Sticky mess
OPINION: Your canine crusader sees that NZ Manuka industry has upset its Australian counterparts – again!
That’s the possibility specialist honey company Comvita is investigating with Massey University and PGP funded trials of manuka around the country, delegates at the New Zealand Grassland Association conference in Tauranga heard earlier this month.
The thinking is the native tea tree, leptospermum scoparium, will anchor slip-prone hillsides and when it flowers, bees will harvest the nectar and process it into high value manuka honey.
The catch is that not all manuka nectar is equal when it comes to producing honey high in unique manuka factor (UMF), conference delegates heard.
“You can’t just plant any manuka,” warned Comvita research manager Jonathan Stephens. “There are real differences between the different types of manuka you find in New Zealand.”
Part of the project is identifying stands of manuka which do yield high UMF honey, and seeing if they still do so when grown in new locations, including the South Island which isn’t known as a high UMF area.
However, the biggest trial is 150ha near Lake Tutira in northern Hawkes Bay, planted with 1000 trees/ha at 3m x 3m spacing.
“We got 85% survival in a dry summer so we’re pretty confident about planting,” noted Stephens’ colleague John Burke, general manager of Comvita’s beekeeping subsidiary, Kiwi Bee Apiaries.
From 235ha on seven sites this summer, the aim is to have 803ha in 23 locations by 2015.
In natural manuka scrub, one hive/ha is the norm, typically producing 30kg of honey per hive, though the variation in that is huge, as in the UMF, says Burke.
The hope is selected lines of manuka with high floral density and known high UMF content will remove that variability and consistently yield more honey of higher value.
Currently landowners might get 10-15% of, say, a $400/ha revenue from hives in natural manuka scrub but Burke says in a plantation situation that could be raised to a 30% revenue share, given the landowners’ investment in trees, and it should be 30% of a much higher revenue, perhaps as much as $1100/ha.
That’s a 6-14% marginal return on land that would otherwise have been a cost to the farm and quite possibly a threat to the environment, he calculates. “So it’s well worth looking at.”
The seven-year project is in its third year.
