Honey harvesting to beekeeping: Part II in which decreased VAB* correlates with increased honey production

Entrepreneurship and Beekeeping Training

We sent beekeepers from 2 villages in southern Tanzania (Lulindi in Masasi region and Ndechela in Lindi region), for beekeeping and entrepreneurship training.

In Dar es Salaam, they had 5 day-long sessions about entrepreneurship with an NGO called Restless Development. https://restlessdevelopment.org/country/tanzania/



In class.

The trainers, at either end, had been trained by Internatio
nal Labor Organization and tailored the course to beekeeping, and to the beekeepers education level.

After the entrepreneurship training was completed, they rode a bus across the country to Sumbawanga for an intensive training at www.africanbeekeeping.com/ Africanbeekeeping.com focus their training upon helping local small-scale and subsistence farmers utilize materials common in their homes for beekeeping and honey processing.

 

Here the students are showing the wax starter strips they have made.

 

                                                                Searching for the queen.



Separating the honey from the wax.

After the trainings they returned to their villages

What happened then?

The beekeeping groups returned to Lulindi and Ndechela.  They placed their new top bar hives in the protected government forests near their homes. They placed the hives in their Forest Reserves and in a few weeks bees moved in.

Table. Decreased VAB* is correlated to increased honey production


*VAB – Violence against Bees, usually through hive destruction or fire. Estimated 25,000 bees lost per hive.

The above table shows the results from Lulindi. Before training they were using bark hives which are very fragile.  At each harvest the hive would be destroyed; all the bees would be lost. In addition they were harvesting very little honey, and making very little from it.

Honey harvesting takes place every six month in Tanzania. Six months after training in November 2017,  they checked the frames and found them full of brood, so they returned them. They waited to harvest til June 2018 but found all the hives were still full of brood, so the combs were returned to the hive. They reasoned, once the larvae hatched they would be available to make more honey.

The next harvest, the collected 110 litres and made 825,000 shillings. Most recently I heard the number of hives had increased to 50 and several other villages had become involved.

Decreased Violence against Bees is correlated to increased production.

Note: Appreciation to World Learning who supported this project through the Advancing Leaders Fellowship. https://www.worldlearning.org/pressrelease/world-learning-announces-2016-advancing-leaders-fellows/

1-2021, S Burlington


 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Begins at the bombing of the USEmbassy in Tanzania

Image
 This blog begins at the bombing of the US Embassy in Dar es Salaam Tanzania in 7 August 1998. As one of four first responders I was very disturbed that with all our nursing and medical skills we failed to save many. Since it was impossible to save them, it was obviously going to be more effective to focus on prevention. I made a promise to those victims who included perpetrators (driver of the truck bomb), victims (guards at the Embassy), and witnesses (people waiting for visas) to follow this thought that is, to address the problem of how to prevent such violence logically,   through research.         USEmbassy, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 7 August 1998. Photo from Association of Diplomatic Studies and Training. https://adst.org/2016/07/bombing-u-s-embassy-dar-es-salaam-tanzania/ This blog is drawing on 15 years of quantitative and qualitative research into ways of decreasing violence and increasing wellbeing in Tanzania, East Africa. We started gathering data in 2005, trying to un
Read more

Collective Violence as Social Control: examples in Tanzania and USA.

Image
  Theory of Collective Violence as Social Control Collective Violence as Social Control theory as described by Senechal de la Roche (1996) has been helpful in understanding the relationship between the violence witnessed at the bombing of the US Embassy in Dar es Salaam Tanzania and the ‘mob violence’ we see on the streets of Dar es Salaam, and  recently witnessed at the United States Capitol in Washington DC. She describes the 4 types of unilateral collective violence and categorizes them by Liability of the victims and how the event was Organized. Unilateral collective violence in Tanzania The violence that I witnessed at the US Embassy in 1998 is defined as Terrorism, in the above model. It was a highly organized attack – simultaneously in 3 neighboring countries. Responsibility was collective – in that anybody connected with Americans was a target; the victims included the Tanzanian guards, the Tanzanian driver of the truck bomb, and some Africa people in line for visas
Read more

Violence against Bees (VAB)

Image
Bees provide valued services by processing natural resources into products use-able by human beings. Yet, often the welfare of the bees themselves is given little consideration or ignored.     Apis mellifera scutellata  Evidence of VAB In the United States it is common to lose a large number of colonies every year. For example, in northeastern USA, where only 18.9% of beekeepers collect swarms to start new hives, it is not atypical for beekeepers to lose a third of their hi ves ( Department of Agriculture, Conservation, and Forestry, 2020). In the European Union, based on more than 8,500 visits to apiaries, a survey reported wide variation in annual mortality, ranging from 3.5% in Lithuania to 33.6% in Belgium (Cressey, 2014). Likewise, in China considerable variations in annual total colony losses are found among provinces (ranging from 0.9% to 22.0%) (Tang et al, 2020).   There are large variations even within geographical regions. Traditional beekeepers in Tanzania usuall
Read more