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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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