Beekeeping Industry Taonga

After the ApiNZ Annual General Meeting in June 2021 I took the chance to re-acquaint myself with two items of New Zealand beekeeping history.  

The gavel and stand used in the AGM by ApiNZ Chair Bruce Wills had been originally presented to the National Beekeepers’ Association in 1983.  The gavel and stand had belonged to the Honey Marketing Authority, the regulatory/marketing body, especially for honey exports.  The HMA was in existence from the end of 1953 until the early 1980s when it was ‘dissolved’.  The HMA was, over that time, something of a polarising body, with some beekeepers supporting it and others working actively against it.

The names of the chairmen through the years from 1953 to 1983 are engraved on small silver shields on the stand.  Edward Field, Wallace Nelson, George Gumbrell, Jack Fraser, Russell Poole, Ivan Dickinson, Percy Berry.  These were all beekeepers who made the effort to provide service to the greater beekeeping industry.  And then, for the winding up of the HMA, Ivan Dickinson had one last round as Chair, ending the HMA’s 30 years of marketing influence.  For anyone familiar with the industry’s history, those names are easily recognised.

At the 1983 NBA conference Ivan Dickinson presented the gavel and stand to Tony Clissold, who retired as NBA President at the end of that AGM.  Ian Berry’s time as president started at the end of that Conference, so Ian would have been the first NBA President to actually use the gavel.  And Ian Berry’s Vice President back then?  Allen McCaw was elected as Vice President even before he had officially taken a seat on the Executive!  All of the NBA Presidents since then have used the gavel and stand, at least for ‘formal’ meetings such as an AGM.  It brought back many memories to see it again this year.

Steuart Goodman, the NBA Executive Secretary for the next 10 years, was attending his first NBA conference when the gavel and stand were gifted in 1983.  Sadly, just after this year’s 2021 conference, I learned that Steuart had died about a month before.  I would like to pay tribute here for Steuart’s contributions to the professionalism of the beekeeping industry.

As well as the gavel and stand, the NBA from that era has passed on to today’s industry one other taonga, the bone carving worn around the President/Chair’s neck.  That taniwha and its wakataniwha (carved box) date back to the Rotorua NBA conference in 1986:

One of the highlights of the Conference was the presentation to the Association by Howard Morrison of a bone Taniwha.  At a subsequent Executive meeting a Wakataniwha was presented which had been carved by Mr Lindsay Reid, and donated by Mr Murray Reid, with Waikato Branch providing a silver inscription plate.

When Ian Berry as NBA President accepted the HMA gavel and stand in 1983, he was beginning his first year as president.  And it was Ian Berry in his last year as NBA President at the 1986 Rotorua Conference who accepted the taniwha from the Morrison family – and at the end of that meeting, hung it around the neck of Allan McCaw for the beginning of his period as NBA President.

And down through the years, upon the election of the next year’s president, at the end of the annual conference, the bone carving was hung around another new industry leader.  Allen McCaw put it around Dudley Ward’s neck.  Dudley passed it on several years later to Frances Trewby, the NBA’s first female president.  And in 1994, at the Tauranga conference, I had the honour of receiving the taniwha from her.  I wore it proudly for my time as President of the NBA.  

Now, about 25 years later, I took the opportunity to get to know these two treasures again while at the Rotorua conference.  They reminded me of the continuity of the NBA, now ApiNZ, as the primary industry representative body.  The gavel, in particular, references all those years of service by beekeepers in the spirit of “Better beekeeping, better marketing”.  The taniwha is the more socially-binding taonga, reminding me more of the people, the beekeepers, who are being served by the wearer of the pendant.

At one of the last conferences I attended in the late 1990s, Ian Berry and I stood around looking at the room full of conference attendees.  He said something like “You know, when I get to conference each year, it feels like I’m with my family.”  A minute later he concluded “You don’t always like all of your family, but they are family still.”

I was proud to be felt to be part of Ian’s “family” back then, and especially to have been chosen to wear the taniwha, and to use the gavel for the National Beekeepers’ Association, now Apiculture New Zealand.