Reporter’s Diary

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 34022, 11 December 1975, Page 3

Reporter’s Diary

Bees priced out “WHERE have all the honey bees gone?” asked one of the editor’s correspondents yesterday. The answer is that they have been driven out of Christchurch by rocketing land prices. Mr John Smith, an apiary instructor with the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, says local body by-laws do not permit anyone to keep a hive of bees on a section smaller than a quarter acre. Now that the city has grown so big and land has become so valuable, the traditional quarter acre has virtually disappeared — and so have the bees. Mr Smith has been concerned for some years about the gradual disappearance of bees from the city. The urban area of Christchurch, with its flourishing gardens, used to be a consistently good beekeeping area. The honey was not always of the same quality as country clover honey, but there was always plenty of it. Assignment awaited Any suggestion that the newly-elected National member of Parliament for the Bay of Plenty, Mr D Maclntyre, will be the Minister of Agriculture in the new Cabinet is simply “newspaper talk,” according to Mi Maclntyre himself. “AH Mi Muldoon has said is that h« considers me to be one ol the senior members of his team, and anything mon

than that is conjecture,” Mr Maclntyre said in Whakatane yesterday'. “I am sitting nervously on the edge of my chair, waiting to be put in the picture,” he added. In the last National Government, Mr Maclntyre held the Lands, Forests, Maori and Island Affairs, Environment, and Valuation Department portfolios. The other woman “TIME” magazine's United States edition covers the New Zealand election, too, but makes a major "goof” in incorrectly identifying a jubilant National Party supporter as the new Prime Minister’s wife in a photograph accompanying the story. The original picture, which was also used in “The Press.” shows Mrs Muldoon standing on her husband's right and an attractive woman supporter on his left. But “Time” has cropped Mrs Muldoon from the photograph and married him off to the other woman. Jinxed OXFORD Young Farmers have had no luck in trying to organise club activities , in the last two months. They arranged for a speaker from the Department of Social Welfare to ■ address a club meeting. . He didn’t turn up. so they j put on an impromptu speaking competition. Fur--1 ther arrangements were i made for the next club

night. When they were stood up again, they felt that it was just not meant to be, especially when they discovered that the prospective speaker had been in a car accident on his way to Oxford. The final blow came when they tried to organise a claybird shoot. The truck carrying the targets and the ammunition caught fire, and they lost the lot.

Yearbook ONE OF the least likely books to hit the best-seller list is the “New Zealand Official Yearbook,” but it usually gets there. A solid compendium of facts about New Zealand, it is now in its eightieth edition, dating its origin back to when its forerunner, “N.Z. Report on the Statistics,” was first published in 1890. One of the yearbook's selling points is its price. Although it is a hardback book of more than 1100 pages, its price is deliberately held at $3.50 to keep it within the range of students. This is about a third the cost of yearbooks produced by other countries, and the Government Bookshop says overseas customers invariably remark on the price difference. Vice-mayoral THE DEPUTY Mayor of Christchurch (Cr P. J. R. Skellerup) could have been expected to say some complimentary things about road transport when he opened a new coach terminal for Newmans in Tuam Street this week. Instead, he told the assembled transport and tour company executives that flying was the only way

to travel. Motoring costs had risen so much, he said, that he could no longer afford to drive his Mercedes Benz. Trains were only for “the peasants,” and the inter-island ferry was a thing of the past. “We never know when it is going to sail or whether it is in Wellington or Lyttelton,” he said. Neither Mr C. S. Roscoe, the Railways district traffic manager, nor Mr J. Newman, chairman of directors of Transport (Nelson) Holdings, seemed very taken with Cr Skellerup’s remarks. But Mr Roscoe was somewhat mollified by a subsequent promise from the councillor that he would ride on the Southerner — “some time.” Dead enil A READER who took this photograph on a road near Waitangi thought it too good to keep to herself. It’s worth knowing which roads are dead ends.