#5 Blood, sweat & honey

beetogether6
3 aug 2017
4 minuten om te lezen

Hi dear reader, it’s another sunny morning in the dusty Turiani and therefore an ideal occasion to get some writing done! While my colleagues are out settling issues at the collection house, I’m here to provide you with some highlights and fun(ny) facts of the beginning of our fourth project week. (Wondering who is writing this blog? that’s a secret we’ll never tell, hihi.)

We left you at the end of last Friday, so let’s start this party with our weekend. Exceptionally, we had a special guest from Belgium, professor Wim Vanhaverbeke from the Uhasselt, who is the promotor of our partner Nicholaus. Before the arrival of Nico and Wim on Saturday noon, we used the beautiful morning (of which they say it has gold in the mouth) to do some finishing touches to the honey press and try out candles and wood polish made from local wax. Blissfully, both these products succeeded and will therefore be explained to the groups, accompanied by our home made ‘how to’-guide! Hooray, it seems like we’re fitting in perfectly with the local tradition of having multiple professions as we’re now becoming beekeepers, painters, carpenters ànd teachers.

After being reunited with Wim, it was time to tighten those shoes and work off some of our extra “ugali-kilo’s” by climbing the spectacular mountains of Turiani to visit the Kwelikweje group. (Just kidding, some of us were not coping to well with the ugali lately and were on a temporary snickers diet.) Of course, we first had a cozy and bumpy ride to the foot of the mountains with a total of ten people stuffed in our six person-jeep, but hey: what better way to get to know some of our Kwelikweje colleagues? The aim of the trip was to do a first inspection of all the hives to make a plan of action for a following visit, but we got a lot more than we bargained for. While ascending the mountains (which some of us did on their slippery slippers), we were blown away by the sunlit jungle-like surroundings and rippling rivers. We can, without a doubt, add it to our top three most beautiful experiences of the Tanzanian nature. So, multiple beehives and one stingless beehive later (yeah, indeed bees that don’t sting! What a dream.) our tired feet were back at the bottom. We were now ready to eat some meat (for a change) and get some sleep.

On Sunday, instead of behaving like good Christians and enjoying our day off, we visited a beekeeper with seventy hives, who was struggling to populate them. While the sun launched its rays onto our vulnerable Mzungu skins, we were discussing possible improvements when a high pitch tone suddenly made us silent. It was a bee-swarm! A cloud of black and yellow chaos that was working its way towards one of the hives. It was very impressive to see a beecolony making its way to a new home… After this excitement, we unwinded with a traditional masai bbq while broadening our knowledge (perhaps a little bit too much) on the masai culture.

Now the weekend was over, Wim and Nico headed to the North to work with stingless bees and we were again in charge of our own schedule. In order to make the most of our days, we had a fruitful group meeting and used the rest of the day to do finishing touches to the honey press and make preparations for the rest of the week. Fortunately, in the evening, we managed to convince some rather reluctant beekeepers to go to their hives and do some late night beekeeping. Since traditionally, hives in Tanzania are hung in trees to improve population and discourage thievery, there’s an extra dimension to beekeeping here! We chose a rather ‘low’ hive (hanging at 2 meters) and started getting the hive down. Two ripped suits and a few beestings later, the hive was back in place and we began to realize that high hanging hives were probably an overkill of adventure. Therefore, the next evening we went back together with a local team member to get a high hive down to a workable level. The rest of the day consisted of fixing our ripped suits, finally and successfully testing the honey press (woehoew!) and checking out some solutions for the thievery problem.

Up until now it sounds like a lot of beekeeping was going on, right? Don’t worry, we’re still managing our collection house which is making fast progress! The roof was under construction this week and the craftsmen finished it on Thursday. Which means that plastering can start soon.

Now the honey press was operational, we grabbed the opportunity to meet an enthusiastic Turiani beekeeping group to explain them some basic beekeeping and show them the use of the honey press. This session made us realise the importance of knowledge transfer and we are therefore planning a big training session in the collection house at the end of our stay (exciting right, we’ll keep you posted!).

That’s it from us until the middle of our fourth project week, stay tuned for updates on the collection house, our beekeeping activities, some more meat-eating and another trip in the Kwelikweje mountains in our next post!

Lots of love from Tanzania

The BeeTogether team