When Michael Howes left Sydney in the mid-1990s, he wasn’t chasing a business. He came north to visit a friend, got lost somewhere in the ranges, fell for the country and stayed. He started keeping bees in 1996 – ‘one or two’ hives on a farm, then 20, then more – until he couldn’t give the honey away fast enough and began selling it into local shops.
The pivot came a year or two later. News of manuka honey was breaking, and as a New Zealander, Michael was familiar with the plant.
A beekeeping friend knew Dieter Horstmann, who owned a property nearby, and they put hives on it. Walking through the bush there, they realised what they were looking at: Leptospermum – known in Australia then as jelly bush, for the thick, gel-like honey it yields.
They tested it, found it active, and built a brand around it. The name arrived through partner Katrina Evans’ childhood friend Cheryl Livingston, who walked the same bush looking for medicine and announced she’d found manuka. Tyagarah Apiaries became Australia’s Manuka Honey.
Making of manuka
That heritage is more than branding. The Leptospermum genus is endemic to Australia; the plants New Zealand is famous for are thought to have crossed the Tasman around four million years ago. Michael worked with the University of the Sunshine Coast on its early research and on mapping Leptospermum species nationally. The business has since won trademark challenges in both the UK and New Zealand over the right to use the word ‘manuka’.
Medical applications
Michael and Katrina say manuka’s reputation rests on its antibacterial strength: early testing proved it kills around 80 pathogenic bacteria. It stimulates wound healing, and hospitals use it on burns, diabetic leg ulcers, and dialysis port sites to prevent infection. Two of the company’s products are certified by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (one for oral care, one for the skin), which means the claims on the tube have been tested, not just marketed. It’s a honey you can eat on toast or put on your skin, and plenty of customers do both.
Michael says the key difference lives in how their honey is processed.
‘The honey is treasured. It’s cold-extracted, which is a lot slower. Cold extraction means you maintain all the nutrients, all the tastes, all the polyphenols, which are very complex compounds – the beneficial compounds of the honey. You maintain those by warming it, but not overheating it. So it’s a slower process.’
The creaming process that gives the honey its fine crystal texture is a closely held trade secret.
In the hives, there are no pesticides, no antibiotics and no sugar feeding. These practices are common elsewhere in the industry, and residues survive processing. The subtropical Northern Rivers climate means the bees forage year-round and stay strong without shortcuts.
Roughly 700 hives sit north and south of the property and down into Bundjalung National Park, each holding about 40,000 bees and a queen laying up to 1,500 eggs a day. Everything is wild harvested. Hives are moved at night so the bees emerge foraging in a new place at first light, which means knowing the flowering cycles of every honey tree in the district. One of the genuine pleasures of the job, Katrina notes, is being paid to walk around looking at flowers.
Running on sunshine
The processing shed, offered by Dieter Horstmann to prove a business could run on sunshine, operates off-grid on 50 kilowatts of solar. Five permanent staff cover beekeeping, processing, sales, and admin, with casuals throughout the extraction season. The honey is sold at the Byron Farmers Market, and the company donates honey to WIRES, Fletcher Street Cottage, and the Mullumbimby & District Neighbourhood Centre, to name a few. During the floods, staff went out volunteering with honey while the site itself sat under water.
One of the many vital aspect of the Australia’s Manuka Honey brand is the ‘hive to home’ attitude. Many other brands buy the cheapest bulk honey available and put their own label on it. Here, the name on the jar belongs to the people who keep the bees, and visitors are welcome at the factory outlet to taste the difference.
Michael is proud of the fact that their honey is really well looked after. As he puts it, ‘It’s a treasure: it’s treasured’.
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