2025 is the year to come together it would seem, with New Zealand Beekeeping Inc (NZBI) and Southern North Island Beekeeping Group (SNIBG) taking steps to form a “National Beekeeping Collective”. After announcing, via an email to their respective members on December 18 last year, that the groups’ leaders had been in talks to work more closely together and form a “peak body” for beekeepers, not two weeks later NZBI members were sent the latest concept document for the new group.
Running to fewer than 500 words the introduction document to the National Beekeeping Collective being proposed is high level and succinct, but will give their members plenty to chew over as the calendar turns to 2025. It sets out a framework which NZBI and SNIBG leadership hope can achieve ‘real and legitimate peak body status’, all while Apiculture New Zealand (ApiNZ) and Unique Mānuka Factor Honey Association (UMFHA) seek to gain the same footing with the ‘New Zealand Honey Association’.
“We are hoping to achieve a bigger beekeeping body to work for commercial beekeepers,” NZBI president Jane Lorimer says.
“We see what ApiNZ and UMFHA are doing as being focused on export mānuka. We need to consolidate our beekeeping groups. It’s an alternative that will focus solely on beekeeping matters.”
She hopes the proposed new groups could work closely together, and the document sent to members floats the idea of having a memorandum of understanding with other industry groups on ‘areas of commonality’.
SNIBG president Frank Lindsay says the prospect of working together with NZBI has been on the table for a while and there is some cross over in membership. Lindsay puts their membership at around 90, and believes they bring a larger base to the table than NZBI. Therefore, with only between 100 and 200 members between them, they will need to present a more compelling offer to beekeepers if they are to achieve the “peak” status they desire.
The document to NZBI’s membership states the new group would be 'committed to creating a thriving future for the beekeeping community' and that all beekeepers across New Zealand would be invited, but not compelled, to participate.
In a somewhat 'back to the future' approach the model of the former National Beekeepers Association (NBA) – which became ApiNZ, but with a different structure, in 2016 – appears to have been drawn upon. Autonomous regional beekeeping branches would be created, ‘where there is support to do so’. These would feed into a centralised, national executive on which a member from each regional branch would sit.
“The regional groups would cater for local field days to make sure beekeepers in their area get opportunities to meet and discuss beekeeping matters. They can then take any concerns to the national body. The national body would then handle discussions with government and things of national significance. It would feed from the bottom up, rather than top down,” Lorimer says.
Lindsay, who has five-decades-plus experience beekeeping in New Zealand, says a model of industry representation where beekeepers and honey packers have sperate groups, but work together as required, has worked in the past and could again.
“There used to be a group to represent the honey packers, and the NBA for the beekeepers, and we all met up at conference. The packers’ interests and the beekeepers’ interests are there, but they don’t have the same outlook. We are the two corners of the bottom of the same triangle. There should be two organisations that work together. Other than that, beekeeping should be represented separately,” Lindsay says.
The document sent to NZBI proposes ‘we won’t get involved in honey marketing or export; we hope to work with those who do’. It claims the concept will be ‘developed collaboratively with beekeepers … by and for New Zealand’s beekeeping community’.
A ‘limited central agenda to tackle national issues critical to the industry’ and ‘issues fed in from the regions to a central Executive to action’ are stated as purpose and structure.
Five initial focus areas are detailed in the document, with the first being growing the membership base to achieve ‘real and legitimate peak body status’. There follows biosecurity, pollination services, bee health and bee products, which are all briefly detailed.
Following the December 31 email of the new concept, a period of consultation with members of both groups is being undertaken by their leadership.
However, one of those members, Arataki Honey owner Russell Berry, already has a major concern – that NZBI could fail to exist. While Berry is a long-time member of the executive council of the beekeeping group, he has tendered his apology to the two latest meetings where the amalgamation with SNIBG was discussed. Reading the email to members on the last day of 2024 and speaking from a position outside of the leadership group, he says he agrees with much of the concept document, but fears that if it was to lead to the winding-up of the group it would amount to a throwing out of the baby with the bathwater, given what the group has achieved to date.
“New Zealand Beekeeping Inc has done a huge amount for the beekeeping industry and it should be encouraged to carry on with the assistance of Southern North Island Beekeeping Group, and any other beekeeping organisation which can assist us in making an organisation that truly represents the commercial beekeepers of New Zealand,” Berry says.
“I would be greatly opposed to the demise of New Zealand Beekeeping Inc.”
So, it is clearly early days in the discussions and consultations with members and a consensus between the two groups is far from guaranteed. However, if things advance as mooted, and the National Beekeeping Collective eventualises, it could leave beekeepers in the position of having two national industry groups vying to represent their interests – with the National Honey Association of UMFHA and ApiNZ scheduled to come into existence on April 1 (as detailed in Full Steam Ahead for ApiNZ/UMFHA Restructure).
Nine years on from the winding up of the more-than-century-old NBA, 2025 shapes as another year of change in national beekeeper representation.
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