In Bunbury, two hours south of Perth, South Regional TAFE delivers the state's only registered qualification in beekeeping, offered on campus and, through the criminal justice system, by lecturers Sharyn Dauti and Patrick Chamberlain.
Dauti says the Bunbury grounds are what make her TAFE special.
"There is a focus on protecting the local flora and fauna, so you'll often walk outside and see kangaroos on the back lawn, there are possum boxes in the trees and they're planting more local species and getting the students involved in that work from the horticulture, conservation and land management sections of the TAFE."
Sharyn Dauti, TAFE lecturer
The grounds also make the campus ideal for beekeeping. Dauti spearheaded the program in 2022, having taught at TAFE for 30 years, predominately as an Adult Literacy teacher. Before that she was a primary school teacher.
"I was mostly relief teaching because I had children, and I didn't want a full-time class," she says of her school career. She began supplementing that with tutoring adults at community centres and loved working with adults so much that she decided to drop off her resume at her local TAFE. She started picking up classes at TAFE while still relieving at the primary school, and then woke up one day and realised she worked full-time at TAFE.
"Most of my students back then were adults who needed literacy support, they're the one in five that fell through the cracks so couldn't read and write well, and they were fantastic to work with," she says. "At TAFE, we focus on everybody. Those who need support will get support. We give people opportunities that they may not have. TAFE is a very warm environment; we're very student focussed and to see people pick up that knowledge and utilise it and succeed with it is something really rewarding."
After decades of teaching bridging certificates and more, she was ready for a change of pace but still wanted to teach at TAFE, so she pitched the beekeeping course. South Regional TAFE said "yes".
"I was a team of one, myself, so I had to design and write all the 18 units myself. It was very hard work," she says.
Staying on course
The Certificate III in Beekeeping runs one day per week in person, one day online and some additional work to be completed during the week in the student's own time.
"It's a very, very practical course. I would say out of the 18-20 weeks that we deliver, we probably go into the apiary about 17 times, so most days that [students] are here, we are in the apiary," she says.
"My first group were people that were working with bees wanting to get their skills up. But now we're getting mostly people that haven't had bees yet. They're hobbyists in the making and they're doing the right thing by doing a course and learning and doing their research before they actually grab a hive."
The course has proven incredibly popular with students travelling hundreds of kilometres to attend: "I've had students from the north of Perth right down to further south of Nannup."
Today, as the benefits that bees and beekeeping have for mental wellness have been studied by scientists and shared by wellness influencers, the broader community is also learning more about keeping bees.
"I do get a percentage of students that are suffering from what I call modern living stress, they find keeping bees (just one or two hives) reduces their stress levels," she says. "People have this misconception that these are aggressive animals that are out there to sting you. They are very gentle; they are defensive stingers. People will sit with their bees, behind the hive and listen to them humming and they find that that's a big de-stressor."
"Bees hum in the key of C."
Sharyn Dauti, TAFE lecturer
Working together
Another mental benefit of beekeeping is learning or relearning focus.
"When I go and work with my bees, the world's gone, my total focus is on those bees. You really need to think about what you're doing because you're working with live little creatures that you've got to look after. Queen bees live for several years but worker bees and drones don't live more than about 40 days."
When learning how to pick up bees by hand, students typically practice with drones (male honeybees) as drones cannot sting. Worker bees are all female and they are defensive stingers that keep the hive going, and the queens (of which each hive has one) don't have a barb like the worker bees so can sting multiple times when feeling threatened.
"When my students are learning how to handle queens and mark queens, they don't touch my different queens, they work with the drones because I've got plenty of them," says Dauti. "However, in all my years of handling queens, they have never attempted to sting me. This is usually reserved for when fighting rival queens."
"A hive is a single organism, and they function as a whole. I think if people can look at bees and work out why they work so well, maybe we'll solve some of the world problems that we've got today."
Worker bees divide labour and work together to build and maintain a hive: "If you take a frame out of a hive and you come back half an hour later, festooning bees all linked together will be filling in that hole... I think society has a lot to learn from bees on teamwork and cooperation."
Beekeeping
Dauti says a beekeeper's role is to support and assist the hive as needed, and that requires understanding, calmness and patience. Swarming is a natural, productive behaviour for the honeybee; it is not something a beekeeper desires.
"When bees swarm, they're trying to tell you there's something wrong and it's up to you as a beekeeper to find out actually what is wrong," says Dauti. "Usually, it is a result of overcrowding, but it could be that they've been robbed (when they're low on supplies and there's not much nectar) or it could be something like hot weather or they could be a little bit antsy because of the change of flora… it's up to you to work it out.
"Swarming is not desirable because it means that you lose 20, 30,000 bees out of your hive. And if you're really wanting honey production, that's really going to knock your honey production."
Honey isn't the only product produced by the beekeeping industry. Other products include pollination services for crops, beeswax and propolis production, queen bee and bee/colony sales, bee venom (apitoxin) and pollen sales.
"A lot of [commercial] beekeepers don't worry about honey because they're out there pollinating," Dauti says. "If we didn't grow European food, we wouldn't need European bees."
Early life
As the eldest daughter of a coal miner and nurse, Dauti, like the worker bees she nurtures, grew up understanding hard work. She also learnt how to tackle challenges and balance study and family responsibilities.
"Studying for me was hard because … I've copped the responsibility of the family," she says of having to look after her eight siblings. "From about 12, I was solely responsible for cooking, cleaning and that sort of stuff. I'd be kept off school a lot."
Even at that age, Dauti knew she wanted to be a teacher, so she saved money she earnt babysitting neighbourhood kids to go to university to become a teacher.
"I don't know why I had this just stupid thing in my head that I wanted to be a teacher," she says. "I remember in Grade 2 I used to stay after school and help the teacher… it might have been because I never got picked to write on the blackboard, and I thought, well, if I'm a teacher, I'll get to write on the board. I still love blackboards!"
She first encountered bees when she spent a year living on a farm in Kosovo with her husband and sought out a course when she returned to Western Australia.
Today Dauti lives on eight and a half acres with her retired husband, dairy goats and numerous bee hives, balancing her love of bees and goats; she's also secretary of the Dairy Goat Society in Western Australia.
"We have 15, 16 hives at home but I've only got seven goats now," she says.
Broadening opportunity
As a part-timer, Dauti was hopeful of finding a colleague to expand the beekeeping offerings beyond the Certificate III course, including exploring delivering in the prison system, but finding someone with a dual qualification in beekeeping and teaching in regional WA wasn't easy.
"Whenever someone new came in here, just for a joke, I would say, 'have you got your certificate in beekeeping?' And of course, they'd say no," she says.
Then one day she was introduced to Patrick Chamberlain, who was coming in to teach CGEA [Certificate of General Education for Adults] maths.
"I asked, 'have you got your Certificate III in Beekeeping?' and he said 'yes, I have'. And I nearly fell off my chair,'" she laughs.
"[Patrick] has since been able to build the beekeeping course from the ground up in the prison setting, progressively expanding it into a fully embedded component of the prison education program."
Bee basics
The Certificate III in Beekeeping covers workplace health and safety (which includes how to work in isolation, safely lift, first aid and fire prevention), how to light a smoker; how to enter an apiary; bee behaviour and how to work with the bees in a hive; how to design an apiary, brood box and frames and repair equipment; biosecurity, pests and diseases; how to care for the bees; how to extract honey, wax and propolis; transportation and pollination; and students also learn teamwork.
"When you're working on a community or commercial hive, communication and teamwork is incredibly important, especially for work health and safety and biosecurity," she says. "Biosecurity is the same for big and small apiaries."
Understanding pests and diseases is essential for beekeepers (whether commercial or hobbyist) to keep hives and colonies healthy. Western Australia has so far been spared the devastation of Varroa destructor mites, which infect honeybees and collapse entire colonies. The mites were discovered in a sentinel hive at the port of Newcastle three years ago and have since crept across the East coast, attacking honeybee colonies. "It's slowly marching towards us," she says. "So there's a big focus on that. Thankfully they don't affect native bees."
There are three types of bees in Australia: the European honeybee, which pollinates most of Australia's Euro-centric crops and was introduced to produce large amounts of honey; native bees, of which there are more than 2,000 species that are stingless and pollinate native plants; and feral bees, which are invasive or exotic species and honeybees that aren't in managed hives and threaten both native and managed honeybees through aggressive behaviours and diminishing resources.
"Bees are opportunistic, they will go and storm the castle and try and take the honey and supplies of a weak hive," says Dauti.
More recent feral arrivals include South African Carder bees, which since 2015 have reached most mainland states, Asian honeybees in Queensland, Emerald Furrow bees in New South Wales and European bumblebees in Tasmania.
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Teaching in prisons
Lecturer Patrick Chamberlain shares a love of bees, the South West and TAFE with his colleague Dauti. His bee journey began as a hobbyist 14 years ago, when he got a couple of hives for his five-acre property in the Perth hills: "I did a lot of reading, as I was a novice and I thought, I've got to learn more. I went and enrolled in a Certificate III with a commercial beekeeper and completed that course and it just hooked me."
These days he shares that love with incarcerated students at Bunbury Regional Prison, Karnet Prison Farm, and he is currently training an educator for juvenile detainees at Banksia Hill Juvenile Detention Centre too.
"I've been running the Beekeeping skill set for a couple of years now at Bunbury Regional Prison, which is six core units out of the 18 in the Certificate III," says Chamberlain. "I've only got six students each semester. But that's purely because of security restrictions. I've got a wait list for two years apparently."
He says most WA commercial beekeepers support TAFE's delivery of prison education programs, and local companies offer students on-site experience, which means that students can sign out a day release, three-day block or a week and work in a commercial apiary under supervision and gain real world experience prior to release.
At Karnet, the delivery is a full Certificate III qualification and at Banksia Hill, the program is due to begin later in 2026 once the students' teacher becomes fully qualified in beekeeping himself.
"Banksia Hill Juvenile Detention Centre wants to deliver to a group of younger people there because they're pretty high risk and they see the benefits of beekeeping," he says. "We've got four hives there now, while the prison trainer there is working towards his Certificate III."
From maths to bees
Chamberlain's transition from teaching mathematics to teaching beekeeping emerged through a convergence of good timing, experience and opportunity.
"My mates call me the accidental academic: I've lectured at Curtin University, University of Western Australia, Edith Cowan University and Central Queensland University in mathematics and finance," Chamberlain says of his teaching career. He then began teaching the Certificate in General Education for Adults (CGEA) and engineering mathematics at Central TAFE (now known as North Metropolitan TAFE) while also lecturing at Curtin. Quickly he found himself as the key maths teacher at Central TAFE as other teachers retired.
When he moved from Perth to Busselton in 2022, he knocked on the door of the South Regional TAFE campus manager and landed a role teaching CGEA maths at Bunbury TAFE, which is where he met Dauti.
Little did he know that Bunbury Regional Prison's education manager had reached out to South Regional TAFE's Bunbury campus manager to enquire about beekeeping course delivery to inmates. Considering his background teaching at Wooroloo Prison Farm and Acacia Prison near Perth, he was just who the TAFE had been looking for to commence the set up and delivery of the prison program. Chamberlain jumped on board and happily pivoted to include teaching beekeeping as well as mathematics at South Regional TAFE in 2024.
Qualified outcomes
Chamberlain says to paint a picture of the apiary at Bunbury Regional Prison, it sits on a gentle slope with filtered light amongst the trees and looking over quite a few acres of market gardens.
"The bees are a useful pollination service, so they pollinate all the crops they grow, and they grow quite a variety which they're supplying a lot of to the other prisons around the state, so it fits together really nicely," he says. "It's the same with Karnet Prison Farm, last year we got 1.2 tons of honey from the hives there."
For his students the beekeeping course serves multiple purposes: it provides them with basic skills, and it gives them a pathway to qualification upon release from incarceration.
"Formal qualifications for these guys is massive, most of them don't have that," he says. "[At Bunbury Regional] they'll get the core skills and are able to progress and continue studying in the Certificate III at the TAFE when they are back in the community."
Future building
How the course is delivered in the prison system depends on the season and weather, but generally theory is delivered every Friday in the classroom in the morning and then after lunch, students are in the apiary, learning hands on.
"When they start, they don't know a lot about it, but as they do more, the excitement and enthusiasm and the change in the demeanour is massive," says Chamberlain of the impact of his course. "I've had a superintendent come up to me and say the training has made such a positive difference and the experience of working with the bees offers a sense of focus and grounding."
For most students, completing the course leads to employment opportunities or commencing their own businesses.
"Pollination services in WA are worth over a billion dollars a year and in the last 10 years, we've grown from about 500-600 beekeeper registrations to over 5,000."
Patrick Chamberlain, TAFE lecturer
"Most want to start their own businesses, it's a fantastic opportunity because it's a growing industry," he says. "Being regional too, a lot of the guys have rural properties, farms, or 40, 50 acres, perfect for commercial operations."
