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Case Studies
Bonga
Beehives
and Abebe Tesfa
At the signing ceremony,
honeycombs and vegetables are put on display to show
officials. Abebe Tesfa shakes his head, protesting that
they’ve eaten all his honeycombs. “You can tell the
culprits by their sticky fingers,” he mutters.
Not one to be deterred,
he sprints off in the direction of his new beehives and
says his farm’s only a few minutes away. Twenty minutes
later after a steep walk uphill we arrive puffing at his
farm.
Abebe has put his new
Kenyan Top-bar hives next to his traditional ones ones,
which are made out of local trees and resemble a hollow
trunk as in the wild. They’re found all over Ethiopia –
about four feet long, hanging up in acacia trees.
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The disadvantages with the
traditional hives are numerous. They’re impossible to
inspect without being broken into and there’s no way to
select ripe honeycombs or to leave some honey for the
bees.
Opening up the hive means
driving the bees away. When it’s time to collect the
honey, the hive is cut down from the tree and broken
open. Many of the bees are killed when this happens, as
the honey collector drives them away
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with smoke and fire,
crushing many as the combs are pulled from the hive.
Bees that survive often desert the hive so the swarm
is lost. The other problem is forest destruction as
so many tree trunks are used to make the hives -
about half a million hives are made in Kaffa alone.
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To get round some of
these issues, the new types of hives are made out of
forest bamboo. They are carefully modelled on the Kenyan
Top bar design but locally adapted and produced. The key
advantage is that the bee farmer can now manage his or
her hive and bee swarm. They are easily opened from the
top for inspection. Slats of wood sit on top of the box
and the honeycombs hang from each slat, making
individual inspection easy. The bees are carefully
smoked out when the honey’s collected and the swarm
stays alive. Using materials such as bamboo is much more
forest friendly. Bamboo quickly regenerates after
cutting so there’s not the same destruction of forest
trees. Honey production is said to be four times higher
from the new hives, so altogether they win all round.
In the context of forest
management – non-timber activities take pressure off the
forest and give people other ways of making an income -
honey is an obvious example.
Abebe is married with two
wives and eight children so needs all the extra income
he can muster. He has a hectare of land growing enset, a
banana-like plant, potato and maize and keeps hens, six
sheep, three cows and two oxen. He says the honey helps
to supplement his income and he spends this on school
fees for four of this children, clothes and materials
for making furniture.
He says he couldn’t
quantify his income in cash terms because they mostly
lived off what they grow. But his wives sold enset after
they’d processed it and bought things like salt and
coffee. “We get by.”
Read
about the Bonga project >>>
Other
case studies from Bonga
A Day in
the life of Haile Yesho >>>
Couples’
Life Undergoes Transformation >>>
Gone
are the Days of Hardship >>>
Livelihood
Supports >>>
Manja
and the Bonga forest: A story of successful interaction
>>>
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