 |
Conrad Bérubé |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| |
Conrad Bérubé |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
American
Bee Journal
May 2003
Conrad Bérubé
890 Eberts St.
Nanaimo BC V9S 1P6
(250)754-1155
email: uc779(at)freenet.victoria.bc.ca
http://www3.telus.net/Conrad
Part 1
From mid-September
to mid-October of 2002 I had the honor of serving as the first volunteer to
Several months after submitting my application and credentials I heard back from the offices of Opportunities Industrialization Centers (OIC) International in Philadelphia; OIC is a non-governmental organization that manages the FarmServe Africa Program coordinating the activities of overseas subsidiaries in 17 African countries. With surprising efficiency, in comparison to my previous experiences in traveling to the developing world, my visa and airline tickets were in hand and I was winging my way to Ghana. Upon my arrival in the capital city, Accra, I was met by Carla Denizard, the Haitian-American country representative for the OIC Ghana country-headquarters and Samuel ("Sammy") Arku-Kelly, agricultural officer. A few days of project briefing brought me up to speed on the project and afforded me an opportunity to practice the niceties of eating fufu. (Fufu is one of a number of dough-like staples that are served hot with "soups"- actually more like stews; one tears off a small piece of the mass, dips it into the soup with one's fingers and then scoops the savory morsel into one's mouth. The operation was occasionally messy to my unskilled hand but I found was invariably delicious.) Carla and Sammy explained that there are four branch offices in Ghana including the office to which I was assigned: OIC Tamale (OICT). OICT amongst other programs, administers an integrated program for Food Security. The program provides village-level assistance in production, processing, post-harvest loss reduction, micro-credit/micro-enterprise development and water and sanitation training. After a brief tour of some of the projects and sights in Accra, Sammy and I embarked on the 700 kilometer journey to Tamale-which afforded plenty of time for him to fill me in on the details of the project on which I was to work.
The beekeeping project involves aspects of production and processing improvement that is supported by a rotating credit program: groups that are interested in tending bees can receive loans of hives and protective equipment; from the proceeds of honey and wax production they pay back the value of those materials and the money goes back into the credit fund to be used in other communities or other projects. The project serves women's cooperatives in 23 communities surrounding the city of Tamale in the dry-tropic Northern Region of Ghana. Kenya Top Bar Hives have been distributed to and apiaries have been established in all communities. About half of the communities have participated for two years in the project, the other half having participated only during the past year.
The ultimate intent of the project is concisely summarized in the name: "Higher
incomes for beekeepers through the application of improved honey production
techniques". The objectives of my particular visit were to:
The road from Accra to Tamale is rough in places- particularly when it passes through towns. There the roads are usually not paved at all, presumably to force vehicles to slow down to afford some measure of safety to the pedestrians, foot carters, and bicyclists, not to mention the chickens, goats, dogs and cows, that also use the thoroughfares. Along the route vendors hawk beverages, prepared food and fresh produce: everything from pineapples and cassava to surprisingly large edible snails whose shells were about the size of soda bottles. We stopped a few times to replenish ourselves on roasted guinea fowl and fried plantain and sweet potato, covering the 700+ kilometer distance in a fairly respectable eleven hours of road-time. We passed from the large metropolitan sprawl of Accra through towns, farmland, and tropical hardwood forests until we entered the savannah area of the Northern Region, of which Tamale is the capital.
|
 |
 |
 |
|
Most rural Ghanaians live in villages in huts constructed from daub and wattle which can be seen in the wall behind the children. The sense of community is very strong in the villages and people often share in tasks such as fetching water or pounding fufu. |
|
Most people (60-70 percent) in the Northern Region live in villages and pursue a subsistence agricultural lifestyle with few modern amenities (electricity and plumbing are rarities outside the city). The villagers of the surrounding countryside produce cattle, goats, cotton, shea-nuts, and groundnuts (peanuts), amongst other things, which are processed by Tamale's 210,000 or so inhabitants. Although I had been prepared to stay in the traditional dab-and-wattle round huts my attitude is probably considerably more flexible than my spine is these days and I was somewhat relieved when circumstances proved otherwise. As it turned out, all of the client villages are within an hour or two of Tamale so it was possible to stay in the town and conduct day-trips to the surrounding communities. Dr. John Nene-Osom Azu, the program technical advisor for OICT, kindly offered me (air-conditioned!) accommodations in his residence near the program office in Tamale. (Several other staff members who rotated work on projects in different areas of the country were also taking rooms at the house, so I had plenty of opportunity to make friendships and discuss technical concerns.) John rather reminded me of an older, more intellectual and stately version of Wesley Snipes and it was not at all surprising to find that he was born of one of the royal houses of the Krobo, an ethnic group from the southern portion of Ghana. John received his doctorate in plant physiology from the University of Guelph in the 1970's- at about the same time that a team from that university was working in East Africa to develop the Kenya Top Bar Hive, or KTBH. He and I both have far-ranging interests and we shared a number of interesting conversations beginning what I hope will be a long-lasting friendship.
 |
Oict technical advisor, Dr. John Azu, has inspiring thoughts about development: "we have work with each other, like the bee, in a social cohesion that brings together a lot of mastermind thought-for the mind is capable of achieving whatsoever it desires. |
Amongst the topics of our discussions were the important roles that bees have
played in the culture of western Africa. Brass work from the region is created
using the "lost-wax" method of metal casting. In such casting a sculpture is
created out of wax and is then encased in plaster. The plaster is then heated
to melt the wax, leaving a cavity into which molten metal is poured to recreate
the original sculpture in metal. Batik is a traditional African method of dyeing
cloth. wax is painted or blotted onto fabric and then the fabric is dyed. After
dyeing, the wax is removed by boiling the cloth. Prior to the availability of
paraffin, both metal casting and batik was done using beeswax as a raw material. In addition, it is estimated that during certain months of the year about 80%
of the caloric intake for some of the forest-dwelling pygmies of central and
western portions of the continent may have been derived from the consumption
of honey, pollen and brood from hunted honeybee nests, food sources that were
certainly used by other peoples in west Africa as well, though, most likely,
to a lesser extent. In many parts of western Africa honey is used to produce
honey beer-but this was not the case in any of the villages that I was to soon
visit. Instead the predominant use for honey in the Tamale area was as a sweetener
for morning porridge and as a cough syrup or medicine.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Bee-culture has played an important role in the culture and economy of western Africa. Honey has traditionally been an important food item and has documented efficacy for both internal and external medical applications. Bee products have been harvested from wild nests and a variety of traditional hives in Africa for millennia. wax has been used in traditional African crafts such as batik dyeing and lost-wax metal casting. | ||
Traditionally in Ghana and throughout sub-Saharan Africa, honey was, until
relatively recently, considered a bush product and even to the present-day may
be gathered from wild nests using little more than smoke, cover of darkness,
a knife and a daredevil attitude to obtain the harvest. Minimal protective clothing
is usually the norm because bees tend to sting more when they get caught under
garments and pressed against skin, and bulky clothing which might protect one
from stings would also impede one's climbing into nest-trees and increase the
risk of a fall. Slapping the skin to numb oneself to stings is a common technique
for primitive honey-hunting. Harvesting is done at night, when bees do not fly
as readily- although the bees will fly to a source of light, such as the grass
torches used during harvesting, but will usually, like moths, navigate themselves
right into the flame. The torch is sometimes passed quickly several times under
the comb, killing, dislodging or stupefying a great number of bees. (If one
is using flashlights, as we were to do on several night raids, the flashlights
should be propped up a small distance away from the nest in order to keep those
few bees that will take flight off of the harvesting crew.) Usually the entire
comb is harvested and squeezed out, to yield honey that is dark, watery and
contains much pollen and other impurities. The introduction of the Kenya Top
Bar Hive to the area allowed the production of much higher quality honey without
requiring a great deal of additional technical skill nor investment of capital
while at the same time allowing for significant returns on the labor that could
be invested.
 |
 |
 |
The day after my arrival in Tamale, John showed me around the OICT offices
and introduced me to the field staff. This included making the acquaintance
of Mohammed Ali (in his words, "the beekeeper not the boxer"), a local
honey producer that OICT had contracted to assist me with translation and technical
support during my stay. Given the short duration of Farmer-to-Farmer exchanges
it is essential for the FtF volunteer to concentrate efforts on "training
the trainers". Fortunately, for my own experience, Mr. Ali (or simply "Ali"
as he prefers to be called) and the 14-member cadre of OICT's Polycovalent Community
Facilitators are very competent and well trained in their respective areas.
Because of their familiarity with a formal education system, much background
material could be conveyed to them through technical literature.
As regards appropriate reference materials, an excellent resource already exists
in the form of Small Scale Beekeeping by Curtis Gentry and published
by the U.S. Peace Corps Office of Information Collection and Exchange (and also
available at: http://nanaimo.ark.com/~cberube/toc.htm).
I delivered a copy of this public domain "how-to" manual to OICT upon
my arrival and a copy was reproduced for each of the PCF's along with a set
of self-study questions and some sets of mini-flipcharts that can be used to
convey the information contained in the manual. I expect that any of the PCF's
who peruse the technical materials given to each of them will be able to address
clients' technical questions regarding basic beekeeping. However, it is my experience
that it is usually not worthwhile to attempt to make beekeepers out of people
who are intensely averse to being stung, or who just don't seem to be subject
to the allure of apiculture. Thus, it was expected that many of the PCF's would
not actively participate in hands-on training with bees and subsequent beekeeping
extension-and this proved to be the case; only two PCF's participated in actually
handling bees during training sessions. However, Ali was very enthusiastic and
extraordinarily helpful and we learned many things from each other which we
were able to share with the members of the women's cooperatives- who were more
willing to risk the pain associated with the gains that beekeeping offers.
 |
A
very good apiary site with good shade and easy access was improved further
by arranging Kenya Top Bar Hives into two circular configurations; in
the smaller, inner circle the hive entrances face inwards, in the larger
outer circle the hive entrances point outwards. This creates a zone between
the circles where people will be less evident to the bees thus reducing
stinging incidents during apiary maintenance and hive manipulation.
|
| Although it was not honey harvest season during my visit,training exercises to remove wild nests at the training center provided the opportunity to practice comb transfer and improved honey processing techniques. |
 |
 |
Training materials developed and delivered to OICT included newsprint flipchart, mini-flipchart presentations and Small Scale Beekeeping, a complete "how-to" manual by Curtis Gentry published by the U.S. Peace Corps. |
Ali and I made field visits over the course of two-and-a-half weeks to all 23 communities involved in the beekeeping project in order to assess current skill levels and to gather baseline data on management practices, annual income from bee products, current uses and quality of honey, and cultural aspects associated with bees and beekeeping, such as folklore or taboos. Ghana has a very rich cultural heritage and, as a former British colony, English has been adopted as the official language of Ghana to allow some common means of communication in a land with nine major language groups contained in an area only slightly smaller than the state of Oregon. Thus, most folks in the larger towns and cities speak English. However, at the village level, local languages prevail- Dagbani being the tongue spoken in the area around Tamale- such that even a Ghanaian extentionist may need a translator when working beyond the range of his or her own local language. To shamelessly mix metaphors, as in most countries where English is the lingua franca, it has acquired its own unique flavor and I was frequently challenged to re-tune my ears to Ghanaian pronunciation. This led to several amusing misunderstandings.
One of the office assistants, Afe, was curious about the slogan on the bee-emblazoned
T-shirt I'd worn on several occasions. She asked me "What does it mean
on your shirt 'Beekeepers do it for the booze'?" I had to explain to her
that phonetic spelling to the contrary my shirt actually said 'Beekeepers do
it for the buzz'-but in a region where honey is often used in brewing honey
beer perhaps Afe's motto works just as well…
On one of our first village visits Ali introduced me to the local chief and
elders and then happily announced "You may now feel the shit!" I was
a bit confused. But I remembered seeing in an old National Geographic TV show
that Bedouins play a "board game" using lines drawn in the sand to
create a gaming surface and dried camel droppings for game pieces. I thought
that perhaps Ghanaians played a similar game and that visiting guests were invited
to handle the game pieces to imbue them with good luck-in the same fashion that
Las Vegas gamblers will ask someone they consider to carry good fortune to blow
on their dice. But rather than giving a more literal meaning to the game of
"craps" I discovered that I had simply misinterpreted Ali's accent
and what he was actually saying was that I could begin to complete the skills
assessment survey form that we had developed: "You may now fill the sheet!"
 |
 |
|
Termite
mounds are a ubiquitous feature of the Ghanaian savannah. Their buttressed
form probably influenced the traditional architecture exemplified in the
ancient mosque of larambanga-which in turn influenced the monumental mausoleum
built in the capital city of Accra for Ghana's first prime minister Kwame
Nkrumah. Although the mound- building termites subsist on fungus grown
in "gardens" of the termites' excreta, subterranean termites
can cause significant structural damage to beehives.
|
 |
As the result of our field visits I learned of several taboos about "honey tapping" (nest robbing/honey hunting):
 |
In a typical village in the northern region of Ghana, villagers during the harvest of groundnuts (peanuts) spent many hours chatting and shelling the nuts for market. A typical problem in the apiaries was hives that were too close together, hapharzardly arranged and left empty and untended for too long such that ants or other critters took up residence. | |
 |
 |
|
I also learned several local fables:
The first story reflects the renowned ferocity of African bees
when disturbed. Africa’s varied ecosystems
have led to the evolution of distinct races of Apis mellifera—most of
which are highly defensive because of the wide variety of natural enemies with
which they have been challenged from time immemorial. Ants, wasps, spiders, scorpions, lizards, rodents,
birds, honeybadgers, and apes (including ourselves and our hominid ancestors)
will attack individual bees or entire colonies and, through natural selection,
have skewed the disposition of surviving subspecies towards ill temperedness.
One of the nastier strains is Apis mellifera scutellata which
inhabits the central and eastern portions of Africa; imported to the New World
it was bees of this race which escaped from breeding trials in Brazil in 1956
and subsequently spread throughout the tropical zones of South, Central and
North America. Apis mellifera scutellata has, to many
people, come to be thought of as “the African honey bee”. However, the bees along the western coast of
Africa, are classified as Apis mellifera adansonii and they are at least
as irritable as their more publicized cousins.
Smaller than the European bees with which most U.S. and Canadian beekeepers
are familiar Apis mellifera adansonii bees will sting with less provocation,
with a greater proportion of the colonies’ population, around a greater distance
from the nest and for a longer duration than will European bees.
In short, they’re just nasty.
The second and third stories, both of which associate bees with male gonads are only slightly more obtuse. Anyone who has ever seen the backside of a buck goat will be hard-pressed to deny that the pendulous testicular pouches do, in fact, resemble, in outline, the hanging combs of a natural honeybee nest. From there it’s just a short intuitive jump to create a mythic association of the stinging pain of testicular hernias with some alleged injury done to the First Bee of fable (although the story errs, of course, in ascribing to male bees the ability to sting). The KTBH takes advantage of the pendulous form of natural honeycomb
 |
 |
|
Kenya
top bar hives allow for the construction of naturally v-shaped combs. A central ridge along the lower portion of the bar serves to guide the
construction of comb.
|
|
A team from the University of Guelph developed the KTBH in
the 1970’s using basic concepts established for traditional horizontal hives
used in many parts of Africa. Usually
such hives are cylinders of bark, hollowed logs or woven reeds or grasses from
which honeycombs can be removed without destroying brood combs—thus allowing
for the continuance of the colony. However,
these are fixed comb hives which do not allow for the manipulation of brood
combs that is a requisite part of true beekeeping—thus traditional hives allow
only “bee-having”. The KTBH, in contrast,
involves the use of individual strips of wood with central guides to encourage
the bees to build straight combs. The body of the hive is trapezoidal in cross-section—
which allows the bees to build comb in its natural “V” shape without the need
for them to attach the comb to the sidewalls for the additional support required
when rectangular comb is constructed. Since top bars are kept flush together when
a hive is being inspected and a comb is removed from the hive there is only
one slot on top from which bees can emerge— making it easier for the beekeeper
to control the colony. (For more information
and plans for the KTBH see "The Kenya Top‑Bar Hive as a Better Hive
in Developing Countries," American Bee Journal, August 1989 at http://nanaimo.ark.com/~cberube/ktbh.htm) It was these types of hives, 30 to 50 per group,
that had been distributed to the cooperatives.
The KTBH is more appropriate than the Langstroth hive for the storage habits of Apis mellifera adansonii. One of the principle differences between the Langstroth hive and the KTBH is that the Langstroth hive allows for rapid expansion of honey storage capacity through the addition of supers. But expanding the hive capacity of African bees is not a particularly effective management strategy because of how they react to surplus stores. Before discussuing storage per se, a brief discussion of the foraging behaviour of Apis mellifera adansonii is in order. It is sometimes stated that bees of one or the other of African or European honeybees are more efficient foragers. Caveats ought always to be added to such statements since each subspecies is adapted to foraging under different circumstances. In general, European bees are better foragers during profuse flows when numerous plant species can be depended on to deliver pollen and nectar in a manner that is distributed regularly in both time and space; African bees are better foragers on patchy start-and-stop flows. As one would expect, temperate flows are generally of the former type and tropical flows are typically characterized by the latter pattern. European bees do best when conditions favor group foraging, to which they are well adapted, while African bees fare better under conditions best exploited by more individualistic gleaning behavior in food collection. In general, if European and African colonies of the same size are foraging in the same area in a tropical ecosystem, the African colonies will bring in more nectar to the colony and have the greater potential for tropical honey production. However, large honey stores represent a significant attractant to the numerous pests that plague honeybees in the tropics. Therefore African strains of honeybees have evolved away from maintaining large stores of honey and, instead, tend to convert surplus stores into increased brood production. This results in the bees' greater propensity for swarming. By conducting smaller harvests more frequently, at about the same intervals at which one would install supers in a Langstroth system, swarming can be better controlled and honey production with the KTBH can be increased.
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
One
of Ghana's national treasures is mole national park where populations
of native wildlife are still intact. The bee-eater, as its name implies
is an insectivorous bird. In some parts of Africa, elephants have recently
been discouraged from raiding farms or regenerating forests by installing
beehives-- even elephants are not immune to the fury of disturbed African
bees since the insects can locate and target the elephants tender nostrils
and ear canals. Monkeys and impala don't have much to do with beekeeping
but , nonetheless, I still found them interesting ;-)
|
|
For more information on the farmer-to-farmer program write to
Farmserve Africa Program
OIC International 240 West Tulpehocken Street
Philadelphia, PA 19144
For more information on the Peace Corps visit the following website:
or write to:
Peace Corps
806 Connecticut Avenue N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20526
Or call (toll-free): 800-484-8580 or look up the local recruiting office under the government listings in your telephone directory.
Back to Conrad's Farmer to Farmer home
page
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
