JOHN - Central West NSW

I grew up in Narromine which is about half an hour west of Dubbo. Most people have heard of it now because of Glenn McGrath. I’m a bit older than him though.

I got hooked on beekeeping over 50 years ago when I was about 16. I remember driving down the road where a beekeeper was set up and there was this wonderful smell. I went to see what it was and found out it was the smell of honey being extracted. The wonderful aroma from freshly extracted honey was so overpowering I was hooked from that moment. The beekeeper doing it, Andy MacLean, showed me a few things. I got my own hives and from then on I’ve always kept bees.

I haven’t always been a commercial beekeeper – I’ve had a range of jobs over the years but it was always what I wanted to do and how I spent my spare time. So about 17 years ago, we made the big decision to go into it full-time. There was me and my two sons then, Glenn and Kieren. We bought a truck and the basic extracting equipment and started up some hives and just got going. We’d travel around the Central West finding sites for our hives and meeting lots of the landowners whose land we’d put our bees on. My favourite part is travelling round looking at sites, checking out what the trees are doing, figuring out what’s going to be budding, whether there’ll be honey flows, how long they’ll last and planning what to do with the bees – whether to move them or not. I’m not that mad on the extracting part once we’ve brought the honey back into the extracting shed. That’s just hard work though it’s always good to see the flow of honey and smell that same old smell that got me hooked in the first place.

What would I do if I retired? Probably keep bees! Once you’ve got honey running in your veins you can’t give it up.

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