About friendly animals, wild animals and underestimated animals

We hope you all enjoyed our first blog post, so here we are with the next one. If you are in a hurry and you’re thinking: “maybe I’ll skip this one”, this won’t be the best decision. A lot happened since our last blog post and we can really say that our team will never be the same as before.

First things first: We’ll start with the safari. Because of the holidays in Tanzania from tuesday till thursday, Nico (our project partner at the Mzumbe university) said we could do a safari from tuesday till sunday, so we arranged one to Ruaha National Park and Udzungwa Mountains National Park. On tuesday we had to travel from Morogoro to Iringa. To get there, we took a few busses. Now we now travelling by bus is not the most safe thing to do in Tanzania. The bus driver drove incredibly fast and overtook every other car on the road, even if there were oncoming cars. After a trip of more than 8 hours, we reached Iringa, where we met our guide for the next days. We did a two day safari in Ruaha (and slept two nights in the park), then travelled a full day from Ruaha to Udzungwa, where we did some hiking to waterfalls while spotting monkeys. On sunday our driver brought us to Mikumi city where we had to take a bus back to Morogoro. To our happiness, our driver had fixed a taxi for us. Although we had to sit on two seats with our team and the car was filled with 15 persons, this was much more safe than our bustrip!

On our safari we saw 4 of the Big Five (there are no Rhinos in Ruaha), impala’s and other animals and an incredibly beautiful night sky (the picture shows only 1% of the beauty we saw at the park). We now know an elephant can pee up to 5 litres, weighs about 7 tonnes, has a skin of 8 cm and can live up to 70 years. They have no natural enemies and that’s why our guide says this is the real king, and not lions.

After beeing a real tourist, we got back to work. Nico fixed an appointment at the Sokoine University (an agricultural university) in Morogoro. Here we talked to Prof. Kimaro, who has a lot of experience in beekeeping and setting up beekeeping projects. He checked te almost completed beehive we took from the carpenters and said it was a good design. He also gave us some tips and tricks about beekeeping. In the afternoon Nico took us to the first beekeeping group to harvest some honey. We all dressed up with our beekeeping suits and waited for the two beekeepers out of a group of eight to come. We explained some basic beekeeping skills like lighting up a smoker and its purpose (calming down the bees), how to harvest a honeycomb and some other basic stuff. After that, we thought we were ready to harvest some honey. We took the first beehive outside the little building where it was placed and puffed some smoke at the entrance, we noticed the smoked didn’t really calm down the bees. After that we lifted the lid from the hive. The air began to fill with thousands of bees. A few seconds later, there was a scream: about hundred bees found some naked skin at Milan’s legs. The bees were stinging him and some kind of panic wave spreaded. We started to move away from the hive as more and more bees came out. One starting beekeeper put the lid back on the hive together with Jonas and then ran away. After an hour of trying to get rid of the bees and alerting the village people for aggressive bees, we could ride back to the campus. Nico, the beekeepers and two other persons put on some more clothes and went back to the hive at night (although we said it wasn’t a good idea). Afterwards we heard they had cut out every comb of the hive, even combs with larvae and eggs.

To conclude this terrible day: Milan had about 50 stings on his legs, Jonas about 20 stings, the girls luckily got away without any stings (the picture of the gloves show some bee stings (the black dots). We also lost two bee colonies and we had a harvest of poor quality honey. We now know we underestimated the African bees. We felt stupid, because the beekeepers expected a lot from us that day and we failed. We’re sure this memory will be forever in our minds.

The next day (12th of July), we met Nico at 8u30 at his office. Milan was sick as a reaction on the big amount of bee venom. So Faith, Femke and Jonas went toghether with Nico to the second beekeeping group. They said they had beehives since 2014, but only harvested once. During the harvest, the bees could get into their beekeeping suits. I think they had experienced the same thing we did the day before. Since then, they were affraid of harvesting. We were convinced that the focus of our project was no longer only producing decent hives, but also dealing with aggressive bees. In the afternoon, we showed one of the beekeepers of the first group how to process the harvested honey (although there were more combs with larvae than with honey). The picture with one comb shows that even combs with brood (larvae and eggs) were harvested. The picture on the right is a simple sieve made with two buckets to make sure there aren’t too many impurities in the honey.

Today we started to gather more information and started writing a basic beekeeping manual. We also went back to the beekeeper to tell him about the process of melting wax. In the next days, we will finish the beekeeping manual (translated by Faith in Swahili), give some basic lessons in beekeeping and go back for a second harvest. After the last few days, we realised that live isn’t always as sweet as honey. Sometimes you have to be stung before getting to the sweet liquid gold.

As I already mentioned in the beginning, a lot happened the last few days. But this won’t stop us from trying to succeed!

Sweet (but stingy) greetings, Faith, Femke, Jonas and Milan