Gisborne beekeeper Bill Savage got his first beehive when he was a slightly allergic but fascinated 12-year-old and he has loved bees ever since. Now, 44 years later, he still finds his millions of workers intriguing.
“There are 60,000 bees in a hive at the peak of the season and the queen is mother to every one of them – laying around fifteen hundred eggs – per day! That’s quite a feat when you think about it.”
Bill’s a high-UMF manuka honey specialist. UMF, or Unique Manuka Factor, is an industry standard for measuring the anti-bacterial compounds found only in certain grades of New Zealand manuka honey.
A kilo of one of his higher grades will retail for over $100 and Bill says the demand offshore is growing and growing. But it’s a fickle business. Yields fluctuate wildly from year to year.
“In a good year you can make a lot of money, but in a bad year you can lose a lot of money” he says.
The East Cape region abounds with wild manuka but Bill has big dreams of increasing quality and volume. He is converting his own 1200 hectare bush block into a mono-floral, high-UMF manuka forest, clearing kanuka and planting thousands of the high-grade trees there every year.
“But you can’t spot a high-UMF tree by looking at it.”
In summer, he painstakingly collects nectar from his own wild manuka and has a lab analyse it for DHA, the precursor to UMF. Then in winter, he collects seed from those trees identified as high in DHA and grows tens of thousands of new trees each year from that seed.
He’s experimenting with planting systems to maximise nectar production.
Kitt Higgins and Bill Savage harvesting honey at Ahititi
But he’s more than happy to share his knowledge. “It’s for the good of the industry.”
A tireless advocate for quality and integrity in the industry at large, and in his own practice, Bill says that the honey industry is enjoying ”a goldrush” at the moment as demand soars, evidence for UMF
