Sweetening the community spirit

The Geelong Beekeepers Club Inc is abuzz with generosity, giving their time to educate the community and donating jars of honey to a local food bank.

The club’s mission is to promote good bee keeping practices and support the wider community through the work they do.

Meeting once a month, the group of more than 200 bee enthusiasts enjoy learning all about the honey producing insects.

Geelong Beekeepers Club Inc president Nathan Whitford said they aim to be an outlet and resource for people to learn about bees.

“We’re trying to make the club more of a community where you can come, and you can engage with other beekeepers.

“It’s about letting people new to beekeeping or who have an interest and haven’t committed yet, to come and suit up and get some hands-on practical experience to see what’s involved and how you do it.

“We do really try hard to support our members and encourage members of the public who have an interest in beekeeping to join up and come along.

 

Expanding its service in the community, the club donated more than 200 jars of high-quality honey to Geelong Foodshare (previously Geelong Food Relief Centre).

The idea to donate the produce came from wanting to do more for the wider community and from a desire to give back.

“For me it was a little bit of a no brainer in terms of a food bank and honey and we’re beekeepers,” Whitford said.

“I had a discussion with the committee about how we’re able to allocate some of our money that we’ve made from the honey sales in October to donate to a local charity in Geelong.

“The committee all agreed that we really wanted it to be local, that we wanted it to have a connection back to beekeeping and back to what we do as a club.

“Geelong Foodshare was nominated and from there I spoke to them about would they be interested in receiving a honey donation, which they were really excited about.

 

To meet food labelling laws and quality standards the club chose to partner with founding and life member of the club, John Edmond.

The partnership meant the donated stock was ‘supermarket’ quality, traceable and suitable for distribution.

“Not all honey is made equally so to be able to provide a really good quality honey and to be able to help in our wider community is really important,” Whitford said.

“We wanted to be able to give them a product that would look good on the shelf and be shelf stable.

“We wanted to make sure that whatever we were providing was really fit for purpose and we wanted to do it in a way that was dignified.”

 

To keep the focus on the donation of the honey, members decided not to put a large label on the jar, instead opting for a small barcode linking back to their website

This is the first time the club has donated product to an organisation, with committee members keen to keep the initiative going.

“I was really excited that at the last committee meeting one of the other committee members suggested that we could do this annually,” Whitford said.

“Everyone in the committee certainly felt like this is something that’s really achievable and something that’s good for the wider community.”

Whitford hopes from the donation recipients will be able to enjoy good quality honey and it helps them out at this time of year.

For the club, sharing knowledge on the importance of bees is a big part of what members do, wanting to educate the community around how important the animals are for food pollination.

“Bees provide pollination for one third of all the food we eat, particularly vegetables, seeds, fruits, things like that.

“A world without bees is a world without all those foods which will be an incredible cost to businesses but also what you can put in your mouth and what you can get out of markets and supermarkets.”

 

As part of the club’s monthly meetings, experienced beekeepers and people in the industry such as researchers and scientists cover a range of topics.

“It’s really about just having that conversation about the importance of bees, why they’re important, how much pollination they do for the food we eat and why they’re good for the garden.

Members who volunteer for the club also go around to different community groups and primary schools to share their knowledge and the importance of bees.

Whitford encouraged community members plant flowers to provide bees with the resources they need.

“Urban beekeeping in Geelong is big, there’s hundreds of registered beekeepers and thousands of hives out there,” Whitford said.

“It would be just great to see people that are able to put plants in their gardens that would help the bees.

For more information on the club, head to geelongbeekeepersclub.org.au or find Geelong Beekeepers Club Inc on Facebook.