Sweet as

Some busy neighbourhood residents deliver a true local flavour, writes Liz Schaffer

Spend half an hour talking to Vicky Brown and you’ll want to become a beekeeper. Brown is the co-founder of the Urban Beehive, which has apiaries across Sydney: in the Royal Botanic Garden and Centennial Parklands, atop David Jones, Swissôtel and Shangri-La, at Vaucluse House, and dotted around Woolloomooloo, Bondi and the inner west.

The company’s growth is astounding, especially when you learn that it began with Brown and fellow beekeeper, Doug Purdie, partnering with community gardens and bottling honey at their kitchen tables.

Meeting Brown by her Royal Botanic Garden hives, I barely have time to think about what’s happening before I’m suited up and standing beside her as she checks the honeycomb and waxes lyrical about her ‘girls’.

She’s completely at ease with the bees in her charge, which she captures in spring as wild swarms. Watching her work, I begin to breathe a little easier, my nervousness evaporating as I see how second nature this all is.

Brown’s beekeeping story began more than two decades ago when she worked on Kangaroo Island, in South Australia, a designated bee sanctuary famed for its Ligurian honey bees. This is where she first learned the holistic beekeeping approach she practices today.

“Every day is completely different,” she says. “I'm outdoors, I'm with nature. I love that I've been doing this for more than 20 years now and I'm still learning. There are always new things to learn. I could talk bees for hours and you still wouldn’t know everything.

“And I know it sounds weird, but bees are actually really cute. They're furry and they have a sweet tooth, and I have a total sweet tooth. They're just so interesting as a society. I think what I really love about them is that bees don't have an ego.

“Everyone compares humanity to a beehive, as we’re social creatures and things like that, but the one thing that really differentiates us is they don’t have an ego, they're in it for the whole, the greater good.”

To calm her bees, Brown lights pine needles. Smoke is one of the main threats to bees in the wild, a sign that fire is approaching. Sensing it, the bees retreat into the hive to devour honey, building up energy reserves in case they need to abscond. As she moves around the hives, Brown muses on her beekeeping journey.

“There’s no beekeeping in my family at all. I’ve gone back and asked everybody, and [found] nothing. But I always wondered what was in the box.”

Australian beekeeping has long been a family oriented industry, and with the season lasting nine months (far longer than in the US or Europe), there’s an added incentive to keep bees thriving for as long as possible. This is something Sydney’s bounteous flora definitely helps with.

“Sydney has a remarkable amount of diversity of floral, so you produce up to 150kg per beehive, a year,” she says. “In the UK, if they get 40kg, that’s a bumper year.”

It’s this diversity that prevents Brown from naming her honey after a particular blossom, as she’s never entirely sure where her bees forage. Instead, she names it after the hive’s location: Bondi, East Sydney, Vaucluse House, to list just a few.

Interestingly, though Potts Point locals will buy their honey from Wayside Chapel, they’ll try varieties from further afield, whereas inner west and Bondi dwellers prefer their own honey.

“Sydney residents are very loyal to their suburbs,” Brown laughs.

There’s a lot to be said for the meditative power of beekeeping, a profession that isn't as out of reach as you may think. In fact, the main thing you need is the right state of mind — and a little bravery.

“Even if you're not calm in your daily life, you need to be calm when keeping bees, you need to show empathy,” Brown says. “You’ve got to respect them, because if you don’t, they'll show you who’s boss. The more gentle you are with them, well ... they’re really gentle.”

Hive mentality

The Urban Beehive offers beekeeping courses, from beginner to advanced levels. The Inner East blend raw honey is available online: $10 per 350g.

theurbanbeehive.com.au