Arataki Honey

A look at Arataki Honey, the largest bee keeping business in the Southern Hemisphere.

Arataki Honey has around 20,000 hives across New Zealand. The company was established in 1944 and is run in two parts. The Hawke’s Bay Division produces and packs honey for the local and export market, provides local pollination services and is the site of the Arataki Honey Visitors Centre.

Around 40 employees are based at the Havelock North branch – working in beekeeping, processing, administration, tourism and retailing.

There’s also a Rotorua Division which specialises in live bee exports, queen bees, packing honey and providing pollination services.

In 1944 Ian Berry’s dad Percy bought nine acres in Arataki Road, Havelock North. Percy registered the apiary and set about turning the family beekeeping business into a commercial venture. Those early years weren’t all beer and skittles (or milk and honey). In the 1946 no honey was produced at all. It was one of the driest years on record and the business nearly collapsed

The 1950’s was a period of growth although conditions were tough. There were price restrictions on honey and many beekeepers who established business post-war couldn’t make a viable living. Arataki bought up many small beekeepers and expanded the business to over 5,000 hives. They bought a delivery van and started delivering honey through the middle and lower North Island.

A lot of the early growth was from exports of comb honey to UK and German markets. Comb honey at that time was not subject to the draconian pricing regulations of the then Honey Marketing Authority.

Arataki also got involved in the early plantings of kiwifruit for pollination throughout the Bay of Plenty. The pollination of crops is an on-going business although Psa has had an impact on kiwifruit. Pollination with the gold varieties has dropped off although green kiwifruit (resistant so far to Psa) is still steady.

The Hawke’s Bay division of the company does over 6,000 hive placements each season during pollination. They have hives working for nine months of the year starting in July.

It’s not just kiwifruit, Arataki play a significant role pollinating stonefruit, pipfruit, blueberries, zucchinis and melons. There is also some seed industry pollination.

In the 1990’s the company began packing honey under licence using the Honeyland brand, exporting product into Japan. A nationwide distribution of the Arataki brand through leading supermarkets was also established.

Publicity on the health benefits of UMF manuka honey received worldwide attention and stimulated demand for manuka honey in general which Arataki’s been able to join in on.

Arataki Honey works under several compliance licences including Exporter Licence, Site Compliance Certification, Certificate of Kashrut and UMF Licence.

In submissions to government on the subject of imported honey products Ian’s brother Russell said the following. “Most countries of the world recognise the public good and public benefit of beekeeping to their country’s economy and subsidises beekeepers in some manner, some more apparent than others! Because bees fly long distances it is very hard to get up-to-date, reliable information on any country’s disease status. This adds substantially to the risk of importing bee products into New Zealand. Unless it can be confirmed that a full survey has been carried out during the last five years, then it must be assumed, if we allow imports in or not, that that country wishing to export to us is likely to have the disease risk concerned.”

Among the particular concerns are European Foul Brood (which we don’t have) and American Foul Brood (which we have). Given the presence of Varroa either of those two bacterial diseases could have an even more devastating impact on NZ’s bee populations. There are other threats including Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus and Small Hive Beetle, and the National Bee Keepers Association has also identified that threat posed by an apparently growing practice of adulterating honey (honey laundering).

MPI biosecurity documents on the web say that they have the assessed the risk of honey imports as negligible and says that honey products can be safely imported.

NBA made submissions in response to the proposed opening up of New Zealand to overseas imports and then took (the then MAF) now MPI to court. Following that were a series of proposed law changes, NBA lobbied the select committee and there’s now a review panel at MPI looking at their concerns.

Another issue is export restrictions on honey because of C4 sugars.

The presence of the varroa mite in New Zealand in the 2000’s had major effects on Arataki. The beekeeping industry responded with good management practices in controlling the parasite but there are on-going issues with this pest, resistance to conventional approved treatments being one big issue for the company.

In the 2000’s, Arataki Hawke’s Bay invested in a purpose-built visitor and education centre in Havelock North. This development is part of further upgrades to processing, packing and staff facilities.