This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 43.0027° S, 147.0696° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Look out for the Big Bee, says the council's own tourism directory, which is as clear a statement of purpose as a roadside object gets.
The oversized honey bee marks The Honey Pot at 2273 Huon Highway near Huonville, an active seven-day visitor business in the Huon Valley south of Hobart.
Tasmanian honey is a genuinely distinctive product, and the reason is a tree. Leatherwood grows only in Tasmania's western rainforests, flowers for a few weeks in late summer, and produces a honey with a strong, spicy, unmistakable character that has no equivalent anywhere. Beekeepers move hives into remote forest country to catch the flowering, which makes leatherwood honey both hard to produce and specific to this island in a way very few foods are.
So a bee on the Huon Highway is advertising something more particular than generic honey.
It also gives Australia two significant giant bees at opposite ends of the country, each attached to a distinctive local apiary story – this one and the bee at Kingscote on Kangaroo Island, which marks the world's only pure strain of Ligurian honey bee.
The Huon Valley is better known for apples and, more recently, cherries and salmon, but the honey trade is older and stranger than any of them.
Not documented anywhere: its scale, the date and the builder.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Huon Valley Council’s tourism directory explicitly tells visitors to look out for the Big Bee, while The Honey Pot remains an active seven-day visitor business at 2273 Huon Highway.
ACCESS
Visit via The Honey Pot at 2273 Huon Highway, an operating seven-day visitor retail attraction. Navigate to the business rather than an inferred roadside photo point.
