Just as that character in the 1971 Dr Suess book spoke for the trees Goodwin has spent the past 30 years doing the same for bees.
While health issues prompted Goodwin to step down earlier this year from his role as bee scientist with Plant and Food Research at Ruakura, his passion for the insect is no less dim.
From his Waikato home he continues his campaign to increase New Zealanders’ knowledge of and respect for nature’s most industrious worker while overseeing research for the next generation of bee scientists.
Goodwin’s 30-plus years of experience remain invaluable in a sector that has experienced an explosion of commercial and amateur beekeeping enterprises in the past decade.
The sector now boasts more than a million hives, up from 270,000 only 10 years ago and even more than Australia.
The surge in interest has been driven by promising returns from manuka honey but coming at a time when knowledge and extension services have been wound back.
“Back in the eighties we used to have advisory services and a lot of industries recreated those services, such as DairyNZ and Beef + Lamb. But beekeeping did not.”
Having dropped the full-time research commitment Goodwin has spent this year focusing on writing two books to help fill that knowledge gap. One is for amateur backyard beekeepers, the other for commercial operators.
The books are an exercise in concise simplicity, field guides on what operators should, could and should not do when managing all aspects of their hives.
The amateur guide book assumes nothing, with comprehensive explanations around such industry blights as American foulbrood disease.
He has also partnered with a corporate sponsor to ultimately produce 90 three-minute videos on all those management aspects, keeping the messages tight and to the point for a generation less inclined to seek out and read written management guidelines.
“I see it as something of a compromise – ultimately you would prefer to be able to give live demonstrations at field days to groups of beekeepers but this will go some way to achieve that, maybe through a subscription model.”
Ever adaptive, Goodwin is also leveraging off more flexible publishing options new technology has bought to traditional how-to books.
“It means we can tailor our print run – you no longer have to publish a pallet-load of books in a single run.
“Now you can design your own book, lay it all up and then publish very limited amounts that match the market’s size.”
It’s useful for a man who has niche publishing experience that includes a book on the history of Port Charles on the Coromandel Peninsula and one on NZ’s history of toxic honey encounters.
His passion for bees was ignited over 30 years ago when he was looking for a doctorate subject. He chanced on work examining bees’ ability to find food and communicate that to their hive mates via a special bee dance.
“But they used the sun to orientate themselves for that dance, which raised the question what do they do on a cloudy day?”
He found they recalled the sun’s position at a certain time of day from the day before but that required a biological clock.
Goodwin’s work has also included better understanding how bees pollinate kiwifruit in orchards, critical given the sector has only a 10-day pollination window.
It included something as simple as learning that bees collect water as well as pollen and the water source needs to be out in the open, away from the reflective vines for bees to find it and drink from it.
Goodwin has appreciated the opportunities to work on industry problems, something scientists often don’t get to be part of until a problem has become a crisis.
He worked closely with the team dealing with American foulbrood, initially a successful approach that became the template for dealing with Tb in the early nineties.
However, the failure of foul brood infestation to fall much further in the past decade has in part been causesd by a need for greater education of and behaviour change by beekeepers.
“Hopefully, my books and the videos will go some way to improving on this.”
His one regret is the approach taken in the late nineties when varroa was discovered and authorities dithered before acting.
“If things had been done differently, acted on sooner, it could have been eradicated.”
One of his greatest worries now is the slow but distinct level of resistance to treatment developing among varroa mites.
And thanks to the disease coming into NZ the dependence between humans and bees has become greater.
“Now bees need human intervention to control varroa in order to survive.”
Goodwin views the beekeeping industry as something of a public good in a country so dependent on pollination for its income.
He likens its risks to exploitive fishing before quotas were introduced.
“There is nothing to stop you expanding and the relatively low cost of capital to do so means many have. I can’t think of any industry that has expanded as rapidly as beekeeping in recent memory.”
