Kintail Honey and Apiflora New Zealand

Two substantial beekeeping companies, Kintail Honey and Apiflora NZ Ltd, have jointly exported large quantities of live bees each autumn for over 20 years. Between 18 and 20 tonnes of bees go annually to Canada with about 10,000 bees weighing one kilo. The process of planning queen supply, bee supply, packaging, assembling, palletising, transporting and air freighting bees and making sure they are sedated and fed well for the journey, etc, is a wonder to beehold. 

Kintail Honey is a long established beekeeping enterprise with a home base in Takapau and satellite sites in Te Puke, the Wairarapa and the Manawatu. From around 11,000 hives they produce several brands of high quality honey and provide seasonal pollination services to orchards particularly in Hawkes Bay, Te Puke and Masterton.

James Ward and his two sons run the Takapau base with shareholding managers running the satellite units. From its beginning in 1947, the company has produced queen bees for its own use and for the past three decades for export to many countries such as the UK, France and Korea. In the early 90’s James was invited to supply live bees to Canada, and in 1993 he joined forces with Steve Weenink of Apiflora in Tauranga to form one of the country’s largest bee export businesses.

Some people may think that exporting bees would deplete New Zealand of an increasingly scarce resource, but that is not the case. Bees finish their pollination and nectar gathering tasks by February, and after that many of the foraging bees die off leaving small numbers to overwinter and survive until the following spring. What James and Steve do is harvest the bees from February through until mid-May and send them to Canada.

In James’ case he starts planning around November, checking that his queen and live bee suppliers will be ready when the time comes, arranging to have packaging made and getting in supplies of food needed for the bees on their journey.

Late in February the first shipments are prepared and sent away. James explains:

“In late summer when the bees have finished gathering honey, there is a huge mass of them that would just naturally die off, so we take the honey from the hives, varroa treat them and then two weeks later shake some of the bees out over a funnel that leads to a capture box,” he says.

“We have to ensure we get a mixture of young and old bees because they will become the nucleus of a new hive. At this time we can get up to 2 kg of bees per hive whereas by the end of April the weight has dwindled to about 750g.”

An excluder is used during the shaking process to separate out the queen and also drone bees, which are put back in the hive. A queen from another source may be put with the export bees or if buyers want to use their own queens a pheromone strip is put into the export box as a substitute. A jelly-like food is put in each box to sustain the bees over the journey.

The bee-proof packaging is made of cardboard with gauze on one side to provide ventilation. Packages are stacked in rows on four separate pallets with space between rows and a larger space down the middle, all on top of a large airline pallet. The 637 packages per shipment need to be tied together securely so that they don’t move during handling and transport. Four pallets are then bound together to make one large package for airfreight with cardboard corners and an over-net. The shipment has two tiny electronic thermo-recorders placed strategically in the pallet giving a minute-by-minute record of the temperature during the journey.

James drives his pallets to Auckland airport in a refrigerated and CO2 controlled truck, arriving in time for the Vancouver direct flight. The bees are stored in Air New Zealand’s chiller until departure, then within half an hour of being loaded into the aircraft hold, blocks of dry ice are placed across the top of pallets. The heavier-than-air gas drifts down, having a chilling and calming effect on the bees.

In Vancouver the receiving agent separates the four pallets and oversees onward transport of them in refrigerated trucks to the buyers. Most bees go to seed canola producers in Southern Alberta and to honey producers in Saskatchewan and northern Alberta. The early shipments stay in Vancouver for cranberry and blueberry pollination.

In the past, Steve and James have supplied bees to Korea, but the arrival of varroa in 2000 put a stop to that. However, demand has grown for New Zealand bees in Canada even though they are a different strain to the Canadian bees and adapted to a milder climate. Buyers often prefer to use their own queens because theirs can survive colder conditions, so the use of the pheromone strip is an essential part of the many consignments.

Although honey production and pollination are Kintail Honey’s main businesses, the bee exports are a profitable sideline. James says that getting everything together for each shipment could be a logistical nightmare but because they have been doing it for several decades “somehow everything just seems to fall into place”. However, “you can never be complacent as there is always a variable or a curve ball to catch you if you take your eye off the ball,” he says.