In an old grey jacket and beaten-up hat, John “Tractor” Ferguson meanders across the red dirt.
His face is difficult to read, but his eyes scan the treetops, searching for the ones in bloom.
In his hands is a bee smoker, which he puffs in a regular rhythm in the direction of his 350 hives nestled in the clearing.
There are hundreds of thousands of bees at the site, and they’re slowly forming a buzzing haze around Tractor as he walks from hive-to-hive.
He jokes he’s the largest employer in his remote Queensland town of Thargomindah, around 1,000 kilometres west of Brisbane.
But more than 70km from Tractor’s house, and with the sun setting between the gidgee trees, it feels like he’s the only soul out there.
A nickname that stuck
Born in Broken Hill in the 1950s, he first worked as a ringer across various properties in NSW, rounding up cattle in dusty paddocks.
Dubbed Tractor at just 13, he earned his moniker on his first job, carting firewood in a tractor at dawn to the camp cook.
“One morning I came back to the camp with a load of wood, and I went to sleep … the tractor ran up against a tree and stopped,” Tractor says.
“The blokes found me about an hour later with the old tractor idling and me asleep.
“It’s stuck since then.”
Several years later, he moved up to Thargomindah in Queensland and took on a job as local street sweeper.
It was there he was introduced to bees.
“There was an old foreman and he had some bees, so on the weekend I’d get out and see them, so I got interested,” he says.
Tractor purchased a few hives, and after dabbling as a contract grader, he decided to get into beekeeping full-time.
“I’ve been beekeeping virtually ever since,” he says.
Learning from the bees
Though humble about his craft, Tractor’s beekeeping operation supplies vast quantities of honey for a large commercial brand.
He keeps both Caucasian and Italian bees.
Just a few years ago, he managed upwards of 600 hives, relocating them to new spots every few weeks.
Drought, flood and the threat of varroa mite mean he has steadily reduced his numbers.
But he’s never considered hanging up the bee net.
Tractor, who is also the local mayor, made national headlines in 2018, when then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull posted about Tractor’s efforts to keep his hives alive during drought by handfeeding the bees.
Tractor reckons the key to beekeeping is knowing which trees produce the best pollen.
“You can have good hives … but if you don’t have knowledge of the trees and knowledge of ground flower … then you’ll have weak bees,” he says.
He says there’s many lessons humans can learn from bees.
“They can [teach] heaps of things — like don’t be greedy, they only get what they want and come back,” he says.
“They can tell you how to look after trees and look after nature and do the right thing.
“Because once it’s gone, it’s gone, there’s no more to it.”
A dying craft
Tractor has tried to get others in his remote town and broader region interested in commercial beekeeping, but says younger generations have “too many other options”.
“The rule of thumb in this country is over five years, you’ll have three bad seasons and two good ones,” he says.
“One time people put up with that, but now there’s so many other opportunities.
“The younger generation … don’t have to put up with that. That’s why these things are starting to die.”
People often ask Tractor when he gets time to himself, in between mayoral duties and his beekeeping.
“I say when I go and sit by a beehive,” he says.
“You may get a sting now and then, but that’s part of the game.”
