About

Contact us

Tim Heard and the Sugarbag team
BY APPOINTMENT ONLY -193 Norman Avenue, Norman Park 4170, Brisbane.

We are not a shopfront and are often out beekeeping - email contact is preferred and the best way to get in touch with us. Please visit upon scheduled appointment only.

Email: info@sugarbag.net (preferred and best way to get in touch with us)

Phone: 0491 646 295

To place an order visit the products page, or contact us by email. We offer various payment options, including online payments through our products page, cash, EFT to our bank account or PayPal.

About Us

Sugarbag Bees is an innovative company based in Brisbane Australia which provides stingless bee hives, products, services, advice, information and education resources. Our primary activity is breeding and selling stingless bee hives. We also provide a variety of beekeeping products such as hive boxes, mounts and tools. We offer a range of beekeeping services including splitting or extracting honey from your hive, and hive buyback options. We present workshops and seminars on native bees in Queensland and New South Wales. We partner with universities to conduct pure and applied research on bees. We extend professional advice on crop pollination. We love what we do and feel privileged to spend our lives engaged with wonderful little masterpieces of nature. To share this love, we turn out a range of educational resources including The Australian Native Bee Book, a multi award winning and bestselling guide to keeping Australian native stingless bees.

People

  • Dr. Tim Heard

    Tim is an entomologist and ex-CSIRO research scientist. He has been keeping Australian native stingless bees since 1985, when he transferred his first hive from a cut down tree into a wooden box. He now keeps over 500 hives, obtained through rescuing threatened wild hives and splitting existing hives. Tim continues to develop new hive designs and techniques that allow better splitting and extraction of sugarbag and wax. Tim has been giving seminars and workshops on native bees since 1995. See here for a list of Tim’s bee-related scientific research publications.

    Tim’s favorite Australian stingless bee species is Austroplebeia essingtoni, because their tiny size and beautiful gentle nature.

  • Aislinn Spencer

    Aislinn is a UQ science graduate with ecology and zoology majors, providing all-round education, advice and beekeeping to our customers as the manager of Sugarbag Bees. It is more than likely that she will be your first point of contact, and the beekeeper that comes to provide your hive services! She has a passion for the natural environment and for travel, music, and wagon wheel biscuits. Aislinn is captivated by the nest-structure of Leafcutter bees (genus Megachile), but enjoys the company of Tetragonula carbonaria most of all.

  • Ben Heard

    Ben is just plain wonderfully useful. He builds stuff, maintains even more stuff, cares for bees and is generally a friendly helping hand. Ben shows an affinity with australis stingless bees, which are similarly gentle natured.

  • Zoe Davison

    Zoe joined the Sugarbag team in September 2019. Zoe has a long-term love and appreciation for all animals. Her background in equine-assisted psychotherapy showed her the importance of bringing connection with nature into our lives and she now finds great joy in helping bees enter hearts and homes through Sugarbag Bees! The aesthetically pleasing blue-banded bee is her favourite looking bee, though she is fascinated by the behaviour of social bees.