SOLVING A PROBLEM:
Lynelle Kenned, who plays Maria in The Sound of Music, now on at The Playhouse, offers a hand in support of the world’s declining bee population at the butterfly garden in the Durban Botanical Gardens, which is also a foraging haven for bees.
TEENAGE honey hunters notorious for starting forest fires as they smoke out wild bees are among the small-scale commercial beekeepers emerging in KwaZulu-Natal.
Their mentor, Guy Stubbs, formerly of Hilton College, first teaches them to make the basic equipment, the type Gauteng-based Stubbs used when he was introduced to apiculture at school.
“A veil made from a hat, a T-shirt, gauze and piece of tablecloth or curtain” is where they start, said Stubbs, now 50.
The 1 000-odd KwaZuluNatal emerging beekeepers – teenagers and adults – who have trained under Stubbs passed an entrance test by showing interest in a project that did not involve hand-outs. Rather, it took the “teach a man to fish” approach, an idea he picked up from a visit to a project in Swaziland, where there are 1 600 beekeepers.
“My favourite part of all this is when I see them harvest their own honey and when they catch a swarm for the first time and place it in a box hive,” said Stubbs.
Such techniques are an advance from honey hunters’ methods of placing a burning stick into a wild nest, fiddling around to grab a few honeycombs and then fleeing after being stung.
“The fire can go out of control; 95 percent of forest fires are started by community kids aged between 10 and 17, looking for honey,” said Stubbs.
Another method involves placing the burning leaves of a paraffin bush into a nest, forcing the bees away as they escape the acidic, paraffin smell.
Stubbs said that in Zululand small-scale farmers had been in the habit of harvesting trees growing in small woodlots when they were were young, getting poorer quality timber simply to get cash when times were hard. Honey allows them to let their trees grow longer.
Their training starts when they show they can make the veil, a smoker from an old paint tin, sew up a pair of gloves and mould a hive tool, often flavoured with their own innovations. They then move to beekeeping theory and practice and then finally a course on how to write a business plan.
For further details, visit www.africanhoneybee.co.za