FAQ With Bee One Third founder, Jack Stone
Products & Process
We use a non-invasive method of honey harvesting from the hive and therefore classify it as vegan-friendly and bee-death-less engagement.
- We use clearing boards on all of our hives three days prior to harvesting honey, ensuring 100% of the bees have left the honey box before we remove it from the hive.
- The honey is then strapped down on the back of the ute, taken back to our honey house, placed on the uncapping line, where the wax capping is removed from the honeycomb frame and placed into an extractor.
- The extractor uses centrifugal force to pull the honey from the individual cells where it drains down into a sump. It's then pumped to a storage tank for settling and then filtering, to remove any unwanted pieces that came out during the extraction process.
- The next step in the process is bottling and this occurs on a location-by-location basis depending on the harvest QTY and the quality of honey.
- Only Bee One Third premium honeys are sent to market.
There are dozens of pest and diseases present in the global beekeeping industry but our most common pest in Australia is the African Small Hive Beetle (SHB). It is a small, black beetle with a hard outer shell which lays eggs in the protein rich bee brood before eventually turning into little crawling grubs. These beetle-grubs chew through the entire hive, excreting bodily waste over the honey and brood frames, causing a fermentation effect and forcing the bees to abscond from their hive. I recommend using beetle traps like the drop trap and poison traps to catch the beetles as the bees cannot grab or manipulate the beetles to defend themselves.
The other major issue or disease we are dealing with here in Queensland and nationally is a spore-born bacteria called American Foulbrood (AFB). AFB is a terrible disease and, once present in a colony, is impossible to breed out of their genetics. It takes seven individual spores to cause a chain reaction of billions of present spores in a matter of days within the hive. When you have a confirmed AFB case, I would advise to close the hive at night and burn the entire hive. If you don’t want to burn, consolidate the infected equipment including tools, suits, boxes, frames and honeycomb structures onto a pallet and have it irradiated (GAMA IRRADIATION) at the SteriTech plant.
We are flat out working our European beehives; preparing them for pollination and a season full of nectar gathering, so we have very little time to focus on the amount of Native beekeeping that we would like to.
Even so, we do offer a free service to remove native beehives when they have established inside of a water or gas meter box but do not sell these beehives. These native rescue beehives are kept in our suburban locations ranging from backyards to local urban farms to aid with the act of pollination. We do not harvest honey from our native beehives.
At Bee One Third we offer wholesale prices to businesses in the retail, food service, restaurant, manufacturing, and service industries. If you would like to talk with us about obtaining wholesale pricing for your establishment, please contact us via our 'contact us' page.
- If you would like to apply for a wholesale account click here to create a customer account on our website;
- the method of payment for online orders are all major credit cards, PayPal or bank transfer with seven(7) day payment terms;
- the minimum order for free shipping is on wholesale orders is $75;
- to be eligible for a wholesale account, an ABN/ACN is required;
- wholesale prices are available upon request, for a PDF Price List or more information you can email us at: hello@beeonethird.com.au.
It really is hard to tell. Our advice is always buy from a local or reputable beekeeper. If you know your beekeeper, ask them what seasons they tend to feed their bees in. If they feed their bees, they are supplementing their hives with carbohydrates and proteins to get the colonies through a potentially ‘tough and dry’ season.
If your beekeeper doesn’t feed their bees, like us here at Bee One Third, they are lucky enough to have enough local flowers to fill their hives with proteins and carbohydrates from nature. Avoid buying supermarket honey or honey sold in bulk counters at the grocer. Buy local, buy Bee One Third.
At Bee One Third, we hope to produce close to 9 tonnes of honey in 2017, and expect 90kg from each our 100 hives on average!
Shipping & Returns
Yes we do! If you’re having trouble ordering online, send us an email to orders@beeonethird.com.au and we’ll help you complete your order.
With any of the major credit cards, PayPal or even Apple Pay
For all shipped orders, we send an email that references your tracking number. If you ordered and never received your tracking number, email orders@beeonethird.com.au and we’ll get you sorted.
Shipping rates are calculated as a flat rate based on the weight of the products you ordered and the shipping method selected for the region which your order will be shipped to.
Yes, on all orders over $75!
Your order will get processed within 1-4 days of placing it. For Australian orders, expect your order to arrive within 2-4 business days from the date of shipment. For other international orders, your order should arrive within 14 to 21 business days depending on your location, the carrier and the size of package.
Beekeeping at home
It’s great that you are looking at getting into bee keeping and want to know more. Awesome! The more people know and learn about pollinators and their important role in ecosystems and food production, the better. Taking on the responsibility of beekeeping is a big step in the right direction for someone who wants to connect on a deeper level with nature or, quite simply, someone who wants to provide pollination for their neighbours and local ecosystem.
Like anything, you will need a strong interest in beekeeping if you are thinking of starting at home. Outside of just exploring the fascinating world of bees, you need to be prepared to set aside at least one hour every fortnight to inspect your beehive, identifying change and development in the hive. There is loads to learn and know. Join a local organization or interest group to get the support and wisdom of the community behind you.
There are many things to consider for the backyard beekeeper, such as the position of your hive, what impact the hive could have on your neighbours, whether the beehive will receive enough sun during the day and whether there is a nearby water source – just to name a few.
Best to check in with your local city council area about space requirements for European honeybees (Apis mellifera) at your home: The requirements for keeping honey-producing beehives depend on where you live and how much space you have. Each local council has slightly different by-laws and requirements.
Bee One Third’s beehive service arrangement operates on a business to business model. If you are a business, building owner, property manager, café, restaurant, precinct manager or just have a burning desire to see more bees incorporated into your company’s internal philosophy, then get in touch!
If you are interested in being home to one or more hives in your backyard or within your community garden, we would love to help you get started. Bee One Third provides a dedicated mentoring program covering one-on-one training within the first year of beekeeping – we will come to you!
If you’d prefer to attend one of our Beginner Beekeeping courses, check out our What's On page to see when the next available course is being held. You can also sign up to our monthly newsletters to keep in touch with what Bee One Third is up to in your community.
Although honey is not the primary reason you should be keeping bees, I would think that in the first year of beekeeping you should expect to extract around 50kg of honey if you begin beekeeping in spring and see it through to autumn. This is assumed if working from a nucleus colony and growing it into a fully operation three or four box colony. In years to follow, a reasonable years harvest would be around 90-100kg per full season (spring-autumn).
Loads of ways! Have a look in to the following ways to help your local bee population. A simple Google search of the following titles will help you understand the topics better.
- Solitary Bee Wall
- Native beehive
- Plant bee friendly plants
- European beehive (Big investment in time)
- Encourage local community garden to get more hives!
- Plant more flowers!
Yes and no. If you are well-trained and understand the potentials of beekeeping, it will be an enjoyable and safe journey over the coming years – if not decades! Respect for the bees is essential as they will not tolerate ignorance or hot-headed behaviour near their hives.
You must always wear protective clothing when working your beehives and, if you have an allergic reaction to bee stings, you must always carry an EPI-PEN in your pocket. PLEASE NOTE: Allergic reaction is not ‘swelling’ but anaphylactic shock.
The industry is not a hugely competitive space regarding product sales, popularity or levels of ‘cool’ but, rather, in a rare and unique way. The beekeeping industry is competitive in individual nature and precision, dependant on each beekeepers set-up.
Beekeepers are competitive with one another when it comes to discovering and owning the best ‘apiary sites’ which house bees during forest or crop flowering seasons. These sites can yield hundreds of kilograms of honey and comb per beehive if positioned well within a floral source. Some beekeepers are lucky enough to have apiary sites positioned in rare ‘Jelly Bush’ or ‘Leptospermum’ country – known to Australian beekeepers as some of the hardest territory to work your bees on.
Bee Curious
Honeybees fly up to 5 kilometres in any direction from their hives but often don't need to fly this far due to the abundant sources of nectar and pollen in urban areas.
In research tests, bees have been known to fly up 10.5km in search of a feeding source but were not known to fly back to their hives.
To find out the exact pollens in your honey, you would have to run a very detailed pollen analysis test on the honey sample. There are billions of varieties of pollens in the world but, because bees fly a distance of up to 5km from thei hives in your local area, there might be a coupe of hundred (if not thousands) of varieties of trees that she has visited. The seasonal variance of pollen changes according to what is in season and in flower.
You’ve got to remember that pollen and nectar are two completely different things. Pollen is the protein inside the hive, and nectar (or honey as we know it) is the carbohydrate for the bees inside the hive.