And why every bag of Humble Roast coffee is part of the answer.
We're beekeepers. We rebuild.
That's not a marketing line. It's the only answer this family knows how to give when the apiary is empty and the question of what comes next is sitting heavily in the air.
The Day Aco Walked Out to the Apiary
In spring 2025, Aco walked out to the apiary and found what he had been quietly dreading since Varroa mite arrived in NSW three years earlier.
Twenty hives. All of them gone.
Not the sound of a working hive — the low, purposeful hum that means a colony is building, foraging, thriving. Not the smell of warm wax and propolis that every beekeeper knows without thinking about it. Just silence. Twenty empty hive boxes, and the stillness that comes after something you spent years building disappears in a single season.
Why didn't we just walk away?
Because beekeeping isn't a hobby in this family. It's how we understand who we are.
Three Generations, Two Families, One Village
The beekeeping knowledge in this family comes from two directions that converged in the same small Macedonian village and eventually found each other in Western Sydney.
Dedo Blagoja was the first apiarist in Mrenoga in the early 1970s. He was self-taught. He worked without gloves. The bees rarely stung him — not because he was lucky, but because he had a patience and stillness around the hive that his daughter Lidija watched and absorbed from childhood. She learned to read a colony by its sound before she learned to read a book.
Dedo Vojislav came to Australia and found beekeeping through friends, through hobby farms across Sydney, through the beekeeping associations he joined and the community he built around the practice. His son Aco learned alongside him. Vojislav sold honey to family and friends and to anyone who'd listen — earning himself the nickname the honey guy — and that quiet pride in what the hive produces passed directly to his son.
When Aco and Lidija married, the beekeeping traditions of both families came together. When their daughter Biljana was old enough to help at the apiary — and then to run it, to process it, to build Humble around it — three generations of accumulated knowledge were living in a single Western Sydney apiary.
Varroa took all of it in one season.
That's why walking away was never an option. You don't walk away from something three generations built. You figure out how to bring it back.
What Varroa Actually Is
Varroa destructor is a parasitic mite that attaches itself to honeybees and feeds on their fat bodies — the biological tissue that stores proteins and supports immune function. An infested bee doesn't die immediately. It becomes weaker. Its ability to fight off viral infections declines. Its colony gradually loses its capacity to sustain itself.
The mite reproduces inside sealed brood cells — the capped chambers where young bees develop before hatching. Each reproductive cycle produces more mites. Each generation of bees born into an infested hive carries a higher burden than the last. The colony weakens slowly and invisibly over months, until the tipping point arrives and what appeared to be a struggling hive suddenly collapses entirely.
This is what makes Varroa so devastating and so difficult to manage. It doesn't announce itself. It doesn't kill dramatically. It quietly dismantles a colony from the inside, over a season, until there is nothing left to save.
Australia detected Varroa for the first time in June 2022 near the Port of Newcastle in NSW. The largest agricultural biosecurity response in Australian history was launched. It failed. By September 2023 eradication was formally abandoned. Australia — the last major Varroa-free beekeeping nation in the world — has permanently lost that status. Every hive in the country now operates in a Varroa environment, and every beekeeper now carries the cost and complexity of managing it for the rest of their beekeeping life.
What Varroa Is Doing to Australian Beekeeping
Our twenty hives are not an isolated story. They are one small piece of a crisis that is reshaping Australian agriculture in ways that most people don't yet fully understand.
Varroa destructor arrived in NSW in June 2022. The largest agricultural biosecurity response in Australian history was launched. It failed. By September 2023 eradication was formally abandoned. Australia — the last major Varroa-free beekeeping nation in the world — lost that status permanently.
What has followed is a systematic dismantling of the managed bee population that Australian agriculture depends on.
As of November 2022 — the most recent national beekeeper census — Australia had approximately 47,900 registered beekeepers managing 855,000 hives across the country. That number has changed dramatically since. By mid-2026 Varroa had spread to NSW, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and the ACT, wiping out at least 60% of hives across eastern states and South Australia. The Wheen Bee Foundation's Pollination Security Status Report 2026 warns of a shortfall of close to 300,000 commercial beehives for peak pollination season. Treatment-resistant Varroa strains have emerged in NSW and Queensland as of January 2026. Almond pollination costs have jumped from $30 per hive two decades ago to approximately $200 per hive by November 2025. In the Blue Mountains, apple crops were reported at just 5% of normal yield due to collapsing feral bee populations. The two-year national transition to management program formally ended in February 2026. Varroa is now permanent.
The beekeeper attrition numbers are the most alarming detail. The Australian Honeybee Council estimates almost 40% of commercial beekeepers will leave the sector in the coming years. This means there will be fewer bees pollinating crops — putting farming communities and food security at risk. A separate ABC report from June 2026 found the cost of managing Varroa and the development of insecticide resistance is forcing half of Australia's beekeepers to quit.
Some bee clubs in Varroa hotspots have already lost half their members. The exodus of backyard and hobby beekeepers — the people who kept bees not for commercial pollination contracts but because they loved it — is accelerating fastest in the regions hit earliest by Varroa.
Varroa mite was first detected in South Australia in September 2025, meaning the crisis has now spread well beyond NSW.
Why Backyard Beekeeping Matters More Than You Think
The conversation about Varroa tends to focus on commercial beekeeping — the large-scale operations that service almond farms, canola crops and horticulture across eastern Australia. That conversation is important. But it misses something equally significant.
One of the hidden findings of recent research was just how much heavy lifting feral honey bees are currently doing for agriculture. With Varroa mite coming into the country, Australia will lose all of those feral honey bees.
Wild and feral bee populations — which have historically supplemented commercial pollination across enormous areas of Australian farmland — are collapsing. While native stingless bees will be spared, the number of feral bees is expected to be reduced by 95% as Varroa spreads. That collapse is happening silently, without anyone paying for replacement colonies, without any commercial mechanism to compensate.
The gap that commercial beekeepers leave when they exit the industry is partially visible — fewer hives available for pollination contracts, higher prices for growers. As seen in New Zealand, where Varroa established in 2000, prices for bee hives rented to growers increased by 30 to 100% per hive within five years.
The gap that backyard and non-commercial beekeepers leave is less visible but equally real. Every hobbyist who hangs up their veil and sells their equipment is one less person keeping bees alive in suburban and regional Australia. One less person maintaining the distributed network of managed colonies that supplements commercial pollination. One less person learning Varroa management and sharing that knowledge through clubs and communities.
The 35 pollination-dependent industries across Australia — almonds, avocados, stone fruit, macadamias, berries, onion seed, canola and dozens more — depend on this distributed network as much as they depend on commercial operators. When the network thins, the whole system becomes more fragile.
Backyard beekeeping after Varroa isn't a hobby. It's infrastructure.
The Rebuild
We are starting again this spring.
A five-frame nucleus colony — the minimum viable starting unit for a new hive, consisting of a mated queen, frames of brood and a small population of worker bees — currently costs between $450 and $500 from NSW suppliers. Equipment that survived needs to be treated and decontaminated. Equipment that didn't survive needs to be replaced. And every hive that's established now requires ongoing Varroa management in perpetuity — oxalic acid treatments multiple times per year — a cost that simply didn't exist for Australian beekeepers before 2022.
We're starting with a small number of colonies. We'll grow them through the season, split the strong ones, and build from there. The way Dedo Vojislav built his first hives. The way Dedo Blagoja tended his in Mrenoga. Slowly. With patience. With the understanding that bees don't respond to urgency.
We will update the progress here. When the first nucleus colonies are installed in spring, we'll say so. When the first brood frames appear, we'll say that too. When the first honey super goes on, you'll know. Because this rebuild belongs to everyone who bought a bag of coffee or a jar of honey and chose to be part of it.
While the apiary rebuilds, our honey is sourced from trusted Australian partner apiaries — always raw, always unfiltered, always hand-harvested. The standard that defines Humble honey hasn't changed. What changed is which hives it comes from. We will say clearly when our own Sydney hives are producing again, because that moment is the whole point of everything described above.
What Your Purchase Actually Does
The rebuild is funded by two streams with two distinct jobs.
Honey profit rebuilds the hives. All profit from Humble Raw Honey — after the cost of the honey and the jars — goes directly to nucleus colonies and hive equipment. The capital cost of starting again.
Coffee keeps them alive. $1 from every bag of Humble Roast goes to the ongoing cost of Varroa management — the oxalic acid treatments, monitoring and testing that Australian beekeeping now requires permanently. Not a one-off purchase. The permanent new operational cost that doesn't end once the hives are rebuilt.
Every candle is made from retired hive frames — zero waste from the apiary, the third thread of the same story.
The honey and the coffee aren't separate causes. They're the same cause, approached from two directions. We're not asking you to save Australian beekeeping. We're asking you to help one family in Western Sydney keep doing what three generations built — and to understand that every family that chooses to stay in beekeeping after Varroa is making a contribution to Australian food security that is larger than it looks.
Coffee Brought This Family Together. Now It's Helping Rebuild What We Lost.
Aco sat down for a traditional coffee visit with Lidija's family in a Macedonian village. A love story that would eventually cross the world began over that cup.
Years later, Charbel — a barista in Sydney — wrote his number on Biljana's cup. She called. They built Humble together.
Coffee didn't make our honey. It didn't build our hives. But it brought together the people who tend them. Twice, across two generations.
The least it can do now is help bring the hives back.
Every bag helps. Every jar matters. We're beekeepers.
We rebuild.
Sources: Bee Aware / Plant Health Australia — Number of Beekeepers and Hives by State, November 2022 (beeaware.org.au/industry); AgriFutures Australia — Size and Scope of the Australian Honey Bee and Pollination Industry 2023 (parliament.nsw.gov.au); Wheen Bee Foundation — Pollination Security Status Report 2026; ABC News — Crop Failure Fears as Deadly Bee Parasite Wipes Out Hives, June 2026 (abc.net.au); ABC News — ACT Varroa Mite Sees Over 1,000 Beehives Destroyed, April 2026 (abc.net.au); Forest Fresh Honey — Varroa Mite Australia: What It Means for Your Honey in 2026, April 2026 (forestfreshhoney.com.au); Australian Government Outbreak — Varroa Mite Current Status, June 2026 (outbreak.gov.au); Australian Honey Bee Industry Council — Colony Loss Survey and Chair Quarterly Report April 2026 (honeybee.org.au); PIRSA — Varroa Mite Detection South Australia, 2025 (pir.sa.gov.au); National Varroa Mite Management Program — Hive Losses (varroa.org.au); ABC News Rural — Beekeepers Battling Varroa Mite Call for Industry Exit Strategy, October 2023 (abc.net.au); NSW Department of Primary Industries — Varroa Mite Detection and Response, 2022 (dpi.nsw.gov.au).