and there was no honey," she said.

The drought had stopped the flowers blooming and blocked the whole process.

"To overcome that, we had to make sure the bees survived winter," she said.

"We started feeding them a sugar solution, and we did that for weeks on end. Then at the end of the winter, we saw that their strength had built up."

For the bigger commercial operations, the strategy of survival was different.

They could move hives to the flowers. As the drought hit some blooms, beekeepers and their bees took to the road.

Oddly, bees fared better in towns, according to Greg Dojchinov, a researcher at CSIRO in Canberra and also a beekeeper.

There is a greater variety of flowers in cities, he said, so if drought hits one, others are more likely to be available, particularly in parts of towns and cities settled by people from southern Europe, whose tradition is to garden and grow blooms.

"Canberra is really, really good," he said. "The suburbs have lots of gardens. Southern Europeans love their gardens. There's always some diversity so bees always have something."

Beekeepers get used to the roller-coaster of nature, the lurching from feast to famine.

Just before the drought hit three years ago, one of the best seasons in decades happened. Not only was there rain, but it came in the right pattern - rain when the flowers needed it and then no rain when the bees needed the nectar from the pollen (rain would have taken the pollen to the ground).

"That's like getting a 'bingo'," Mr Dojchinov said.

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Apart from the drought, there were also fires in many beekeeping areas, including Bowral and Canberra.

"December struck and the bees were having to endure the smoke, and that was the time we should have been harvesting honey," Deborah McLaughlin said.

"We had these skies which were orange. Then miraculously we got the rain which was beautiful. It was just incredible."

The two dams are back up to full. The frogs are loud, "and most importantly we've got the eucalyptus which is starting to bloom".

For the industry as a whole, though, recovery from drought takes years. On one estimate, commercial beekeepers lost 9,000 or more hives in NSW and the ACT.

Not only does that matter for the honey but also for the wider agricultural system. The labour of bees also contributes to the profitability of another 29 crops, including lucerne, carrots, cherries and cotton.

But already beekeepers such as Mrs McLaughlin are anticipating the next drought.

She and her husband have increased the size of the dams in readiness. The bees just soldier on.