Denille Banham, the co-owner of Costa Honey in Kempsey, has struggled to come to terms with the loss of her business.
She sent 480 beehives to Griffith to fulfil pollination contracts and another 300 to Crescent Head. It would have been a windfall season, were it not for the varroa mite.
“Now both these areas are in red zones. The hives are set to be destroyed regardless of whether they have varroa mite or not,” Banham said.
“That’s our entire business between those two sites. It’s taken 23 years of blood, sweat and tears to get to this point.
“They’re like family to us, our bees. How can someone come back from this?”
The varroa mite is a sesame-seed sized parasite that has wreaked havoc on the New South Wales honeybee industry since it was first detected in surveillance hives in the Port of Newcastle in June last year.
In the past month the pest has been detected in hives at Euroley, Nericon, and Balranald in the Riverina; Euston in Sunraysia; Newcastle and Singleton in the Hunter; Tamworth in New England; Blackwall on the Central Coast; Vineyard in the Sydney basin; and Cuttabri in NSW’s north-west.
These hives had all been transported from areas around Kempsey, where they were fulfilling pollination contracts, before the infestation was discovered. All areas where the mite has been detected have been declared red zones.
The detections at Balranald and Euston were close enough to the Victorian border that emergency zones were extended into that state last month. It is the first time an emergency zone has been declared outside NSW since the outbreak began.
To date there have been no varroa mite detections in Victoria, the state’s chief plant health officer, Dr Rosa Crnov, said.
Banham’s beekeeping shed is now located within a red zone. The emergency order, issued by the NSW government last week, means that bees are unable to be kept in any red zone – which now includes Kempsey – for the next three years.
The NSW and federal governments have announced an $18m reimbursement package for beekeepers affected by the outbreak, but Banham and other commercial keepers say that’s not enough.
“The compensation, we feel, is on the minimal end of the scale to what it actually costs to rebuild a hive,” she says.
“It’s wiped our entire business out. We don’t have anything to fall back on, and we now have no income and a mortgage to pay and two little kids, ongoing business expenses, and we have nothing left. It’s all gone.”
More than 280,000 hives have been destroyed since the mite was first detected 14 months ago. As of this month there have been 250 properties listed as having an infestation. Eradication zones – red zones – now cover more than 1,683,000 hectares, or 2% of NSW’s landmass. All honeybees within red zones have to be euthanised, whether the varroa mite has been detected in their hive or not.
Bees within emergency surveillance zones, marked in purple on a map updated daily by the NSW Department of Primary Industries, must not be moved unless they have an approved permit issued by the department.
Benjamin Durie, a commercial beekeeper from the Humble Hive Collective in Maitland, lost his hives in the early stages of the varroa outbreak last year.
“You get compensated for the hardware. You’re compensated for the bees. But you then lose any potential revenue from those sites,” he says.
“So for me I lost a rose farm, I lost a vineyard and a brewery, where I would regularly run talks and classes.
“It multiplies when you lose the platform. You’re not just losing the bees or the potential honey revenue, you’re also losing the opportunity to make more. And to beekeepers that’s really hard.”
Emily Middleton is a journalist in central-west NSW
