For episode 90 of the Bees with Ben podcast, we are heading to the tropics to catch up with Maurie Damon. Maurie has been keeping bees for decades in the Cairns region and remembers as a twelve-year-old being intoxicated with the intense flavour of honey from a nest of native bees.

Maurie tells Ben that one of the main differences about beekeeping in the tropics is that hives must be placed on stands to lift them about forty centimetres off the ground. One reason is the heavy ‘dew’ (there can be up to 150 millimetres of rain overnight). The other is the cane toads. Maurie says given the opportunity the troublesome toads will tap on the entrance to a hive and wait for an unsuspecting bee to investigate, whereupon it becomes a snack. Even hives on stands are not exempt from attack, as the toads have devised a cunning plan to get to the bees. They climb on top of one another, forming a pyramid; the uppermost toad eventually reaches the entrance to the hive, and when it has had its fill, falls off and helps lift its comrades to get a feed. The toads are unaffected by bee stings and swallow the insects whole.

Surprisingly, the toads have one beneficial aspect. When the larvae of small hive beetles crawl out of hives to pupate in the ground, the toads are waiting to devour them as well. Maurie reckons the toads may have been released a hundred years too early! He says nature has a way of working things out and cites the problems that beekeepers in the tropics had with wax moths in the 1970s and 1980s. These pests are now held in check by a native parasitic wasp, which lays its eggs in the wax moth grubs, as a food source for its young. When a researcher asked Maurie for some wax moth larvae to study, he could find none that were not infested by the wasps!

Maurie started his professional beekeeping career in Cairns and then moved to the Atherton Tablelands, where pollination services were in demand for winter-flowering crops such as avocados, mangoes, lychees and pumpkins. The business grew and grew; honey was initially sold at markets, but later to supermarkets and distributors. When he couldn’t produce sufficient honey in Cairns to satisfy demand, he shifted a heap of bees down to his block near Brisbane, where they were used to pollinate strawberries, mangoes and lychees. Every month he would drive down to pick up honey, which was then distributed to his customers in Cairns, where he maintained a large extraction plant.