On World Bee Day, honey lovers are being urged to reject the nine million kilograms of cheaper imports shipped into the country last financial year and buy pure Australian honey to support Australian beekeepers.
Honey labels must include the country of origin, but one bare-handed beekeeper has gone to extra lengths, including filming drone footage, to show customers exactly how far his honey travels.
Hinterland Bees' Apiary to Pantry project uses QR codes on each bottle of raw chemical-free honey to pinpoint which one of nine apiary sites on the Sunshine Coast it was harvested from.
"The QR Code will allow you to scan the jar, find out where that honey comes from, look at how many hives we have at that location and what the important nectar sources are," apiarist Scott Whitaker said.
"It's about highlighting that some of the honey on your supermarket shelves has really long food miles on it."
By using bee colonies that he has cut out from the walls of houses, or rescued as swarms, Mr Whitaker and his wife Allyson Reynolds have built up more than 150 hives to produce Maleny Honey.
The work was documented on video.
"Some of the larger suppliers, they'll have their own hives, but they will also pack other people's honey, so traceability is really difficult in those situations," Mr Whitaker said.
"To trace it back to its exact source for us is exciting and we've had fantastic feedback from the people that have looked at this so far."
In the 2021-2022 financial year, honey and wax production in Australia was valued at $132 million (ABARES).
But through added value to agriculture, pollination services were worth more than $14.3 billion.
Australian Honey Bee Industry Council chair Stephen Targett said by that buying Australian instead of imported honey, consumers could support the crucial work beekeepers do.
An AgriFutures Australia snapshot listed 35 horticultural crops as dependent on honeybee pollination including almonds, apples, avocados, blueberries, pears, some sunflowers, broccoli, brussel sprout, cabbage, canola, carrot, cauliflower, celery, clover and lucerne.
Incredible impact
"For all your cucurbits; your pumpkins, melons and cucumbers, it's a 400 per cent better fruit set by having European honeybees sitting next to the crop," Mr Targett said.
"What a lot of people don't realise is that I can get a huge amount of pumpkins off a fairly small area if I have honeybees there for the environment.
"That's good because that's a lot of land that I do not have to plough up, that's a lot less fertiliser … a lot less water I have to use because I've got way less plants there."
Of Australia's 13,000 registered beekeepers, 1,877 work commercially, caring for more than 675,000 hives.
Mr Targett said if varroa mites could not be eradicated in New South Wales, many more managed hives would be needed for pollination as feral colonies died.
"There's certainly quite a few orchards that get free pollination from the feral hives.
"The experience in the rest of the world and our near neighbours New Zealand was that farmers who had never paid to have bees in their orchard for pollination suddenly had to start paying."
Mr Targett said maintaining access to floral resources was a big challenge due to tree clearing and weed killing.
He urged people to make their backyards bee-friendly by planting flowers, reducing chemical use and letting dandelions live.
