Master Beekeeping
Our beekeepers nurture and protect the bees all year round without using any antibiotics and with frequent hive checks, every ten days in the honey season. Beekeeping entails a wide variety of skills including good quality judgement of mānuka trees when selecting hive sites, hive management to yield the best honey, perfection of timing seasonal activities and harvest timing dictated by the beekeeper’s experienced eye. Hives placed strategically in remote areas to protect them from drift (bees from other beekeepers’ hives crossing into and possibly contaminating our hives) and far away from pollution and insecticides for the finest mānuka honey. There's no overcrowding of hives in any one location, so bees can sustain themselves if necessary.
Queen bees reign
The queen bee is the most important bee in the colony, she is the mother of all the bees in the hive. The bees do everything they can to protect her and they feed her every day. She does not have to go looking for food, she just lays eggs. During the season (Spring-Autumn) she will lay up to 2,000 eggs per day, every day of the week.
It's easy to see the importance of the queen in the colony; for example, bees in each hive know their queen. This can be observed with bees stationed as guards at the hive’s entrance. They constantly swarm and protect her.
The art & science of queen bees
Queen bees are the foundation of good honey yield and quality. It takes years to develop the art and science of rearing queens. There are no tests one can use to identify strong queens, only a trained eye can ‘spot’ the best queens and eliminate imperfections through the breeding process.
At Haddrell's, we breed and nurture the best queens to cultivate the best hives and environments that ultimately yield the best honey.
Dedicated to our craft, devoted to our future
We have created a mānuka plantation with millions of specially selected mānuka trees adding to the restoration of New Zealand's native forests. This project helps to offset some of the planet’s carbon emissions creating a habitat for New Zealand native birds and helps ensure the best mānuka honey grown and yielded by the bees.
From its inception, Haddrell's has held bee health and environmental sustainability as an underlying principle. Mānuka honey is a unique and precious gift. As beekeepers we acknowledge our responsibility to protect the bees that produce our honey and our role as guardians of our environment.
Haddrell's Mānuka Reforestation – 2 million trees and counting
Our sustainability ethos is the drive behind our huge mānuka reforestation project. Located in the Hawke's Bay, we have undertaken to plant the largest single mānuka plantation in New Zealand. Covering more than 2,000 hectares (the equivalent of 5,000 football fields) so far we've planted more than 2 million mānuka seedlings, with many more planned for the future.
As well as providing a wonderful nectar to produce mānuka honey, mānuka trees play an important role in re-establishing native forest. Mānuka grows very fast and develops deep, flexible root systems that bind unstable soil together, which helps prevent erosion around waterways and hills. As they grow larger, mānuka trees provide canopy cover which helps to prevent invasive weeds from growing and creates a safer environment for slower-growing native plants.
Mānuka forest also provides a habitat for native species such as Kiwi. The native forest surrounding our plantation is home to a significant and successful Kiwi conservation initiative with more than 300 Kiwi hatched and released into the wild. Alongside the numerous environmental benefits provided by mānuka reforestation, it also provides our bees with an exclusive, protected source of high potency mānuka nectar.
Hive to Pot
Bees form an amazing team. The queen, worker bees and drones all know their jobs and together they populate, protect and maintain the hive, collect the nectar from flowers and make and preserve the honey. All this work is done with enormous energy and sheer dedication to their tasks. We have great respect for our bees and their life's hard work. Our team takes care them at every step of the journey from hive to pot.