Become a beekeeper or chicken wrangler

Keep chooks in your backyard

Keeping chickens in the backyard has lots of benefits and done properly will reduce kitchen and food waste and reward you and your garden in many ways for years to come.

How about giving a dozen home 'chooked' eggs to your neighbour as a gift or bake a cake from your freshly spun eggs?

You can even Rent-a-chook in your backyard for 6 weeks, including chickens, a chicken coop and educational support.

Native Stingless Bee and Honey Bee Trail

Honeybee and stingless native bees find a home at Randwick Sustainability Hub

You will find the apiary enclosure on the southern boundary of the Village Green at the Randwick Sustainability Hub. The enclosure houses two honeybee and one stingless, native bee hive. One of the honeybee hives is the top bar type and the other a conventional box hive.

Native bees are kept mainly to assist with pollination as they do not produce much honey. There are numerous varieties, most of them stingless. Some are social while others are solitary.

Considering bees?

As an urban beekeeper you are supporting urban pollinators and increasing their population as insurance against colony collapse disorder that is devastating beehives in other countries.

Workshops on urban beekeeping at the Hub educate people about the importance of bees to the pollination of our crops and for the culinary and medicinal importance of the honey they produce.

Contacts..

Contact the Urban Bee Hive, established to support bees and pollination in urban Sydney or the Amateur Beekeepers Association formed over 50 years ago for some tips.

• The Urban Beehive: http://theurbanbeehive.com
• Native bee specialist: http://elkeh.com.au/native-bees-stingless-bees/
• Sydney Bee Club: http://www.sydneybeeclub.org.au
• Amateur Beekeepers Association: http://www.beekeepers.asn.au

Reduce Your Footprint website stories...

• When bees come to town — Story and photos by Russ Grayson, June 2015
• People swarm to attend bee workshop — Story and photos by Russ Grayson, June 2015