In Tasmanian Forests, A Battle Breaks Out Over Bees and Trees

From In Tasmanian Forests, A Battle Breaks Out Over Bees and Trees:

There had been reports of a bushfire in the mountains that night. So, before dawn, the beekeepers headed west to check on their hives. Like most of the beekeepers in Tasmania, they set up their hives along logging roads in the forest, because their bees collect nectar and pollen from flowering leatherwood trees.

Leatherwood grows only on this heart-shaped island the size of Ireland, a hundred miles south of the Australian mainland and 800 miles west of New Zealand. The trees' small, star-shaped flowers blossom into the autumn, generating 70% of the 1,200 tons of honey produced in Tasmania each year.

But today, a battle of trees versus bees is unfolding here. For more than 30 years, timber companies have been energetically converting the forests of this Australian state, which have the tallest and oldest flowering trees in the world, into sawdust and woodchips, which are shipped primarily to Japan. The loggers want the huge eucalyptus, but like dolphins caught in a tuna net, the leatherwood, Huon and King Billy pines that grow alongside them are harvested as well. The loggers then firebomb the forests to clear out the debris, a process that can lead to runaway 'regeneration burns' and inadvertently destroy nearby leatherwood, and threaten the hives.

If the logging of leatherwood isn't limited, the beekeepers warn, not only will their livelihood disappear, but so will the world's only source of leatherwood honey, which has a sharp, musky flavor similar to honey from chestnuts or thyme.