🟠 Busy bees and street trees

Also including: My chat with ABC Radio Melbourne's David Astle on the airwaves

Author

Matthew Sims
March 13, 2026

⏱️ The 119th edition of our newsletter is a seven-minute read.

Hi there 👋 

Matthew Sims here, your reporter at the Eastern Melburnian.

Being a journalist is a lot of typing on a laptop or cold calling in the blind hope someone wants to give you the scoop you’re chasing. However, every now and then, you get to do or learn something you never normally would’ve. This week, my highlight has been donning a beekeeper suit and visiting some local beekeepers for a story.

Mei from City Bee — a Ringwood-based family-run business involved in breeding queen bees — reached out to us earlier this month, inviting us to come and check out their operations. Of course, I jumped at the opportunity.

Mei, her husband Jack and their son Aiden were very welcoming as we had a long chat about how they create the best-quality queen bees for use across a range of different crop cycles. I was amazed to learn that bees are essentially used as part of the workforce in Australia’s almond production.

Beyond how amazing it is that people like Jack and Mei work hard to ensuring the health of bees, it is just incredible that what looks like a normal house in Ringwood is the hub for an operation which then helps put food on your table. It can be very easy in today’s modern world to forget about how much we rely on our natural world to support us, but it should never be something taken for granted.

Today we’re covering:

“It's been an upward pathway to making it a really valuable local place.”

Surrey Hills and Mont Albert Progress Association president Mark Curry said Mont Albert’s new plaza space would not have been possible without a strong community push to advocate for the local council and State Government to come to the table.

WHAT’S ON 🎟️

📰 THIS WEEK’S HEADLINES

To an outsider, the inside of a bee hive can often look like mayhem.

However, for a Ringwood family business, each bee plays an important role.

City Bee is an eastern suburbs business involved in breeding hundreds of queen bees every week, shipping them across the country to support agricultural production.

Husband and wife Jack See and Mei Gan arrived in Australia from Malaysia about 13 years ago with a dream to make waves in the agricultural world.

From their backyard in suburban Ringwood and using hives across the region – including in Mooroolbark, Blackburn and Woori Yallock – the couple operate a business that raises queen bees.

Breeding queen bees involves carefully selecting queens with strong genetics and desirable traits – including a calm nature and high honey production – via a process of checking a queen’s physical characteristics and the overall output of the hive.

See and Gan sell their best-performing queens to beekeepers, who use them to replace older or failing queens in their hives.

“Queen breeding is a very technical job — it’s not like just keeping one hive in the backyard,” See told the Eastern Melburnian. “We are not creating just one or two queens, we have to create 200 to 300 every single week.”

Gan said the job was both fun and stressful. It requires constant care for thousands of bees, while also being subject to the ever-changing climate and the increased use of dangerous pesticides in garden care.

“Each bee hive is a little bee city, so every bee has their own work to do,” Gan told the Eastern Melburnian.

See was one of the first people to discover a Varroa mite – a parasite which can cause the collapse of a large colony in a few weeks – in inner-city Melbourne.

Australia had kept varroa mite out for decades, with the pest first discovered in New South Wales in June 2022 and now found across Queensland, the ACT and South Australia.

See said all local beekeepers should check and treat their hives early and ensure the health of their queens.

“The queen is so important, because if a hive gets into trouble, the first thing you need is a new queen,” said See.

Mont Albert’s main street saw 11 shops close in the span of a few months after the closure of the train station three years ago.

Once a vibrant hub, the strip became a shell of its former self – seeing limited visitor numbers and business.

But the community is not accepting defeat. Instead, locals say the village is on the way towards becoming a drawcard for visitors in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs once again.

Mont Albert station was closed in February 2023 as part of the State Government’s Level Crossing Removal Project.

A level crossing is where a railway line crosses a road, footpath, or pathway at the same, flat grade, rather than using a bridge or tunnel.

So far, the Victorian government has removed 88 intersections and built or rebuilt 48 stations.

One of the new stations built was Union – sitting in between the former Mont Albert and Surrey Hills stops – officially opened to the public in May 2023.

After the community rallied together to shape the government’s plans for Mont Albert, work in the precinct also included relocating the heritage-listed station building to form part of the new community plaza, which includes landscaped areas, a community garden and a cafe run by disability support organisation Cape Group.

Mont Albert Village Business Association and Mont Albert Village Gardening Group convenor Bruce Harvey said the village had seen a number of shopfronts reopen with new businesses, including a dentist, music store and Chinese restaurant.

“With the loss of the station, we lost the heart of the hub,” Harvey told the Eastern Melburnian.

The next step in reinventing Mont Albert is the planned upgrade of the streetscape, with many buildings constructed in the 1930s.

🔊 DID YOU HEAR? 📡

🤖 Hot trams, cannabis farms and pesky pigeons: The Eastern Melburnian hits the airwaves

Did you happy to be tuned to 774 on the AM dial on Wednesday night? If you did, you would have heard me speak with David Astle.

Over about 15 minutes, we fit in a quick discussion on three of my recent stories — how public transport users suffer during heat waves, the proposal for a medicinal cannabis farm in the Dandenong Ranges and whether or not pigeons are precious or a pest.

Check out the full interview below from the 10-minute mark to about 24.30.

Victorian Evenings with David Astle - ABC listen

David Astle brings you an eclectic program with the latest in arts, sport, science, music, medicine and more.

Thanks for catching up with us this week at the Eastern Melburnian. We hope you enjoyed this issue.

Cheers,

Matthew