Training in Shambu

My training of beekeeper trainers in Shambu includes both classroom and practical experience. Ninety-seven percent of Ethiopia’s honey bees are housed in traditional bee hives high in trees. Traditional beekeeping primarily involves placing in trees a number of hives, rubbed with a native plant as a bee attractant. In western Ethiopia, the plant is “kusaya” in Oromifa or “kosereta” in Amharic, a plant with a lemon odor similar to honey bee Nasanov pheromone. After swarms move into the hives, beekeepers wait for the bees to expand their colony and build up stores of honey. Then, at night, a beekeeper climbs a tree and lowers a hive down to a waiting partner. Using large amounts of smoke, the beekeepers drive the bees out of the hive and cut out the honeycombs. The evicted colony of bees is lost. The honeycombs are crushed by hand, and the honey and beeswax are collected together. The traditional beekeepers actually have little interaction with the hive and the bees. The students, each seasoned beekeepers, are extremely interested in the workings of a honey bee colony.

Ethiopia’s rainy season dictates our training schedule. Intermittent rains and power outages bring us indoors. Using a portable generator, we view photos of healthy bee hives and hive problems; many are the same photos seen in this blog. Some have not seen inside a hive with the bee colony intact. Their only experience involves driving bees from the hive at night. For practical experience, the beekeepers prepare a modern Zander hive and transfer the bees from a traditional hive to it. This procedure will allow beekeepers to catch swarms of bees in the treetops and then move them to modern hives where they can be tended allowing for continuous harvests without destroying the bee colony. First, beeswax is melted and cleaned to produce foundation. In today’s photo, skilled hands embed support wires into the freshly made sheet of foundation using a knife heated in an open fire.

--Richard

Priming Foundation

Honey bees build their own nest from beeswax that the young bees secrete from glands on the lower side of their abdomen. The beeswax is secreted in small flakes, and these are worked into six-sided cells of honeycomb by the worker bees using their mouthparts. The beeswax is produced by young worker bees when the bees eat honey. The bees must consume about one pound of honey to produce one ounce of beeswax. To produce this pound of honey, or an ounce of beeswax, the bees must visit about two million flowers and fly a combined distance of 55 thousand miles. That’s more than twice the distance around the earth at the equator. Building honey comb is, therefore, quite costly to the bee in time and resources consumed. The bees will readily build their comb on beeswax foundation. Foundation is the mid-rib of the honey comb, and it was one of the great beekeeping developments of the mid-1800s.

Beekeepers now have available foundation made of beeswax or of plastic. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. The honey bees strictly prefer to build comb on natural beeswax foundation. If frames of both types are placed in a hive, the bees will use the beeswax and ignore the plastic. Some colonies build comb on plastic foundation in spotty, erratic patterns. This can be corrected by priming or painting the plastic foundation with melted beeswax. The beeswax can be melted in a double boiler and added to the plastic foundation with a paint brush or roller. The bees will use this layer of beeswax to start drawing out the honey comb cells. The beekeeper’s work doesn’t need to be too neat; the bees will correct it. At Peace Bee Farm we use our own chemical-free beeswax, saved from our honey harvest, as a major part of our integrated pest management program. We prefer the durable plastic foundation because, unlike beeswax foundation, it can easily be cleaned of old comb and reused.
--Richard