Our Story - how it all began - the bumps - and where we are going...

 well, that's a bit of a longer story...and there had been hiccups ...

Many many moons ago, at a time we still had lived in Switzerland, we had been experimenting with growing all sorts of crops in various types of soil, we also played around using hydroponics and Aquaponics and in some occasions we also tried growing crops without water and soil all together using water mist / fog based systems. The hole focus was always on growing crops and optimizing the growing media for maximum harvest, which ever we had intended to use. 

 

Beekeeping as such was a logical "accident" to happen later down the line, once we arrived in Australia, and had developed our backyard, and once continued of where we had stopped in Switzerland by building raised beds, veggie patches and planting 20+ fruit trees around our house in Perth's suburbs and continued the efforts of amending our pile of sand and turning it into a healthy soil around the house.

When in 2016 we had gotten our first backyard bee hive due to optimizing the next logical step in the sequence, pollination of the crops! While my brother Gordon, previously had gained previous experience by having worked for Kim Fewster and the Fewster Farm in a commercial beekeeping entity a few years earlier, this while I had zero experience with the bees at the time and below is how we first started, our first backyard hive:

 

On a sunny Sunday while having showed off the bees and pointing out the queen to my older brother Donald and the kids, I must of dropped the queen and or squashed her during the excitement, as probably quite a few new and excited beekeepers would do!

Exactly 14 days later, again on Sunday I would inspect the bees again, and I would even have more excitement, as I found queen cells for the very first time. I remember how I phoned my brother Gordon, asking him what to do, as one of the virgin queens was just about to push the capping off or queen cell and emerge the very moment I had the frame in my hands. Time was not on my side, and I quickly gathered a spare box and improvised a bottom and hive lid. This was probably the start, of what grew bigger and bigger over the next few years following. 

Out of our first hive we ended up with 3 splits, this while our backyard pollination efforts started to pay off nicely around the house with having a garden full of fruit and vegetables ranging from Avocados, Bananes to loads and loads of pumpkins.

  

 

After about a felt ton of pumpkins and all family members and friends starting to stop accepting any further pumpkins we knew we are on track with the soil and bee experiments, at least we knew how to grow "stuff" also in Australia in comparison to some rather icy growing attempts we had tried prior in Switzerland shown below. However not all of our crops always had been bumper crops...

 

One or two years into it in Western Australia and the bee-fever got us, and out of a few backyard hives, grew a few more and more, and with it the requirement for more hive sites.

Continuing our expansion, came the need to purchase more queens. However, out of our first 15 introduced queens, we probably had 4x queens actually making it, this by doing all sorts of beginner mistakes we could have done and our missing knowledge around the surrounding floral sources and flowering patterns would cause us high casualty rates in lost hives and the first big encounter of wax moth's destruction capabilities.

 

As we had been had been increasing our queen numbers, so had the boxes, frames, tops and bottoms had to increase too, and there comes a time where your hobby starts to go out of control. Boxes, boxes and more boxes... We had put in quite some time construct our own insulate our wooden boxes with a custom setup.

  

We expanded faster as we could continue to build our own wooden hives with custom insulation fitted to them, we had to move on to Paradise Polystyrene bee boxes to keep up with the bee expansion rates.

  

At the time we operated based out of our own homes and garages and pretty much any start-up, we once again had to move on and scale up and get a bigger shed and started operating out of Gingin Western Australia on a large bush block.

 
 

As the story goes on, the large shed once thought to be big enough for the project, has been outgrown and we needed some extra storage space and started arranging our headquarter.

Meanwhile we have had a few very close calls in 2020 and 2021 in terms of bush fires right in front of our doorstep and it had been a scary and catastrophic bush fire season for many families in WA.

  

And as time goes on, our trail and error continues...

  

Its one of those stories, probably told by every emerging beekeeping enterprise which is going through its expansion, initially having started with a 6x4 foot trailer and a handful of hives, and soon needed to upgrade soon to a 7x4, when a few month later we are using a 7m flat top trailer, and we will probably will soon be upgrading to the next level soon. (written 30.4.2021)

 

More and more customers are coming into appreciation of our quality NUCs.

 

In August 2021 we have placed our first "trial load" of 30 hives onto Canola, including the pallet with the 4 monitoring hives, and now can remotely observe their daily 2kg weight gain.

 

And then came 2021, a year in which what initially started as BE WORTH IT pty ltd came to a separation and Colin had removed himself from BE WORTH IT, and left his brother Gordon to drive the ship for the next few years due to differences in direction and operation.

 

 

 

In 2023 Gordon decided to discontinue the beekeeping operations and to concentrate his efforts in his own designs and packaging / packing rather than to pursue keeping bees, as it seemed too hard for him to manage.

QuickWings pty ltd was formed and created on the 20.4.2023 and will be taking over the beekeeping operation as of 30.6.2023 again. So we are back on track again after this slight hiccup. 

  

Off for e a new start...

We will keep adding to this post as time goes on...

Make sure you check in every so often!

Please let us know if this information had been useful on your journey to your first set of bee hives!

Feel free to browse to our complimentary Youtube channel which goes hand in hand with this blog.

Happy beekeeping,

The QuickWings Team

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