With a focus on commercial, environmental and land use benefits
Today, bees are dying in large numbers, exhausted by pesticides, pathogens and parasites, climate change and the depletion of honey resources, electromagnetic waves, and decades of intensive beekeeping practices. We are reaching the end of a system obsessed with honey that has forgotten the bee's basic needs.
In biodynamic and Hua Parakore beekeeping the approach is the opposite. We allow honeybee swarms to express their natural behaviours, building their own wax combs, without artificial insemination, treating disease with medicinal plants, and we act to promote the health of the colony and of the environment around it, without giving up either the honey harvest or the quality of the queen genetics. Whether you are responsible for one hive or several hundred, biodynamic practice offers concrete and compelling possibilities for improving beekeeping and queen breeding worldwide.
Building a bridge between biodynamics and hua parakore
Shared values and local adaptation.
A hundred years ago, biodynamics was taking shape in the heart of Europe. The plants recommended for making its preparations are common on the old continent but unsuited to other climates, which presents a double challenge in New Zealand, where alternatives are being sought to every form of neocolonialism.
Hua Parakore has its own register, drawing on resonance with the philosophies and practices of Māori people. These voices find in biodynamics a form of common language, a foundation from which to innovate beekeeping methodologies. Local communities are forming around the Te Waka Kai Ora foundation and connecting with each other. Through this work, links are being forged beyond borders, uniting to share questions of certification, research and training, and to build momentum towards new beekeeping standards of high quality.
Environmental and land use benefits
Biodynamic farming has a long history in New Zealand and reached its peak twenty-five years ago, but joint biodynamic marketing initiatives remained underdeveloped. As a result, only direct sales remain today.
New Zealand's apiculture strategy 2024 to 2030
Thriving Together: Futureproofing the New Zealand Apiculture Sector sets out the commercial strategy for 2024 to 2030, intended to ensure that New Zealand apiculture as a whole can thrive and grow.
The strategy describes recognising the importance of a united sector empowered to deliver, building a sustainable and equitable funding model to enable reinvestment, delivering on export market consumer needs and on New Zealand's differentiating reputation for the highest quality honey, leading on social and environmental practice, and strengthening engagement with Māori so that mānuka, the country's major honey export earner, is recognised and protected as a taonga species unique to New Zealand.
Biodynamic methods produce hive products that meet and exceed global consumer expectations, differentiated on quality, sustainability, and social and ethical attributes. The strategy's own framing is that the export sector needs to build value for all through category growth and by increasing consumer awareness, delivering on the promise of New Zealand producing the highest quality hive products and standing as the only credible source of mānuka honey.
Risks linked to intensive beekeeping
Biodynamic beekeeping has long stood against the disrespectful practices of industrial beekeeping and warns against the genetic manipulation of bees. With the national mānuka rush, the intensive management of hives through migratory beekeeping affects local and native bees, spreads viruses and honeybee diseases, and drives excessive hybridisation within migrating colonies.
Recent findings show that the honeybee colony, understood as a single organism, is intelligent in the way it communicates and adapts to changes in its environment. This research sets out to show how to work in harmony with them. By changing our attitude and our beekeeping techniques when approaching them, we work with their wisdom, using the cosmic calendar and specific schedules to breed, grow and produce high-quality hive products. As with the seeds in Hua Parakore, innovative management models are being proposed, along with breeding methods that promote greater harmony with the colony's own behaviour, particularly in producing bee venom, whose sacred nature is once again being considered.
Biodynamics and organic beekeeping
The methods and their practical application differ above all in treating the honeybee swarm as a whole and unique living organism, together with its environment, the beekeeper, the soil, and the community that sells and buys from it. When we work with honeybees we work with the swarm as an entire organism, rather than separately with the workers, the queen, the drones and the other native bees and pollinators. All of these, the beekeeper included, form a unity that has to be strengthened, adapted, protected and grown over the years.
Shared ground with Māori philosophy
Māori culture and anthroposophical and biodynamic philosophies are synergistic and provide a good basis for mutual understanding. Five ideas carry that common ground:
- The living soil
- Mauri
- Everything is connected, the Māori holistic worldview
- Water
- Earth as a reflection of the cosmos
From there, several biodynamic strategies bear directly on producing high-quality queens and bee venom:
- The relationship between the maramataka and the biodynamic planting calendar
- Māori food and soil sovereignty
- Biodynamic preparations and their use in strengthening the mauri of honeybee swarms, including making compost to strengthen the mauri of the soil, enhancing soil fertility with preparation 500, making and using cow pat pit, and planting fruit trees with basic pruning and tree paste