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Qualified for growing industry

June 6, 2019

Stacey Forkert getting her beehive ready to take away after completing the apiculture programme at EIT’s rural campus.

Having worked on the land for over a decade, Stacey Forkert decided she wanted to get some qualifications to show for it.

Stacey moved from the Waikato to Gisborne and started exploring some of the land-based programmes on offer at EIT.
She now has NZ Certificates in sustainable horticulture and growing and using native plants, and has just completed another Level 3 certificate programme, in apiculture.
“I had not studied before and really enjoyed learning new things. We had great tutors and the whole experience was just awesome,” said Stacey.
As well as learning how to grow and sustain organic fruit and vegetables, the programmes covered important factors like health and safety.
Stacey also learned how to use permaculture practices, and how to take care of pests and diseases organically.
Along the way she gained practical experience by working with companies like Riversun and Tree Gen.
It was easy to gain this experience while studying the Level 3 Apiculture programme, which was part time.

“We did one full day a fortnight on Saturdays, for a year starting in August, which covers the whole bee production cycle.”

The programme was based at EIT’s Rural Studies Unit in Stout Street, and each student established their own beehive.

It was a fascinating field of study, learning how to manage feeding and maintaining a bee colony. It involved learning how to develop an integrated pest and disease management plan and learning about plant biology and the behavioural characteristics of bees.

Highlights towards the end of the programme was learning to extract, process and pack the honey, and how to divide the hive into two.

It was an engrossing subject, making it easy to study out of class hours.

Having now completed the apiculture certificate programme as well, she is ready to get back to work in horticulture.
Ideally Stacey would one day like to create her own project, but in the meantime she is aiming to gain a bit more experience in apiculture
before branching into that field.

EIT’s next apiculture and sustainable horticulture programmes starts July.