About Us
Why we called ourselves Manui Mānuka?
Why we called ourselves Manui Mānuka?As very new beekeepers we harvested our first crop of mānuka from a road called Manui in the North Island of New Zealand. It was as you can imagine very exciting. The farm where we place our hives is totally covered with masses of white mānuka flowers. In a good year it looks like a sea of snow, just beautiful.
It seemed natural then to call our new business after our 'favourite' spot.
Why did we make the potion?
We have friends and relations in the horse industry. Some are polo pony owners, others breeders, trainers or eventers. They would often have a horse that had decided to run through a barbed wire fence – what for I have no idea, but then we don’t do horses! We do bees! And the next minute there would be a knock on the door with a very sad faced horse owner saying pleassssse can we have some of your magic mānuka for our horse.
They told us that it always worked in healing the wound, cut or tear, but the downside was the honey would run off, especially in the rain. So we decided to have a go at making a more user-friendly product that was rain fast.
We talked with the fantastic folk at Argenta, www.argentaglobal.com, the world’s only combined contract research organization (CRO) and contract manufacturing organization (CMO) specializing exclusively in animal health. Two and a half years later we came up with a range of promising mixtures. We then used horses, our pets and ourselves as guinea pigs to trial these. Humans have the same body temperature as animals, so that’s why we trialled it on ourselves.
It was amazingly effective and you can be assured that no humans were harmed in this testing regime!
– Barb and John
