INTRODUCED to beekeeping in Grade 7, Paul Marsh's passion for the industry is still going strong decades later, and now he wants to share that love with others.

Based in Sarina, he established a business focusing on producing queen bees for the domestic and Canadian markets. However, in 2012 he rebranded to Bee2U, moved into honey production and hasn't looked back.

With his business firmly established in the region, Mr Marsh is passing on his knowledge to others through his beginner's beekeeping workshops at the Sarina Rural Skills Centre

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"As you know, bee numbers are in decline worldwide and in Australia, so we're trying to get more people involved with bees so we can bolster the numbers in the region,” he said.

"We only run one (workshop) a year because of time constraints, but we pretty much fill them every time we do them.

"We try to keep the numbers fairly low so everyone gets a lot of hands-on time, but there's always people wanting to do bees.”

Mr Marsh said there had been increasing interest in beekeeping, especially since the release of the Flow Hive, a new type of system that uses taps to extract honey rather than the traditional scraping method.

Of the 10 people at the weekend workshop, three already had Flow Hives in their backyards.

Kerryn Nicholas, a teacher at Moranbah State High School, said she joined the workshop to help with her school's programs.

"I'm trying to get some hives in the school for our agricultural practice class,” she said. "The students are pretty excited about it even though we haven't even gotten the hives yet.

"I've learnt how to handle the bees, how to take the honey out of the hives, how to make sure they're fine, how to check good health and to learn about the diseases in the hives.

"I'm pretty excited now to get going with it.”

Mr Marsh isn't too worried about the increased interested in beekeeping affecting his business as he sees large importers as his main competition. He was just happy people were taking an interest in establishing their own hives.

"Hopefully their neighbours might buy their honey instead of imported honey.”

There was a slight scare in the beekeeping sector recently, with reports claiming urban hives would be banned or put under further restrictions.

At a Mackay Regional Council special ordinary meeting on Tuesday the matter was put to rest, with Mayor Greg Williamson saying it had "been resolved”.

"We had a complaint about someone keeping bees,” Cr Williamson said.

"We have the same by-laws as every regional city in Queensland, we just seldom get complaints about beehives.

"The beekeeping issue has been resolved - the guy and his neighbour are happy.

"Nothing ever came up about banning bees, it's just with our by-laws when you have a complaint you have to investigate it.”

The council is now looking at updating its laws around bee keeping, potentially making it self-assessable as long as state regulations are abided by.

A meeting will be held later this month to decide if there will be more public consultation on the Draft Mackay Region Planning Scheme. Mr Marsh said he would be making a submission.

When looking to the future of commercial beekeeping in the region, he is optimistic, but said he was looking for more interest.

"This region is not a big commercial beekeeping area, that's more down south; however, as most of us commercial blokes are getting on in years we need to get some younger people involved,” Mr Marsh said.

"Hopefully, at one point, I'll be able to sell my business to someone when I get too old and crusty.

"Until then I'll keep training people.

"When the demand dies down I might stop, but I don't see that happening any time soon.”