Training at Bonga

I considered the training sessions at Bonga to be a success. In an effort to expand upon the Ethiopian beekeepers’ sources of income, I demonstrated methods to producing cosmetic products from the available beeswax and honey. The processors at Apinec made nicely finished lip glosses, hand creams, and restorative skin care products, adding Ethiopia’s cocoa butter, olive oil, sesame oil, Ethiopian spices, and the essential oils of frankincense, citronella, palmarosa, and eucalyptus. Apinec’s spices included Ethiopian cardamom and wild pepper. The processors’ tej honey mead production was quite successful using the Kaffa Zone’s organic forest honey and native plants to recreate Ethiopia’s traditional honey wine. Microbiologist Abraham Tesfaye joined in the tej production effort to ensure that our procedures consistently produced a tej in a traditional manner while preventing contamination of our yeast cultures. To ensure consistency of the tej production over numerous batches, Abraham started propagating our lines of yeast in laboratory conditions. He explained that the yeast cell division occurs under aerobic conditions. Abraham assisted by directing the production of tej in anaerobic conditions to enable the yeast to convert the carbohydrate of the honey to alcohol. Complete filling of the fermentation vessels and the use of fermentation air locks that processor Fasika Habtemariam built ensured the proper conditions existed. The honey used to produce the tej is the forest honey collected from traditional bee hives. The honey is derived by crushing the honeycomb by hand, which leaves significant amounts of pollen and brood in the honey. The pollen and brood are sources of protein necessary for yeast cell development. Protein makes this raw forest honey an excellent medium for yeast cell growth and fermentation.

Twice a day during our training sessions, Apinec’s Tigist Wildemichael roasted, ground, and brewed Bonga coffee in a jebena and served it to us along with roasted barley or chickpeas.  Many a Kaffa Zone thatch-roof house sports a jebena coffee pot atop the center pole of the roof, the house’s only adornment.

--Richard

Ethiopia's Limich

On the second day of our training sessions in Bonga, Ethiopia, the students arrived with bundles of foliage that they harvested in the surrounding forest. The bundles contained aromatic plants used to make Ethiopia’s traditional honey mead, tej.  In today’s photo, my host, Apinec Agro-Industry’s Managing Director Wubishet Adugna, checks the fragrance of the broad leaves of wild pepper. The center plant in the bundle, with small leaves, is limich; and the plant to the right is gesho. The people of the Ethiopian highlands are adept at finding and harvesting the rich plant life of the forest. The wild pepper will be burned along with Olea africana to produce a sterilizing smoke for the vessels holding the tej. The smoke also imparts some of the distinctive flavor to this traditional mead.

When I bruised the leaves of the limich plant, Clausenia anisata, I immediately recognized the bright, pleasant odor. It is the odor of honey bee Nasanov pheromone! Worker honey bees raise their abdomens and use their wings to fan air across their Nasanov glands to direct flying bees back to the hive. Nasanov pheromone helps organize bees while they are swarming, and worker bees fan Nasanov pheromone while their virgin queen is making her mating flights. Scout bees use Nasanov pheromone to mark the location of food sources including favorable sources of water. Nasanov pheromone is of great importance for communications within the honey bee colony. A plant-based substitute would be of great use to beekeepers. I quickly learned that limich is well founded in Ethiopian indigenous knowledge of beekeeping, as it is used to attract swarms to traditional bee hives placed high in trees. Limich is commonly used in Ethiopia to bathe mothers after they give birth. Essential oils of the plant are used to treat a number of ailments of humans and cattle. The gesho plant is used to give tej its distinctive flavor. The bitter gesho stems and bark counter the sweetness of the honey.

--Richard

Ethiopian Tej

Mead, or honey wine, considered our oldest alcoholic beverage, is produced by fermenting honey diluted with water. There is no single formula for mead, and it is made in many styles and flavors. Most mead recipes include a fruit or spice added to balance or contrast with the sweetness of honey. Some of the fruits added to mead include tart apples, citrus fruits, and raisins. Cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon are spices commonly used in making mead. Yeast, which provides the fermentation, for mead may be added by the mead maker or it may be derived from “wild” yeast existing in the air or on the surface of fruit. While mead is made and enjoyed throughout the world, Ethiopia has its own traditional honey wine known as tej, which is produced from three ingredients: honey, water, and gesho. Gesho is the native Ethiopian shiny-leaf buckthorn, Rhamnus prinoides. The stems and bark of gesho are used to counter the sweetness of honey in tej.

The production of tej is an art passed as indigenous knowledge across generations over thousands of years. The unrecorded oral tradition of tej-making has been lost in some locations. At Apinec in Bonga, we recreated the process of making tej using traditional materials and techniques along with modern production methods. A microbiologist joined us in producing tej. While we used modern techniques for sterilizing containers and equipment, we also burned Olea africana and wild pepper, two plants smoked in traditional tej making to sterilize containers. While modern sterilizing methods are effective, traditional tej receives some of its distinctive flavor from the smoke. Once a drink of nobility, tej is now enjoyed by many Ethiopians. It is usually served at room temperature in round flasks called bereles. This tej is cloudy in appearance. The processors at Bonga are experimenting with techniques to produce a clear golden, effervescent tej. Today’s photo shows bereles of tej served with a traditional meal of wot, rolls of injera, and squares of false banana enset.

--Richard

Hive Products for Apinec

Bonga, Kaffa Zone, Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s Region, Ethiopia is in the heart of the organic forest honey and coffee region. Located in the highlands at seven degrees north latitude, the region produces ample amounts of product from the surrounding forests. Apinec Agro-Industry purchases raw, hand-crushed honey and beeswax from two thousand area farmers. They process and pack honey and beeswax along with coffee and spices for export. Apinec requested that I train their employees to produce additional products from the honey, beeswax, and propolis collected from the Kaffa bee hives. I conducted a series of training sessions similar to those conducted by the Tennessee Beekeepers Association across the state of Tennessee. In both cases the purpose was the same: to make beekeeping more sustainable by expanding the number of products available for sale. Numerous products can be produced based upon beeswax and honey.

Through an Amharic language interpreter, I demonstrated how to produce beeswax candles, hand and skin lotions, lip glosses, and other cosmetic products. A student repeated the steps to verify accurate translation and understanding. Having a rich supply of vegetable oils, spices, and essential oils, Ethiopia is well suited for producing such products.  I also provided the Apinec processors with formulas and procedures to produce other products from leather conditioners to furniture polish. The technology for producing each of the products is relatively simple, so start-up of manufacturing products should begin fairly soon. The first attempts by the student processors resulted in very presentable packaged products. The appearance, texture, and fragrance were very nice. To get some feedback on the appeal of the products, we gave samples to five ladies. Each of the five reported that they were not comfortable with the feel of the product on their lips. This proved to be an important marketing test of the product, which will now be reformulated with beeswax and other Ethiopian oils. Apinec’s venture into producing other products from the bee hive is a first for Ethiopia.

--Richard

Traditional Beekeeping

Agriculture and beekeeping contrast starkly from the United States to Ethiopia. America’s food production is now accomplished by a small fraction of the population, while almost all Ethiopians are farmers. Even though beekeeping and the pollination it provides is responsible for one third of our food production, an extremely small group of people manage our bees. By contrast, beekeeping is a part of many Ethiopian farm families’ endeavors. Honey bees in the US are housed almost exclusively in removable frame hives, mostly of the Langstroth design. A few individuals keep bees in top bar hives or Warre hives. In Ethiopia, modern bee hives are few; some keep bees in mud-coated straw top bar hives, known as transitional hives. However, the vast majority of hives are traditional bee hives which are simple six-foot cylinders made of cane and lined with leaves. Traditional Ethiopian bee hives are placed empty in the forest tree tops with the leaves of the Limich plant used to attract swarms of honey bees. The hive trees are truly beautiful and impressive sights. With woven bee hives mounted among the branches of trees from 50 to 120 feet above the ground, the trees resemble larger-scale versions of native Ethiopian trees covered with weaver bird nests.

The keeping of honey bees in Ethiopia involves indigenous knowledge passed down through generations. Nimble two-man teams of beekeepers harvest the hives at night. One barefooted climber with a torch negotiates the tree and gently lowers a hive to his waiting partner. The bees are worked at night because these are the bees with the reputation as the most defensive honey bees in the world. Harvesting the honey is destructive of the nest. Using heavy smoke to drive the bees back, the beekeepers cut combs from the hive. The combs are crushed by hand, and the collected honey and beeswax are sold. The displaced colony of bees flies to another awaiting traditional bee hive. Beekeeping in Ethiopia depends upon colonies regularly swarming.

--Richard

From Proctor to Bonga

It is a long trip from Proctor, Arkansas to Bonga, Ethiopia. It’s 21 hours in the air at six hundred miles per hour, stopping at Atlanta, Amsterdam, Khartoum, and Addis Ababa. And then it’s almost two more days by truck, stopping regularly for goats, sheep, cattle, and donkeys. Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, is a cosmopolitan city. Ethiopians call it “The Capital of Africa.” The African Union meets in this colorful, flowered city. Diplomats, tourists, engineers, and business leaders are seen on the streets. The traffic in the city of four million is similar to that of American cities. Drivers negotiate busy intersections with their vehicle’s horn because there are no traffic signals. Traffic officers referee the larger intersections. Newcomers, like me, are surprised to see small herds of sheep, goats, or cattle on city streets. Driving out of the city, the sight of animals becomes the norm. The people of Ethiopia hold a strong connection to their animals. After leaving the capital city, one sees a continuous flow of humans and animals on foot along the roads. People walk with their donkeys laden with goods for the market, or they carry a plow by hand as they follow their oxen to the field to plow. Young boys herd drought-thinned cattle to rivers for water or to fields to forage. Near the small towns, two-wheeled horse carts called “garis” and three-wheeled “bajajs,” diesel-powered, enclosed rickshaws, serve as taxis. Buses carry passengers between towns, and large trucks carry sacks of coffee, grain, fuel, and goods to markets.

I knew that I had arrived in the land of Ethiopia’s forest honey when I saw the weathered sign on the side of the road. The sign proclaimed “The Town of Bees” in Amharic. Two traditional bee hives stand on the highlands above the Great Rift Valley with volcanoes in the background. The cylindrical hives are adorned with honey bees, modern bee hives, and honey. Endemic Limich plants top the hives.

--Richard

Short Course Forty-Seven

By the time I made my presentation to 150 new beekeepers at the Memphis Area Beekeepers Association’s Forty-Seventh Annual Short Course in Beekeeping, I was already packed for my next assignment. Speaking to the enthusiastic Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi beekeepers about different approaches to keeping colonies healthy, I explained that some beekeepers reacted to the invasion of parasitic mites in the mid-1980s by attempting to kill the pests with chemical miticides. The result of this approach was a temporary control followed by an evolution to a heartier strain of mites resistant to the chemicals. I told the new beekeepers that some individuals took no steps to control the parasitic mites, and that their colonies usually dwindled and died after about two years. I proposed that the beekeepers adopt an Integrated Pest Management approach to beekeeping designed to strengthen the bees and weaken the pests while using a minimum of chemicals in the bee hives. I explained that our goal should be to evolve strains of honey bees that are capable of living in the presence of pests that, once introduced into our area, are surely here to stay. The reception from the audience was positive. Many are entering into beekeeping with a desire to be environmentally responsible, and they seek a way of effectively managing bees without relying upon chemical agents to control honey bee pests. An individually designed IPM plan offers them a workable solution. In today’s photo Adam Power and Sam Mardis demonstrate building bee hive frames.

Leaving Memphis’ short course, I turned my attention to my next beekeeping teaching assignment far from home. I had been invited to travel to Africa to train beekeepers in techniques for producing additional products from the bee hive. The voyage would take me to areas I never expected to see. It would provide me with great insights into the capabilities of people who live close to the land and rely upon the honey bee to harvest the resources of the forest.

--Richard