His company, Australian Queen Bee Exporters, employs 30 staff and supports at least a dozen rural industries including a beeswax processor, three honey processing factories, a honeycomb exporter and a bee-box manufacturer.
He also provides hands-on work experience for overseas students as part of an international primary industries rural trainee program.
''I had my first beehive when I was four years old,'' he says.
''I started in the bee business back in 1972, in my backyard in Cabramatta. We're now the biggest provider of queen bees and package bees to the Australian beekeeping industry. We're not honey producers, even though we extract and export honey from our hives. We're mainly in the business of breeding and selling bees for crop pollination.''
But Mr Taylor and his wife Rose are facing the loss of a $2 million-a-year export market, providing California's almond growers with bees to pollinate their nut trees. They also face the prospect of laying off staff. Except for trainees and field workers managing the company's 10,000 breeding hives at Oberon in the NSW central tablelands, all staff are locals.
Last week, the federal Department of Agriculture announced it was dumping a $5million national program to eradicate Asian honeybees, claiming it was ''no longer technically feasible to achieve eradication'' of the invasive pests.
For the Taylors, this means US quarantine authorities will now place a permanent ban on the import of Australian bees.
For more on this story, see the print edition of today's Canberra Times.
Source: The Canberra Times
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