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It's the bee's knees

We have just welcomed a new member into the Nuevas Esperanzas team.  Erika Perez is 25 and comes from León.  She has joined us to work on our agricultural and environmental projects but it is her interest and experience in beekeeping which got her the job.  While studying Tropical Agroecology at the university in León, she did a module on beekeeping which really captured her interest.  She met someone who was working with bees and soon joined the local cooperative.

Erika has had her own apiary for four years now.  She is fascinated by the way the bees work together, the patience needed to work with them and the way they are so susceptible to changes in the environment around them.  Erika has never been afraid of bees and when she found out that Nuevas Esperanzas was intending to introduce beekeeping to the remote hillside communities on the slopes of the volcanoes she was keen to get involved.  She enjoys sports and keeps fit playing football which is just as well as her first few weeks with Nuevas Esperanzas have involved long walks around the hills looking for the best sites for the apiary.  She has really enjoyed getting to know the area and the communities with which we are working.

Many people in the four communities involved in the beekeeping project are afraid of bees, not to mention Erika’s own colleagues in the Nuevas Esperanzas team!  Africanised bees, which have colonised Central America over the last 30 years, are more aggressive than their European counterparts, and the deaths of several horses in the hillside communities have been attributed to bee stings.  The anxiety about beekeeping is understandable but Erika is sure she will be able to help people conquer this fear by explaining more about the way bees live and work.  Her advice is to remember that if you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you.

Although Erika has joined Nuevas Esperanzas to implement the beekeeping project, she was called upon to help out at La Palmerita in her first week.  While out surveying, our team discovered a natural beehive in their path.  Undeterred by the danger Erika was happy to come to the rescue.  Dressed in her protective suit she smoked the bees to calm them and was then able to move the hive out of the surveyors’ path.  The surveyors were very grateful and Erika has taken the jokes about her Ghostbusters outfit with good humour!

And what of the beekeepers in the hills?   Meetings with the four communities have identified around 20 people who are really interested in having a go and learning how to manage a hive.  This project will train them to keep bees in an environmentally friendly way and produce honey.  Sadly, the more common local way to produce honey is to ‘hunt’ for natural hives in trees and set fire to them to get rid of the bees, destroying the trees and often killing the bees in the process.  While the Africanised bees may be harder to manage in hives, they do produce more honey than the European bees which they replaced which makes beekeeping a serious option for those looking for an alternative way of making a living.  The project is just beginning, though, and commercial honey production may be a long way off.  The short-term aims are to generate interest in the hillside communities, to conquer the fear factor, to train future beekeepers and to experiment with the best places to locate the hives.  Nuevas Esperanzas will establish two separate apiaries, one for El Ojochal and El Ñajo and the other for Agua Fría and El Caracol.  The hives will be moved into place in early August and if everything goes according to plan, Erika hopes the first honey harvest will take place in time for Christmas. 

We are very grateful to New Hope Llantwit Major for their support in funding the beekeeping project.

09/07/10