[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A99E90;”] W [/dropcap]hen it comes to making a living, Brentan Doeven has chosen a path with a real sting in the tail.

Brentan, a tall, 25-year-old with a shaved head, Greg-Combet-style glasses and a heavy gold chain around his neck looks more like the sort of guy who would be serving short blacks in an inner-Melbourne café, but instead he makes his money from honey.

He finds it difficult to explain what drew him to beekeeping exactly, other than he simply likes bees.

“I found them fascinating. They are such simple yet complex creatures,” he said.

Brentan bought a single hive about four years ago and placed it on his parent’s farm at East Naringal, where he still lives, and taught himself the finer details of beekeeping by reading books about it.

“There is a lot more to it than meets the eye, actually,” he said.

“You have to learn how to check the boxes for diseases, how to keep the boxes in good condition and how bees operate.”

[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A99E90;”] B [/dropcap]rentan has since expanded to 30 hives and pretty much knows all there is to know about bees, from how they don’t like getting caught in the rain, to how they choose their queen and which flowers produce the best honey.

In this, he has a distinct advantage, as his parents grow and sell cut flowers, so the property is awash with a huge variety of native plants and trees, plus numerous fruit trees that have also proven irresistible to his charges.

“Come late spring and summer, when everything is in flower, it can get pretty crazy here,” he says.

Brentan has also taught himself how to extract and bottle honey, using techniques that involve as little human intervention as possible.

He bought a hand-cranked extraction machine – which looks like a metal garbage can – from an old farmer and uses this to spin the honey out of the honeycomb.

The honey is then filtered with a hand-sieve that is held together by four bits of cane.

And that’s it.

The rich golden honey tastes superb – not too sweet, not too overpowering.

Of course there are drawbacks to working with bees, and we had to ask the obvious question, to which Brenton replied: “Yes!”

“Yes, I have been stung. Several times.

“Once I didn’t zip my suit up properly and a bee got in, then another and another, because once a bee stings, it lets off a pheromone that sets all the other bees off. I had to jump in the dam to stop them.”

[box type=”bio”] You can find Brentan (aka Brentan the Bee Man) at the Port Fairy Farmers’ Markets and Warrnambool Showground markets.[/box]

 

[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A5CECD;”] A [/dropcap]NDY and Debbie Doeven live the kind of life that most people only fantasise about while staring out the window from their desk job.

It has been more than 20 years since the pair decided to uproot from suburban Melbourne and start afresh – from the ground up – on 21 acres of scrubby land at Naringal, east of Warrnambool.

“When we first came here, this land was covered in blackberries and weeds and that was about it,” Andy said.

It is a far cry from that today, with the couple and their two sons using most of the land to grow magnificent native and South African flowers for their cut flower business.

They also sell fresh market produce harvested from their two flourishing vegetable gardens and a bevy of fruit trees, including two types of plum, two types of pear, six types of apple, peaches, passionfruit, kiwi fruit, mandarins, lemons, figs and feijoa.

Hazelnuts, chestnuts and walnuts have also recently been added to the farm.

[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A5CECD;”] I [/dropcap]T IS PERHAPS not surprising that Andy had previously worked at a Safeway supermarket as the fresh produce manager, until the recession Australia had to have drove profit margins down and personal stress levels up.

The pair decided it was time for a lifestyle change and found the Naringal land on a real estate board in Warrnambool while on their way to visit Andy’s brother in Portland.

“We actually were thinking about Snake Gully (near Ballarat), but when we saw this, we thought it had a lot of potential for a good price,” Andy said.

The family started from scratch; living in a shed on the property for “several years” while they built their mudbrick and bluestone home by hand, using the clay soil dug from the building site.

They salvaged and recycled second-hand materials where possible, including buying used equipment to set up their own solar electricity system.

They still remain entirely off the grid and use a wood stove to heat water in winter.

[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A5CECD;”] I [/dropcap]T HAS BEEN LONG, hard, tiring work that has taken many years to complete, but now they enjoy an enviable lifestyle sustained by much of their own produce, including free-range eggs, at least some milk from a house cow and, perhaps, some pork from the pigs that one of their sons has begun to breed.

It is a very physical lifestyle that keeps them both looking little different, one imagines, than when they first met at a disco as teenagers.

After building what has been a shared dream, they can’t imagine ever returning to a city lifestyle.

“No, impossible,” said Debbie with a laugh.

[box] Doeven Flowers can be found at the Port Fairy farmers market (third Saturday of the month) and Warrnambool Showground market (each Sunday).[/box]

Other stories you might enjoy…

 

Make mine milk  – goat’s milk!

Brentan the bee man

Life as a sole sister: a cobbler with Rauert’s shoes

Rob Sharrock and his sexy Vespa