Tag: GreenStory2023

People’s Vote Winner Announced

People’s Vote Winner Announced

October 6, 2023

The People's Favourite - Winner - Cluster of Bees

Meet the photographer -
Ramsurendar N K

Ramsurendar is a dentist from south India, who’s very interested in wildlife and nature photography. Over time he has developed his skills and now is a serious hobbyist. His submissions have been showcased in the Wildlife Photographic Magazine several times.

Background to the image: “I came across this bee hive in a forest located in the Western Ghats of India. I wanted to capture the image to exhibit the group of bees and to create awareness that they are part of the biodiversity on which we all depend on for our survival.”

Technical details: The image was shot with a Canon 77d DSLR APC – sensor camera.

Follow his work on: Instagram: @drramsurendars_photography Facebook: /ramsurendar.nk

Second place image

About the Second place image by Darshan Harode

Darshan Harode provided the following caption with their photo:

“Each pair of honeybees legs differ in size and have distinct functions. Bees around the world transport pollen on their hairy hind legs mixing them with either nectar or oil from their mouth. The hind legs of a honeybee serve as a storage box in the pollen-loading process. Whereas the middle leg aids the hind legs in patting down the pollen masses. Each leg comprises of a collecting brush made of stiff unbranched hairs. Honeybees use most of the collected pollens for creating bee wax, and honey and therefore are not the major pollinator bee species.”

The bee is deceased, Darsham found it in a garden at Falmouth University. The Bee was missing its stinger which makes him believe it died of natural cause.

The technique and equipment: There are hundreds of photos stacked to get all the details of the bee. There were multiple failed attempts however i was able to achieve this result at the end.
Equipment used: Macro stackshot rail, product photography stand with continuous lighting for even tone and colour in all photos, Canon R6 with Canon 65mm MP-E lens at 2x magnification, glass box.
 
Darshan’s handle: Instagram: @clickkks | Facebook: @clicks_by_darshan_harode

Third place image

Third place image by Jemima D (10 years old)

This fab photo was taken by 10 year old Jemima D, from Oxford.

Our supporters' incredible photographs

As part of our #GreenStory Campaign, Bees Abroad partnered with internationally renowned photography magazine, Wildlife Photographic, for our first photography competition. The theme of the competition was ‘Bees in Nature’ – bees of all kinds welcome.

We received entries from all over the World: U.K., U.S.A., Singapore, Hong Kong, Bulgaria, and more! We were blown away with the variation and standard of entries that we wanted to share them with you through our People’s Vote Competition.

Below are some of your favourites!

Follow us for more updates and activities!

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Bee Part of The Green Story – Campaign Summary

Bee Part of The Green Story 2023 - The Wrap Up

June 9, 2023

The Green Story - Bringing it together

What an exciting month of events, stories and competitions! This year we ran our first Green Story campaign celebrating the relationships between bees, nature and people. The Bee Part of the Green Story kicked off with the Big Give Green Match Funds week on the April 20th, celebrating World Earth Day (22 April 2023) and ran through to World Bee Day on the May 20th.  

With so much going on, we wanted to bring it all together here to celebrate achievements, provide links to things you might have missed and hopefully get you excited about what we’re up to next!  

The Big Give Green Match Fund – thank you!

This campaign we participated in the Green Matched Funds campaign. The Green Match Fund accepts projects dedicated to solving environmental challenges and we were thrilled that the Big Give foundation recognised our environmental efforts.

Our Green Give week focused on raising funds for the new Elephants and Bees project in Masindi, Uganda, which uses beehive fences to protect farmers’ crops from raiding by elephants, thereby reducing human-wildlife conflict. We had a target of £5,000 which was reached with a day to spare and doubled to £10,000 by the Big Give Foundation. A fantastic effort! An elephant–sized thank-you to all who supported this!  

The Green Stories

Each week of the campaign we also shared a green story from our projects. These snappy blog posts are a great way to get to know our work more and how our projects help support the local environment. Be sure to go back and read them if you missed it!

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Bees Abroad 2023 Photography Competition

Another first for Bees Abroad in the Green Story was our Photography Competition, in which we partnered with Wildlife Photographic, one of the world’s leading wildlife photography magazines. The theme ‘Bees in Nature’ attracted entries from all over the World: U.K., U.S.A., Singapore, Hong Kong, Bulgaria, and more! We were blown away with the variation and high standard of entries.

You can see the winning photo and read the story behind it here. Watch this space, as we will be sharing all the incredible images with you! 

Book Events, Talks and Honey Tasting!

To celebrate the Green Story we ran four events, two online, which you can rewatch, and two in-person.  

‘Buzz’ with Thor Hanson: An online World Earth Day event

The Green Story started off with a bang with an online event for World Earth Day with author, Thor Hanson. His talk was on the nature and necessity of bees, drawing from his book ‘Buzz’. Thor brought his skills together as a biologist, author and public speaker to deliver an event that was so engaging it felt like we were in the room with him, not thousands of miles away from him as he joined from a conference in the USA!

Watch Thor's event on YouTube
Watch 'Developments in Sustainable Beekeeping' on YouTube

‘Developments in Sustainable Beekeeping’ online talk and discussion

For the second online event in the Green Story, we were joined by Professor Adam Hart and author Sarah Wyndham Lewis, both of whom are passionate about sustainable beekeeping and have first-hand experience in the matter.

Sarah drew on the depth of her personal experience and material from her books ‘Planting for honeybees’ and ‘The Wild Bee Handbook’ to deliver an informative talk on the role of beekeeping and beekeepers in the context of the ecological challenges we face. Adam continued the theme but took us over the ocean to Mexico and the explosion of stingless beekeeping following the near collapse and how its reignited popularity is causing challenges.

World Bee Day events

World Bee Day Luncheon at the Wax Chandlers’ Hall, London

For World Bee Day, we invited our guests to celebrate ‘The Value of Bees and Honey’ at the Wax Chandlers’ Hall, London. The menu was creatively themed around bees and honey and the afternoon, hosted by our patron Timothy Maille, Master of the Worshipful Company of Wax Chandlers, featured guest speakers, Anne Rowberry and Professor Dave Goulson. The event was a wonderful opportunity to share about our ongoing work. Read the full story here.

Honey Tasting with Sarah at Hiver taproom, London

On World Bee Day (20 May) guests were treated to a Honey Tasting with author and Honey Sommelier Sarah Wyndham-Lewis at the Hiver Taproom in London. The event featured honey from Bees Abroad four different project countries:  Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Uganda. Each country has its own unique flora and eco-regions which affect the colour, texture and taste of honey. Read the full story here.

Bees Abroad community celebrations and fundraising events

Betty our youngest bee advocate

The wonderful Betty has been fundraising and spreading awareness for Bees Abroad. Betty persuaded her whole class to raise funds for us and was recently interviewed on her local BBC Radio station for World Bee Day.

Inner Wheel fundraising event

The Inner Wheel ladies in Barnsley held a fundraising event with special guest speaker, Richard Ridler, our chair of trustees. Julie from Inner Wheel expressed her thanks and told us what they got up to “Richard was an amazing speaker & great ambassador for Bees Abroad. We had everything bee-themed… All our Inner Wheel ladies worked extremely hard & we raised more than £1,000” A big thank you to all who participated in the event!

Royal Lancaster partnership

The Royal Lancaster raised awareness and funds for Bees Abroad through their “Bee Our Guest” hotel package. And the amazing beekeeper and Corporate Sales Director, Jo Hemesley donned her bee suit in the hotel lobby with a beautiful display on World Bee Day to meet with guests and talk about the Royal Lancaster hives which are twinned with Bees Abroad project hives.

Grifter Brewing honey-beer fundraising

We have news from Down Under! A brewery in Australia, The Grifter Brewing Company, brewed a honey beer “Queen Bee” for International Women’s Day which has been on sale for the past few months. A percentage of the sales were donated to us, raising over £2,000 for Bees Abroad projects!

World Bee Day - Prize Draw

Our World Bee Day Prize draw  featured seven amazing prizes including an overnight stay for two at the Royal Lancaster and afternoon tea for four at the Ritz!We received this message from the winners of the Royal Lancaster prize: 

“So very very excited with this amazing surprise win. Thank you Bees Abroad. Urszula & Tony”.

If you missed out this time, be sure to keep an eye out for our next Prize Draw. 

The Green Story supporters

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Wild About Bees – Honey Tasting event

Wild About Bees - Honey Tasting Event

June 8, 2023

Honey tasting with a world expert

On World Bee Day it was a privilege to have author and professional Honey Sommelier, Sarah Wyndham Lewis hosting a Honey Tasting at the Hiver Taproom, in London. Sarah works with Michelin star chefs around the world guiding them through the complex and exciting world of honey and gave the attendees of this unique event the same five-star experience! 

Sarah introduced guests to the experience of honey tasting with a selection of mono–floral honeys followed by a multifloral honey from her own bees. This first palette of honey finished with a tasting of a low quality, cheap honey from a supermarket. There’s been a lot of news in the last few months of fraudulent or low-quality supermarket honey, and this event was a chance to share with guests what honey can really taste like. The difference between this and the rich flavours and textures of the pure honey samples was overwhelming! 

A honey journey across four countries

The second palette of honey featured honey from Bees Abroad projects in Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda and Nigeria. Every country has its own unique flora, affected by the eco-regions, climates and soil types. The unique flora of each was detected in the taste and colour of each from the black Nigerian honey to the opaque golden Ugandan honey.

As Sarah guided guests through the honey, Rachel Monger shared with guests about the areas the honey came from and the beekeepers who had harvested the honey. The beekeeping projects which are supporting farmers on crutches in Sierra Leone and island women in Tanzania. It was an incredible opportunity to taste these African honeys and hear about the difference that these projects are having in their communities. 

It was a gloriously sunny day, and we were delighted to be at the Hiver Taproom where guests could also enjoy a refreshing Hiver honey beer. A big thank you to Hiver for generously donating their event space on a busy Saturday, and to Sarah and her husband Dale (co-founder of Bermondsey Street Bees) for donating their time for this special event. And thanks to Sarah for signing copies of her latest beautiful, engaging and informative book, ‘The Wild Bee Handbook’, for guests with proceeds supporting Bees Abroad projects. 

You can follow Sarah’s work on Instagram at: @honeysommelierlondon and @plantingforthebees 

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And The winner is…

And the winner is...

May 22, 2023

The Winning image - The fighting Centris Pallida

The Winning image - The fighting Centris Pallida

The winning photograph was taken by Abhik Manna, a photographer from India who’s based in the U.S.A. Abhik provided this caption as context:

“Centris Pallida is a species of bee found in the desert of central Arizona and commonly known as digger bee. They get the name for their typical mating behaviour. They live solitary life underground and come out at the beginning of summer for mating. The males fly low over the ground and upon sensing a female, start digging to get the female out. Finding a female bee is very competitive and often multiple males engage in a fight to take authority of a burrow. In the image, two male bees can be seen fighting intensely for one burrow.”

Abhik is a doctoral student in Chemistry who also shares the passion for photographing wildlife. Abhik is from India and photographing since last seven years. Abhik is living in Arizona, USA for last five years to pursue his studies.

The editor of Wildlife Photographic selected the winning image

Bees Abroad partnered with Wildlife Photographic for the 2023 Photography Competition. As part of this partnership the editor, Bill Gozansky, gave his time to select the winning image. This is what he had to say about the winning shot:

“For me, Abhik Manna’s ‘Fighting Centris pallida’ image stood out in the competition as it is a “story image” illustrating unique bee behavior. Abhik has captured these digger bees in the midst of battle. If one looks closely at this image, there is great intensity in the fight with the sand and dust flying. Kudos to Abhik for capturing such action and intensity on such a small scale.”

As part of the prize, Abhik’s image will be published in Wildlife Photographic, one of the most prestigious wildlife magazines in the world. The magazine is known for its stunning images of animals in their natural habitats, as well as its informative articles on wildlife conservation, biology, and ecology. 

On display at the Wax Chandlers' Hall, London

The winning photo was put on display at the Wax Chandlers’ Hall in London as part of Bees Abroad’s World Bee Day celebrations. 

Wax Chandlers’ Hall is one of the most prestigious livery halls in London, and it is renowned for its stunning architecture and beautiful interior. The hall dates back to the 14th century and has a long and fascinating history. The hall has hosted many important events throughout its history, including royal banquets, state dinners, and other formal occasions.

More on the competition

Bees Abroad partnered with internationally renowned photography magazine, Wildlife Photographic, for our first photography competition. The theme of the competition was ‘Bees in Nature’ – bees of all kinds welcome. We received entries from all over the World: U.K., U.S.A., Singapore, Hong Kong, Bulgaria, and more! We were blown away with the variation and standard of entries. We are planning a people’s vote so the World can see these fantastic images! Which bee will be your favourite?

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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. 

Donate to support this project and others

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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A Trailer for The Green Story

The Green Story trailer

April 19, 2023

The Green Story & Binti the Bee

Welcome to the world of Binti, a busy little bee in sub-Saharan Africa. 

The Bee and the Elephant

One morning, as Binti is flying over the beautiful Ugandan landscape,  where fields border a wildlife reserve, she notices a problem: elephants are raiding farmers’ crops.  In just one night, these gentle giants can eat or destroy a whole season’s harvest of food,  posing a threat to the food security of the community.

Sometimes, in desperation, farmers resort to killing elephants to protect their crops. Binti wants to help and decides to work with the farmers with beehives on fences bordering their fields. The elephants are afraid of bees, just the sound and sight of them can turn them away. Binti and the bees are happily keeping the peace between elephants and farmers.

We have joined the Big Give Green Match Fund Campaign to help set up exactly such a project in Masindi, Uganda. You can help us achieve it by pressing the button below to double your donation.

The Bee and the Bean

Impressed by Binti’s dedication, the farmers invite her to join the other bees in their pollinating team. Binti and her fellow bees visit the farmers’ field pollinating their crops of beans and cotton, tomatoes and pumpkins, helping increase the yield.  

The Bee and the Tree

Next, Binti flies off to a traditional African beehive set up by a local community in the forest. Here, she joins other bees in pollinating the flowers of different local trees. In doing so, the bees help to grow the forest and provide food and habitat for other species. Binti then visits a tree village nursery where she explores different trees that are being grown for fruit, shade, firewood and live fences by the beekeeping community which helps further strengthen the local environment. 

The Bee and the Honey

At the end of a busy day Binti returns to her hive where she helps to make honey.  Some of the honey is carefully collected by a beekeeper who uses it not only for income and food, but also for its health benefits. The beekeeper explains how honey can help with wounds and illness due to its antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties. 

Follow us on social media or sign-up to our newsletter to hear more about Binti the Bee’s story. We’ll be sharing one story per week from the 20th April to the 20th May.

Want to #BeePartofTheGreenStory? This is week all donations are being doubled by the BigGive Green Match!   Donate below and sign up to one of or Green Story events. 

Double your donation to the Elephant and Bees project
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