Following 29 years of beekeeping and consistently producing award winning honey, Jody and Ralph Mitchell of Kaimai Range Honey are slowly handing the day-to-day business of beekeeping to their daughters and partners so they can concentrate on “passion projects” within the New Zealand and global bee industry.

Ralph Mitchell met his future wife in 1989 on the first day of his International Agricultural Exchange Association (IAEA) exchange to New Zealand, where she was supervising new students at his orientation seminar. Jody Mitchell had previously done the IAEA exchange to Norway.

The dairy farming boy from Cornwall, UK and the sheep and beef farmer girl from Kaimai, New Zealand went for an overseas adventure of their own after Ralph’s exchange finished in New Zealand.

“We worked in Canada and travelled the USA before moving back to Cornwall to work on Ralph’s family farm. We returned to New Zealand in 1994 as we knew this was the place we wanted to have and raise our children,” Jody says.

The couple went contract milking with a goal of working up the dairy farming ladder to farm ownership.

“When our eldest daughter Tamara was 5 months old, Ralph was involved in a head-on collision with a truck on SH29. He had multiple horrific internal and external injuries and a stint on life support, fortunately surviving a terrifying flatline incident.”

New beginnings

The young family moved back to Jody’s family land in the Kaimai Range for Ralph to recuperate over the next two years, before starting a new career as a beekeeper nearby, and welcoming another daughter, Zoe.

“By 2006, we realised if we were going to work this hard beekeeping for others, we may as well do it for ourselves. Our goal was just to replace Ralph’s basic wage and see more of him. We started on our own providing local pollination services, often with our girls curled up asleep in the back of the ute as we worked into the night.”

Their first award was the 2009 Quintessential Honey of New Zealand and they have featured in the top three industry award winners every year they have entered, with tawari and rewarewa being their star honeys.

Ralph and Jody Mitchell promoting Bee Awareness Month at the Tauranga Farmer's Market.

Jody trained in sensory analysis in Italy and New Zealand, becoming a judge of honey herself nationally and internationally.

A family business

The couple built up from 300 hives to 2000 but decided to consolidate during Covid-19.

They keep 1000 hives now and the whole enterprise is managed within the family. Their daughters’ partners, Dan Hammond and Tyler Thomas, work fulltime with the family bees. Tamara and Zoe work part-time, and Jody job-shares between bees, paperwork and grandchild duties, with Ralph.

Phasing the kids into the business is important so Ralph and Jody plan to just run a few hundred extra peripheral hives on their own, then help as needed at crucial times.

“That’s our dream of semi-retirement,” Ralph says.

Jody says the kids have done a fabulous job through the spring and preparing the 1000 hives for kiwifruit pollination. In 19 years of never failing a hive audit, they’re relieved they upheld this standard with a 10/10 audit score.

Jody Mitchell judging New Zealand honey with Maureen Conqueror.

“After orchard pollination, the hives come back into the Kaimai Ranges [sic] for a boost of the bush honeys before we move them to our 1200-hectare spray-free property in Taranaki for five months. Four hundred hectares is native bush and rewarewa honey and 400 hectares for our mānuka honey,” Ralph says.

“After harvesting summer honey, our bees build up their own honey stores, before we bring them home for winter.”

Giving back to the bee community

The couple believe it is crucial to protect the health of New Zealand bees and feel that American Foulbrood (AFB) could be eradicated if everyone took it seriously. Jody is now on the board of the not-for-profit organisation New Zealand Bee Health and Biosecurity (NZBB), a cause she is passionate about.

Apimondia is a global organisation established to bring together beekeepers, apicultural scientists, apitherapy, pollination, innovation and development through biennially conferences.

In 2022 in Istanbul, Jody and Ralph won New Zealand’s first-ever medal for honey.

2023 saw Jody invited to Apimondia Chile as a World Beekeeping Awards judge and the delegate for New Zealand. At the Apimondia 2025 conference in Denmark, they were recognised with one of two Beekeepers for the Planet Outstanding Achievement Awards, presented for their Trees for Bees regeneration work on their 1200ha Taranaki property.

Ralph and Jody Mitchell won the Beekeepers for the Planet Outstanding Achievement Award at Apimondia 2025 for their Trees for Bees regeneration work on their 1200ha Taranaki property.

Jody was also delighted to promote six different New Zealand specialty honeys on the Global Honey Bar and start working with major German labs and government representatives to set up a database of New Zealand’s native honeys to better understand their unique properties and honey specifications.

“I want to show that New Zealand honey is so much more than just mānuka.”