Judging " Native " Honey !

It has long been assumed that when the first fleet arrived in 1788 they brought with them the European bee, along with cows, sheep, pigs and horses which quickly overwhelmed the fragile soils and bush of this dry continent.

The Indigenous people who had lived here for fifty thousand years before that European arrival knew all about honey and it was a great but rare delicacy in their nomadic lifestyle.  The native Australian bush bee is not as prolific as its European counterpart and its hives produce only about six hundred millilitres of honey each harvest, but it is fast becoming of interest as our use of pesticide in agriculture thins the number of European bees nurturing crops.

For the first time the honey from native bees has been included in competition at Sydney's Royal Easter show.  The craft of bee keeping is complex and involves the skill of knowing where to move hives to gain the flavours that come from the type of plants that are usually described on the labels of honey sold in the shops.  This hive movement usually follows seasonal crops around the country and is an integral part of the crop pollination that forms part of farm culture.   The farmers welcome bee  keepers and their hives because without them there is the prospect of crop failure.

Because this is the first time native honey has been judged at the show the selection has been placed in the hands of the chief researcher at the University of Queensland and there are eighteen entries awaiting his decision.  He has chosen to reveal some of the techniques he will use when he faces those eighteen entries sitting in bottles awaiting his grading.

Shining a light through the honey is a good way to assess its clarity and brightness, and listening for the " pop " when the jar is opened will indicate if it has started to ferment.  Like judging wine it is important to sniff the aroma, and finally the ultimate test is what the taste buds reveal.   Taste is what consumers seek when they take honey off supermarket shelves and taste has a big influence on the price asked.

The humble bee is something we take for granted and some people get annoyed to find bees buzzing around in their garden, but the food industry would be devastated without them and a mixture of global warming and our use of pesticide is resulting in hive collapses and increasing areas where bee numbers are insufficient to complete the pollination process.

Bees in the city represent the surprising number of citizens who are self taught and have a hive of bees nestled away in suburbia.  It becomes more than a hobby and to many of these people the bees are as constant a companion as their pet dogs and cats.   The people with multiple commercial hives usually keep them well away from the cities and concentrate on crop rotation in the farming centres.

Hopefully, these native bees may be more hardy than their European counterparts and may adjust to global warming.  Native bees have been here for more than fifty thousand years and now it seems they are destined to fill a growing gap in the agricultural scene.