Not many traineeships involve smoke, special suits, liquid nitrogen and grafting queens in the first week, but then again there are not that many beekeeping traineeships going.
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Australian Honey Products started three trainee beekeepers last week, with another three starting this week.
The trainees come from the state’s North and North-West to study the art and science of beekeeping with industry stalwart Lindsay Bourke.
This group of new starters join Australian Honey Products’s four second-year trainees to bring the total to 10, Mr Bourke said.
“I’m very proud of that. I usually employ four trainees but I had some very high calibre trainees this year,” Mr Bourke said.
The trainees are based between Launceston and Sheffield and will complete 14 modules of training over the next 18 months.
“Beekeeping traineeships are very intensive. Trainees study in the field, at TasTAFE and our training centres in Sheffield and Launceston,” Mr Bourke said.
In their first week the trainees successfully helped graft 500 juvenile queens, which will become hive queens or drone mothers later this season.
“We need 2000 queens each year to replace the others who are worn out after two years,” Mr Bourke said.
The new starters also learned how to test whether the bees exhibit Rapid Hygenic Behaviour.
This involves burning some of the hive cells with liquid nitrogen and coming back in 24 hours to see if the bees have cleaned out the bad cells.
“I want them to clean it out ready for the queen to re-lay in it again,” Mr Bourke said.
“We want them to identify there’s something wrong with the cell, uncap it and clean it out before it becomes infected,” he said.
The cells contain bees at various stages of development, such as eggs, larvae and baby bees.
“It may seem bad, but overall it’s good for the beehives,” Mr Bourke said.
“We do it to see how quickly they detect there is something wrong with that brood. It could be foul brood, it could varroa destructor, it could be something wrong, but we want them to be able to detect that,” he said.
After waiting 24 hours, the number of cells cleaned in readiness for new eggs is a good indicator of the hive’s hygiene.
If the bees have cleaned 90 per cent or more of the cells the hive’s queen will be good for breeding more queens and a cleaning rate of between 80 and 90 per cent means the queen can be used to breed drones from.
“If [the hives] have good hygiene then we will breed from this queen,” Mr Bourke said.
Next year’s trainees cover 19 modules over two years.