Meet our Woolworths Bricks Farm beekeeper

Hi, I’m a beekeeper, and I provide some of the honey you will find at your local Woolworths.

While bees produce honey and beeswax, they also have a vital role in the food chain as plant pollinators. Without their pollinating services, our favourite fruit and vegetables would not grow.

Day-to-day work for a beekeeper can involve hive inspections and maintenance, honey extraction, or simply working with partners and suppliers, such as Woolworths, on current or upcoming projects.

When it’s time to visit the bees, I always wear my high-quality beekeeping suit (that’s the big white suit with a mesh face mask!) and gloves. Most bees simply want to go about their business of making honey when we tend to the hive.

If you’ve never seen a beekeeper’s hive, it sort of looks like a stack of drawers. Inside, there are frames that either contain stored honey (known as honeycomb) or baby bees, which we call brood comb.

There are three types of honey bees in a colony: workers, drones and a queen. An experienced beekeeper knows how to spot the queen; she usually has a longer abdomen and torso. The bees are very loyal to their queen and will always return to her (and their hive) after a nectar collection trip.

When it’s time to harvest the honey, the process is quite simple. We use an extractor, which then strains the honey into quality assured containers. These containers can hold approximately 1.5 tonnes of honey!

Honey comes in all sorts of colours and flavours depending on where the bees collected nectar. They all taste sweet, but can have caramel, fruity, butterscotch, floral and toffee flavours – that’s what makes each beekeeper’s honey so unique!

There are so many ways I like to enjoy honey, from stirring it through my morning porridge to drizzling it on top of roasted carrots, or simply adding a drop to my chai tea in the morning.

Here’s my favourite fact about bees: one in three mouthfuls of the food we consume depends on pollinators such as bees.