Lindis honey
By TOM ISERN
© Plains Folk
It's time, I thought as we drove by, to stop in and see these folks. For years I have been traveling to the grasslands of Central Otago, New Zealand — mainly to pursue a line of research in rural history, but partly to escape March on the northern plains — and every year I drove past the barrel-based mailbox that read, "Lindis Honey." Always I thought, the people who keep hives in this place, the Lindis, I'll bet they know everything about it.
And sure enough, the conversation with Ross and Claire Mackay was fascinating. The lead-in was that before arriving, we had been up to the local country church, Tarras Church, looking at the kneelers. These objects of needlepoint art were done to celebrate the centennial of women's suffrage in 1993. Every woman decided what to depict on her own cushion — mainly family things and community history. Claire Mackay had done not only the kneeler depicting the beautiful, simple stucco church, but also another illustrating her family's life.
Bees, in other words. Her kneeler features a pot of honey, a couple of honeybees in flight, and the blossoms they are visiting.
"We had been beekeeping here for more than 40 years," explains Claire, "and so I did one with the different flowers from which honey is produced." Of these she named clover, vipers bugloss (a local borage species, gorgeously blue-flowered), dandelion, catsear, and thyme. Thyme and catsear are difficult to stitch, and so the two featured blossoms on the kneeler are clover and bugloss, with a dandelion border.
We talked for a while about beekeeping, and about Claire's work as a district nurse. Then she said she ought to bring her husband into the conversation, since she only had lived in the district for 49 years. She stepped to the back kitchen door and performed that classic Australasian summons, the cooee. I mean, Claire is a diminutive woman, but her call out to the garden was a penetrating COO-EE. And in came Ross.
Quite a story, the two of them unfolded. As a young man Ross lost an arm in an accident. Luckily, he married his nurse and came out of the trauma with a good attitude. He wasn't sure he could handle the family farm, but the family had a little experience with bees, so he and Claire mail-ordered in enough bees to start a hundred hives. Eventually they would have 2,000. "Losing an arm was not a trauma in the sense I never had the inclination to look back," remarks Ross. "I was 20 and had my life before me.
"Beekeeping," he says further, "is a long learning curve. You never learn all about bees. I was never bored with beekeeping, ever. Many times challenged, but never bored." One hired man said it was "three picnics a day." Claire points out there was the further fascination of going onto so many properties in various seasons. "An adventure," Ross calls it.
It happened that the beginning of their enterprise coincided with changes in the New Zealand high country that complemented it. Throughout the region high-country sheep farmers were pursuing land development in the 1950s and 1960s. They hired aerial applicators to oversow their tussock ranges with improved grasses and clovers, then to dust them with superphosphate. The country greened and, literally, blossomed.
Before there had been no bees, let alone commercial hives. With the changes in the land, there were opportunities for apiarists, who soon learned the nature of the land — when the willows blossomed, when the thyme, how the bees reacted to the seasons and changes.
If you want to learn the lay of the land from a wonderfully perceptive point of view, ask the beekeepers. They still may be learning, like Ross Mackay says, but they already know things the rest of us never imagine.
