The BeeWild program provides a wide range of services including breeding and installing hives of our Australian Native Stingless Bee, Tetragonula carbonaria, into gardens on the Mid North Coast, NSW. We also offer workshops, advice, hive maintenance and rescue.

ABOUT BEEWILD

BeeWild is an exciting environmental program that operates on the Mid North Coast of NSW. Our initiative was established purely as an ecological program recognising the plight that bees face, worldwide, and one that has most recently been exacerbated in Australia for our native bee species due to the damaging bushfires during 2019 and 2020.

The BeeWild program introduces Australian native bee colonies, in wooden hives, into privately owned gardens and bushland areas - providing our little native bees the opportunity to successfully re-establish into our ecosystems.

We breed Tetragonula carbonaria - a sub-tropical native stingless bee species that’s endemic from central Queensland to the south coast of NSW (approximately 1500km). They are a native bee conducive to being propagated in man-made timber OATH (Original Australian Trigona Hive) hives. Each year we provide up to 100 hives to home gardens, schools or other organisations. This also gives us an opportunity to educate people, particularly children, about bees and other insects, and a platform to spread the word about good gardening practices; including eliminating the use of pesticides through organic gardening techniques and choosing plants for a bee-friendly garden.

OUR HIVES

BeeWild’s mission is to re-populate our environment with Tetragonula carbonaria colonies (sometimes called the sugarbag or bush bee) in a two-tiered OATH. Each established hive will have a healthy queen and house around 10,000 bees.

Native beehives are distributed to residents (including schools and community groups) to look after or ‘foster’ on their property. The hives are very low maintenance and only require to keep an eye on the activity of the bees and report any concerns or problems to the BeeWild team. We will visit hives every two years in order to perform a split. Splitting is how we create more hives for the program.

To be a hive-guardian, you can contact us. Each request will be assessed to ensure that hives are placed in a safe and suitable location where there is a maximum benefit to the bees and also the surrounding native ecology. If all is right, we will deliver a hive to your grounds and specifically find a location, with you, best suited for its installation.

We will ensure recipients will be ‘care-trained’ and aware of how to safeguard and nurture each hive so that it is protected, safe and secure. We’ll also regularly check each assigned hive.

Natural HIVE SPLITTING

Achieving our program sustainability comes from hive splitting.

Natural splitting of a hive occurs when a new queen relocates herself from the parent hive to create a new hive and colony of her own. This generally occurs once a year in favourable conditions - when the weather is seasonally good and blooms are abundant - with the new nest being established approximately 500 metres from the original hive (the outer limit of bee-flight from their nest).

After several months the new hive will populate itself to the same numbers as the original hive – 10,000 or more bees.

Wooden OATH Splitting 

Along with the natural splitting that will occur, we will also split the hives that have been introduced to a ‘foster-carer’. This is performed by the BeeWild team after two years, and only if the colony is strong.

We will split the OATH in half. The original flightless queen staying in one half and ‘queen cells’, which will produce a new queen, being present in the second half. Each of the two original sections will be connected to new box-sections. The result will be two new hives.

The original hive remains in the exact original spot and the new hive will be relocated by us to a suitable location elsewhere – safely up to 200km or more.

Natural and planned hive-splitting will result in the exponentially beneficial outcomes for our program, with the positive impact of the introduced hives continuing to replicate indefinitely beyond a hive’s initial installation.

Splitting foster hives

Every hive distributed remains the property of the BeeWild Program. Residents with beehives will be contacted to arrange for the hive to be split every couple of years. Splitting the hive is a really important part of expanding the program and distributing new hives.

No hive will be split unless it is healthy and ready. The health of your bees is our primary concern and we won’t risk any hive by splitting it prematurely.

A small number of hives are sold out of area each year and all funds from this are put back into the BeeWild Program. Hive cost is $550.