Who doesn’t love a walk? Many of the things I hold dearly are right there in front of me when I walk. Special places, fresh air, simplicity, and the natural world. A calm moment in time to clear some space in my mind (if I’m walking alone) or discuss or debate a topic or problem (if I’m walking with someone near and dear). Walking gives me a place to share, think, be grateful, fix a perspective and renourish my inner self.  I walk as often as I can and I love making my own path, finding my own way somewhere off the beaten track in the beautiful surroundings near Beechworth.

To get to chat with Susie Youssef when I met her at our Bee Arboretum was a delight. I always think a great part of a walk is a pause point. I couldn’t think of a better place to pause than in our Bee Arboretum under one of the established Hill Gum habitat trees. There I could explain the idea behind our bee arboretum, the links between bees, trees, our food systems, healthy ecosystems and the future of our planet and our life and history as beekeepers in Beechworth.

Introducing Susie to an Apiary of around 100 hives of bees just on the edge of the Bee Arboretum was a lot of fun. Preparing someone to encounter bees en masse for the first time is something to be done with care and caution. It’s easy for a ‘newbie’ to quickly become overwhelmed even though they’re safely tucked inside a bee suit. And you definitely don’t want to be responsible for getting the main star stung and ending up with a swollen face! The sight and sound of hundreds of thousands of bees is something that most people will never encounter and it’s not for everyone but Susie handled it like a pro with the sweet reward of fresh honeycomb proving to be worth any trepidation she might have felt.

Behind the scenes on a show like this, there is always a large crew to also accommodate safely. Camera persons trying to operate their delicate buttons with bulky gloves and ‘whining’ about the heat inside the bee suit is always comical in some way. Sound recordists learn that a big fluffy microphone on the end of a boom poked in the face of the “talent” not only picks up their voice but is highly attractive to the bees. The bees think they are fluffy animals of some sort. They see them as a threat and try to burrow into them – usually creating their own agitated burrowing buzzing noise which drowns out the voices. This usually sees the sound boom ditched as an unsolvable challenge for the sound recordist.

By the end of the filming, we managed to successfully create both bee lovers and genuine advocates for our beautiful nature and walks in and around Beechworth. We hope that you get time to watch the show and we’d love to see you walking around Beechworth when you next can.

Enjoy our links to our favourite walks in our backyard, and be sure to say hi to our bees as they buzz high up in the trees where you walk.

Find some of our favourite short walks around Beechworth here.

Great Australian Walks season 2, episode 3 (Beechworth) premiers on SBS and SBS On Demand on Thursday 5th September, 7.30pm AEST. Watch now!

– Jodie