Tag: environment

The Value of Honey

The Value of Honey

May 15, 2023

Our Green Story ends with The Value of Honey; we can’t talk about bees without talking about honey! 

Honey has been enjoyed by humans for thousands of years. The oldest known evidence for this is an 8,000-year-old cave painting in Spain that appears to depict honey gathering. Perhaps these honey hunters knew honey was more than just a sweet treat. Honey has been used as a traditional medicine by different cultures around the world. Several studies record how in many countries across Africa, honey is used medicinally to help treat respiratory disorders, stomach disorders, allergies, pain and wounds.

 

Honey for Livelihoods

With all these benefits, honey is in high demand in many countries, an opportunity that Bees Abroad beekeepers seek to tap into. Currently, Kenya imports about 80% of its honey, despite the potential to produce enough quality honey in country to meet about 85% of the demand.

It is important that, as Bees Abroad trains new beekeepers on how to care for bees and harvest and process quality honey, we also provide training in business and marketing skills. These skills are essential to successfully marketing and selling honey. Through honey sales, our beekeepers can generate valuable cash income that can provide medical care and be invested into children’s education and other entrepreneurial projects.

The Bees Abroad Approach

As we celebrate the “Green Story” of beekeeping, it is also important to acknowledge the sustainable honey harvesting practices we teach and encourage in all Bees Abroad projects.

In our previous stories we saw how beekeeping can benefit local flora and fauna, and one of the best things a beekeeper can do to “bee green” is provide forage for the bees. By encouraging sustainable honey harvesting practices, we hope to ensure a healthy bee population and a healthy, sustainable supply of honey. This means only harvesting combs with honey and leaving combs that contain the brood. It means leaving enough honey for the bees and leaving the hive cared for and protected. It means teaching beekeepers the best practices of processing quality honey and maintaining its value. These sustainable practices are at the heart of what Bees Abroad teaches, enabling communities to generate their own income through their own businesses and at the same time care for and protect the local environment.

Thank you for Beeing a Part of our Green Story

We hope you’ve enjoyed the journey we’ve taken on The Green Story. This month we have followed the bees across Uganda, Sierra Leone and Tanzania, (to name a few of our project countries) celebrating their work protecting crop fields from elephants, pollinating beans and other cash crops and then pollinating and protecting trees and forests.

Today we finish by celebrating honey, this incredible gift from the bees. Its’ sweetness is enjoyed around the world, it provides natural health benefits, and it is providing an income to support livelihoods across Africa! As we celebrate World Bee Day this week, we want to thank you for joining us and invite you to support us by donating or getting involved in our activities and work. We are so glad you can “Bee Part of the Green Story!”

See the full Green Story Campaign here

The Bee and The Tree

The Bee and The Tree

May 9, 2023

Mama Merizana’s Mango tree

Our Green Story continues as we buzz from the fields in Sierra Leone to the trees in Tanzania. This is the story of the bees and the trees, starting with the story of Mama Meriziana and her mango tree.

Mama Meriziana has a small plot of land to grow enough food to feed her family. It is not a large area and when this story started she farmed only maize, but at one end of her plot there was a single mango tree. Mama Meriziana struggles with poor health and she joined the beekeeping group to learn how to become a beekeeper with a top-bar hive, something she could manage in order to generate much-needed extra income through honey sales. But she had no idea when she started what would happen to her mango tree!

After hanging her hive in her mango tree, she waited. Waited for the bees to naturally arrive and waited for the honey to appear on the comb. And then, it was mango season.

The Bee and The Mango Tree

Mama Meriziana had never seen so many mangos on her tree. Neither had anyone in the village and people were walking by looking at her mangos, exclaiming there had never been so many mangos on this tree before! When they asked her why she had so many more mangos, she was happy to explain something she had learned in her first training session… that bees pollinate trees, increasing their yield of fruit. Honeybees are effective pollinators for mango trees and pollination from bees can significantly increase yields of mango trees, by as much as 50%.

Meriziana had a bumper crop of fruit for herself and family as well as plenty to sell. Mangos are loved for their sweet, juicy taste, they have great nutritional value and having a surplus of mangos creates an opportunity to generate extra income.

Bees (and beekeepers!) helping trees

Mango trees are not the only trees that bees love. Around 80% of indigenous flowering plants in Africa benefit from honeybee pollination, including native trees such as avocado, acacia, guava and lemon. Bees will also buzz off into surrounding forests and help pollinate wild trees, helping to support places like the Gola rainforest that we heard about in our blog last week.

But there is a problem. Many areas, including Meriziana’s region of Tanzania, have suffered from deforestation. The elders of Mama Meriziana’s family were planning to chop her mango tree down to sell for firewood. But after that mango season, Meriziana was able to convince them to keep the tree; she could show that the extra mangos and honey produced from the hives in the tree would pay more each year than a single sale of firewood.

To combat tree loss, Bees Abroad projects often include supporting beekeepers to plant trees and establish tree nurseries for native trees which are planted locally.  The beekeeping projects encourage people to save and protect the trees, giving a very tangible reason to keep a tree.

Bees, trees and beyond

After Mama Meriziana’s success, she soon had another hive hung in the tree and the following planting season, worked on planting additional crops pollinated by bees. Sustainable beekeeping is a great tool for sustainable farming, as we saw last week in The Bee and The Bean story. The following year, there were flowering bean plants interspersed among the maize and tall heads of sunflowers shining by Mama Meriziana’s mango tree! 

Keep following the Green Story… after looking at the value of the bees for human-wildlife conflict, crop pollination and trees, next up, we are going to look at the value of honey. After all, we can’t talk about bees without talking about honey…

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Next week, The Value of Honey. Stay tuned by following us on social media or signing up to our newsletter. 

Follow along and join in with your own green themed bee stories in the comments on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram!

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The Bee and The Bean

The Bee and The Bean

1st May, 2023

Striving for food security after much instability

Our Green Story continues with The Bee and The Beans. For this story we buzz across to West Africa, to a project in Sierra Leone involving 50 small villages on the Gola Rainforest fringes. This is an area that is recovering from a civil war, an epidemic (Ebola), a pandemic (COVID) and is battling with food security. This is a story about working to enable resilient communities to improve community welfare and livelihood, and support the environment.

The civil war in Sierra Leone lasted over a decade (1991-2002) and has lasting effects still felt today, not least the many people killed or permanently disabled through the conflict. The effects have been devastating to their livelihood, and together with our partner, Rory’s Well, the locals have taken up training on sustainable farming and beekeeping, which go hand in hand. This brings us to the beans… 

Beans glorious beans

One of the main inputs to industrial farming is fertilizers which deliver nitrogen to crops helping them to grow faster and stronger, but this practice has been linked to reduced soil quality and local water pollution. Not only that, but it’s also an additional costly input.

Beans are nitrogen fixers; they naturally take nitrogen from the air and make it bio-available in the soil. Beans are generous plants, the nitrogen they fix is made available to other nearby plants. The sustainable farming practices in this project include inter-cropping beans with other crops such as maize. This practice not only naturally increases yield up to six times in low nitrogen soils but helps stabilise soils and provides forage for pollinators, which brings us to the bees…

The Bee and The Bean!

Bees love the flowers of bean plants. The honeybees at these farms in have a ready supply of forage in the fields from the flowers of jackbeans, pigeon peas and cowpeas, and other legume varieties which are primarily pollinated by bees. The healthy, nitrogen-fixing beans in turn help other crops, but there’s also evidence that bees can help maize crops directly.

Healthy beans further help crops but there’s also evidence that bees can also help maize crops directly. Maize is a wind pollinated crop but when the bees go into the fields, they visit both the bean flowers and collect pollen from the maize, as they rummage around on the maize tassels, they release more pollen onto the wind.

Through their pollination service, bees help increase crop yields and hence help plants produce more produce. This is crucial to sustenance farmers as it is vital to securing their family’s meals. Similarly, should any farmers sell their produce, a higher crop yield will help with an increase in income and therefore a better livelihood.

A piece of the puzzle

This sustainable farming and beekeeping projects are on the fringes of Gola Rainforest National Park, the largest remaining remnant of the Upper Guinean Tropical Rainforest. 

Projects like this can help farmers naturally increase their yield and make additional income through honey and wax products, reducing the need to expand into the forest. The communities bee’s also venture into the forest to pollinate wildflowers and trees that in turn help the growth and enrichment of the Gola rainforest. 

Talking of the forest, that’s where we’ll be going next on the Green Story. Join us next time for the story of The Bee and The Tree. 

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Next week, The Bee and The Tree. Stay tuned by following us on social media or signing up to our newsletter. Missed last weeks story of The Elephant and The Bee? You can read it here.

Follow along and join in with your own green themed bee stories in the comments on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram!

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The Elephant and The Bee

Bee Part of the Green Story - The Elephant and The Bee

April 24, 2023
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Giants in the night

Our Green Story begins with The Elephant and The Bee, in villages bordering Murchison Falls National Park in Uganda. A place where giants visit in the night.  

Every year around harvest time, the community fear of elephants entering their village in the dark of night, eating and trampling their way through the fields, destroying up to a year’s supply of food. Rather than attack the elephants, which can have fatal consequences for both people and elephants, these farmers want to work with bees, using these small, hard-working insects as their security guards.

Two village groups, Upendo and Mungu ni Mwema, are joining together to learn how to become beekeepers. Their goal is to work with the bees to solve the problem of elephants’ crop-raiding.

Elephants and Bees: David and Goliaths of the animal kingdom

Elephants are terrified of bees. Yes, it is rather like the story of David and the Goliath, the young boy who defeated the giant. The largest land animal is so terrified of this tiny insect that it will avoid it as much as possible. The elephant may be thick-skinned, but a bee up its’ trunk is as bad as it gets! And so, the beekeeping group is planning to build a 3km stretch of bee-hive fences. Top-bar hives (or even dummy hives… as an “elephant never forgets”) will hang every 10 meters, linked together on wires along the borders of the farms.  

When an elephant touches the wire or a hive, the bees will come to the defence and scare the elephant back the way it came. Beehive fences offer more than just a live security fence for crops. They are home to honeybees, so farmers can harvest honey and beeswax which they can sell and turn into value added products to generate cash income to pay for things like school fees and supplies and medical care. The honeybees increase pollination of crops and local fruit trees too, though this is a story for another day… 

A natural, sustainable solution

We are excited to be working with our local partner, Amigos, to facilitate this project with the Upendo and Mungu ni Mwema groups. Beekeeping training will be integrated with training in conservation agriculture as well as business and marketing training.

This project offers a real chance for a solution to the human-elephant conflict and helps create a social and economic boost to a once war-torn and poverty-stricken community. A sustainable solution for both wildlife conservation and community welfare.

Up next: The Bee and The Bean

Our Green Story continues with The Bee and The Beans. For this story we buzz across to West Africa, to Sierra Leone and an area that is recovering from a civil war, an epidemic (Ebola), a pandemic (COVID) and is battling against food insecurity…

Read The Bee and The Bean

Bee Part of the Green Story

Want to Bee Part of the Green Story? Here are a few things you can do:

See what else is going on in the Green Story. Stay tuned by following us on social media or signing up to our newsletter. Donate to support Bees Abroad’s work enabling communities though sustainable beekeeping.

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