Colwood residents have a whole new reason to be proud that their community is home to the prestigious Royal Colwood Golf Club.

After dealing with a rogue swarm of bees busying themselves around the Royal Colwood Golf Club, General Manager Philip Nurse got to thinking more about bees.

Royal Colwood Golf Club looks for every opportunity to protect and restore the incredible natural environment that members enjoy. A little research into the decline of honeybee colonies around the globe spurred Nurse to explore whether there was some small way the golf club could do its part to foster the bee population in our area.

The result: a cool little gazebo with five new bee hives, each with three growing bee colonies, now sits on the property at Royal Colwood Golf Club.

“We looked at it from an environmental standpoint,” said Nurse. The combination of having bees around to pollinate flowers and trees on the 160-acre course, and doing their part to help stem the number of bees that die off annually in the area, was attractive to club members, Nurse adds.

The club and its members are also looking forward to the honey that the bees will produce after the first year. The restaurant prides itself on sourcing local ingredients as much as possible, so being able to include fresh honey from their own back yard is a definite bonus.

Barry Denluck is the beekeeper who was called to the golf course to remove the original swarm of bees, but now he's a fixture at the club, nurturing the 15 queens and their colonies. Denluck is piloting a new hive design that he developed specifically to encourage healthy bees in our humid Victoria climate.

Currently the Royal Colwood hives hold about 5,000 bees, but once they are established, Denlock expects there will be closer to a million bees. The site that was chosen for the hives is out of the way and sits on a slight rise. Denlock and Nurse chose this site specifically because the bees take off and head up - well out of the way of members using the course.

Nurse says that members have been supportive of the initiative and appreciate that the club is promoting environmental awareness and stepping up with creative and interesting ways to support that.

Read more in this Victoria News article: Bees in the trees at Colwood golf club