An article of interest to some, perhaps:
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Good news for beekeepers in Western Australia 
An interesting read and only proves what we already know, bee keeping research is under funded and the honey deserves a higher price, even to hobby bee keepers. Hobby bee keepers have a considerable financial investment even in just a few hives and the associated equipment and yet some are just giving their honey away. We under value our pure honey.
regards
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I’m glad for West Australia! The states are flooded with honey of questionable integrity from another country.
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Funny you should say that as we are also flooded with honey of questionable integrity also. The majority of the commercial beek WA honey is exported to China and then rice syrup, er, honey is imported from China, blended with a bit of Aus honey and marketed as Aus honey. It’s a disgrace.
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another disgrace is that they plan to or are chopping down vast swathes of beautiful native forest to make substandard low value wood products- and prop up a handful of subsidised jobs in marginal electorates. They are destroying things without even knowing what they are really destroying.
actually that’s more than a disgrace- it is ruinous short term thinking that future generation will bitterly weep over.
Australia has cleared enough land! It must stop and be reversed.
Here in SA we wiped out 96% of the mallee country. The 4% that we left was mostly because it was hard to get at. Now a lot of that land is ruined by rising salinity and soil erosion. It will take millennia to restore it to anywhere near what it was. Salinity is a huge issue in WA too.
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Just take care that those Manuka corporations don’t make people cut down native trees for the manuka fad and short term big income.
This thread sent me on a tangent. I/we learnt something new today. We both naturally thought that Nullarbor was an Aboriginal name. It’s actually Latin for no trees. Null = no & arbor = tree.
A bit off topic, I know.
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that would be the height of stupidity- as some our natives have been shown to have higher medicinal properties. Also I am sure there are millions of acres of relatively unproductive cleared land that could be planted with Manuka.
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It appears that it’s easy to do the maths because in N.Z. they are planting around a thousand trees per hectare. So for every million trees planted, a thousand hectares are required.
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After a quick google search, 100 hectares = 1 sq. kilometer, therefore a MILLION Manuka trees would occupy 10 sq. km.
This is the part that blows my mind. It would be fair to say that the foraging bees can potentially cover an area of 50 sq. km. That is 5x a million Manuka trees. One sq. km. (2% of the possible range of the bees of a colony) contains one million sq. meters. That means we would have to take one million steps if we were going to walk over an entire sq.km. by putting one foot in each square.
Next time someone says I’m planting something in my back yard for my bees, think about those figures.
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