Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Bees Abroad - Episode 29

So we are back here for another live stream, a new podcast, and we have a brand new name actually, which is Let's Talk Bees. So I have the team from Bees Abroad here today for the very first Let's Talk Bees podcast. We have Dawn and Katerina, and I'd like to welcome you now to introduce yourself. Should we go with Katerina first?

Yeah, sure. Um, hi Lawrence, hi to everybody. I'm Katerina Procopio. For those who find the name strange, it's from Cyprus, which is where I'm from. I'm the CEO of Bees Abroad and really happy to be here. Thanks, Laurence, for the opportunity.

Yes, thank you, Laurence. My name's Dawn Williamson. I'm the— a partnership manager with Bees Abroad in Rwanda, and I'm working with projects in Rwanda. I've also worked with some projects in Ghana before.

Excellent, thanks Dawn, thanks Katerina. You're very welcome on board the stream, on board the podcast, and I absolutely love having guests because it means that I get to drink my tea a lot more and let other people do the talking. So today we're going to ask you a few questions, and people will come in and they will likely ask some questions as well through the chat. So if you have a question, anything to do with bees abroad, you can pop it in the chat and hopefully we'll get through them all. And then I have some pre-prepared questions as well. So we will jump straight in. And what I'm planning to do on this one as well is I will pop the questions into the chat like this, and then we can show them up there. So the first question, which will go to Katerina, is what is Bees Abroad?

Right. Well, Bees Abroad, maybe if I talk about the story first, it's the perfect example of a ripple effect. So just to give you a bit of a background, Brian Dirk, one of the founders of Bees Abroad, was some 30 years ago invited to go to Kenya and train a group of people in beekeeping. So while he was out there, he found out that there was a huge demand locally as the country was developing economically and not enough supply. And there were a lot of people that needed an additional income, and beekeeping was something that they didn't really know. So when he went back to the UK, he got another beekeeper to come out next time with him, John Holm, who both of these two are still with us actually as volunteers. Fast forward, Bees Abroad of course then had more beekeepers join to help, and it's now a registered UK charity. So what we do actually is we use the skill of beekeeping. We train communities and groups in communities in beekeeping with the intention to empower them, so for them to be able to continue a sustainable practice, to have a better quality of life through that, but also to do it in a sustainable manner in respect with the bees and the environment.

Excellent. So the next question that I've got that follows on from that is, what are your roles in Bees Abroad? And it's quicker that I can actually paste it into the comments there, so there we go. The next question And we'll get Dawn to answer this first. So what are your roles like? What do you do for the charity? We'll go with Dawn first.

Yeah, I'm a partnership manager. I'm a volunteer. Partnership managers work either on a group of projects within a part of a country or on a whole country. Because Rwanda is small, I'm the partnership manager for the whole country. It is quite a small country, it's easy to get across. What we do, we liaise with people within that country. If somebody wants to, in Rwanda, wants to become involved with Bees Abroad, they write an application to us, and that will then come to me as a partnership manager to assess. I get in contact with them and we work out whether it's the type of project that Bees Abroad wants to follow up with. As a partnership manager, that's my role. I might then go out to country and meet them, or if we're already working close by, I might ask my counterpart, the partnership manager in Rwanda, to go and have a look, and then if we think it's a project we can work with, we work up a plan, a budget, usually over 3 to 5 years, because as you all know, beekeeping isn't a quick fix, and we then go on from there. And as the partnership manager, I'll follow the project through, and with modern technology, you know, people out there have WhatsApp as well and Zoom, and we can talk to them out there, follow what's happening, visit when necessary. Although increasingly we're trying to work from this country and have the Rwandans, and the same in the other countries, in place doing the work out there. And then once it's successful, we'll, you know, do a final analysis of what's going on in the country, and then the people out there will be able to continue without us.

Excellent, thanks Dawn. It's interesting you say about the technology there, I should note at this point I'm obviously in Wales, Dawn is in Helsinki, and Katarina is in Bosnia, so we're kind of all coming together, aren't we? And we've got people from all over the world dialling into the stream now. So Katarina, would you like to introduce your role in Bees Abroad?

Sure, thank you. I started off also as a volunteer, as a partnership manager, just as Dawn. I've been in the role of CEO for just over a year now. But to be very honest, with any small organization, and I'm sure Laurence, you have the same as what I'm about to say, CEO doesn't mean anything other than you do everything that's needed for the organization to keep going and to keep doing what it you know, what the vision is. So my role actually is to make sure that whatever challenges we face, we can manage them, whatever foundations we need to put in place in order to continue our work, those are put in place, and also to just bring in more, more opportunities and tools that will enable us to do more with the little we have. So that's kind of maybe in a nutshell of every single CEO's role. But of course there's the liaison with the board of trustees as well.

It sounds like a really rewarding role, like, for both of you, but I can imagine, yeah, with you being CEO doing absolutely everything, I bet like you're making the tea for the meeting and cleaning up afterwards at the end and then doing all of the leading through the meeting as well. Excellent, right, I'm going to jump on to the next question then, which is— this is working quite well with the questions on there— so tell us about some of your projects and I'll leave it to kind of you to choose what projects you would like to talk about. But yeah, tell us more about some of like the specific projects that you're getting involved in.

Um, I think I, I, I hate this question, Laurence, because, uh, there's too many projects to pick from. Um, uh, just to give you an idea, there's about 20 open projects at the moment with us, so I, I wouldn't know which one to pick. But, um, perhaps maybe what I will do instead of talking about a specific one is talk about generally the range of projects we have, how we, how we pick the communities we work with, maybe. So we have, since we're small with very little resources, one of the main things is that we, we don't want to spread ourselves too thin. So we did make a conscious effort to strategically pick 6 countries. So we have projects in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania in East Africa. And then we also have projects in Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria as our core. Of course, we have some satellite projects in Rwanda, like the one that Dawn will share with us, but also in Nepal. The groups we work with will have to be always individuals that would not otherwise have had the opportunity to gain this skill or for someone to give them enough attention and effort and mentorship to improve the skill to the point where they can maybe have additional income and make a difference in their own livelihood. So we do have projects with individuals in Sierra Leone, for example. We have a very, to my heart, close project called Bee Farmers on Crutches. So for those who might not know, Sierra Leone has just come out of a very bad war, civil war, and one of the punishments was very much to cut people's limbs. So there's a lot of people that are single-leg amputees, for example, or might be missing one arm. So the project in Sierra Leone is very much about adapting beekeeping and the training so that individuals with that disability, the physical disability, are able to also do beekeeping. So that's a project where, again, beyond just the the beekeeping for producing honey. It's a project where we, you know, we work with a local partner that also trains them in football, believe it or not, and in farming. So we want to create a community that gives them that self-confidence and changes the mindset of what they can and cannot do, gives them that self-esteem that they can go and do more. Similarly, we work with a group of women in Tanzania who have albinism. And traditionally, individuals with albinism in Tanzania are kicked out of the community, ostracized, and really don't have much prospects. So what we're doing with the group of women, we have trained them in producing value-added products using beeswax, for example, also buying honey from the beekeepers that we've also trained and our partners have trained. So they buy the honey and bottle it. To sell. And the idea there is that we're building with them a social enterprise. So it will be their own business that they run as an NGO, it's registered as an NGO. And that will allow them then to train more women with albinism and bring more people in within the enterprise. So these are just 2 examples of projects that I believe have made a big difference to individuals' lives. But they're not exhaustive. I mean, if questions come up, I can share a lot more. So maybe I'll just pass on to Dawn. And again, if questions come along, we can talk about others.

Yeah, thanks, Katerina.

Go ahead, Dawn.

Well, I was just going to talk about one specific project in Rwanda. We've been involved with a school for deaf children. Again, it's a very marginalized group, these children. It's a private school because there was nothing similar working within the state structure, so it gets funding from all over the world. They teach children sign language, Rwandan Sign Language, and basically follow the school curriculum but also give them training so that when they leave the school, they've got something they can do. Hairdressing, tailoring, carpentry, that type of thing, and when we came to them the idea was that some of them would learn to become beekeepers, and this was something that when they left the school they'd be able to go back to their home villages and have something that they show that they could do. It would give them some respect in their communities and also a way to earn money. So we've trained some of the teachers in the school, and quite a lot of the students get some introduction to beekeeping. This also includes farming, because of course the idea of the farming and the beekeeping, it's very closely linked with the pollination, and also increasingly with use of pesticides. Any of these students that are really keen, they then get extra training after school, training and work in the school apiary, and by the end of the final year we tend to have 3 or 4 students who decide they want to become beekeepers, and Bees Abroad then supports those students when they go back to their communities. We provide them with, in fact, 2 sets of protective clothing so that they've got a friend or a family member who can do the beekeeping with them, because we all know that beekeeping is best done in pairs. We give them a couple of hives, and so that when they, as soon as they graduate, they can take this equipment back with them to the village. The teachers have been to the village to explain to the parents and the local community what's going to happen, so they've got support, and then we carry on giving them follow-up support over the next 2 to 3 years by the teacher we part from the teacher and the teacher returns to the village. So it's an unusual project in that there's no real end to it, because of course we have a continual stream of students each year, and these abroad will have to work out in the end how that's going to happen. But we're now in our 4th year, and so far we've had— it's 3 to 4 students each year go through this system, and we are still supporting the first ones Because actually we're getting better each time how we support the students and decide what's the best way to proceed with it, and most, nearly all the students who have gone through have carried on with beekeeping, and if you think how in this country that you can run beekeeping courses through the winter and how few of those people will actually be beekeepers in 2 or 3 years' time, I think we're doing quite well.

I think you're both doing an amazing job. What really strikes me as a nice thing is the fact that you've got all of these different types of projects, and I love the fact that, you know, you've got some projects that are for bees and for beekeeping, and then you've got some that are kind of processing like the beekeeping products and like people working together, charities and different projects working together, kind of, but all linked back by bees. I thought that was really nice. So I've got some more questions in here, but I'm just going to add this question in from Mem. because it's quite relevant where you live, isn't it? So do you want to answer that? I'll ask it. It says, have you got any projects in Cyprus, and would you go to the Turkish side and promote your charity and maybe bring both sides together? Is that something kind of—

any work in that region as Bees Abroad? No, but I have been talking to the local beekeeping association, uh, the Cyprus Beekeepers Association, and, um, I've been trying to get them engaged in more charitable work and more sort of cooperative work. It's a communication that I need to build on, to be honest. It's very hard to get a hold of them and to get them to organize themselves. But also, I think one of the other issues I found is language. They don't speak— they don't all speak English, so they would have to have a common language somehow to get that going. But I think it's a very good initiative, and I'll definitely pursue it. Mem Mustafa, maybe that'd be nice to share also communication onwards, if that's something you want to be involved in. Yeah.

I'm sure he will be. Great question, Mem. So the next question is, and you probably get asked this one a lot, is what is the best thing about being involved in Bees Abroad, if you want to kind of give us your highlights? And we'll go to Dawn first for this one.

I really think it's 2 things. One, it's the bees themselves. Beekeeping is quite different in Africa, I mean Africa is a huge continent so it does vary a lot around the continent, so there's that sort of scientific interest of what is the best way to keep bees, you know, and how can we produce the honey and how can we process it, and there's all the technical side to it, but there's also the people involved, and it's the people in the UK and Cyprus within Bees Abroad, but also the people, the friends you make, the friends I've made in Rwanda. I mean, at times in Rwanda you think, you know, is this really worth going? But it's the people you know, you get to become part of their lives, they know you, and it's a very unusual way to be able to get to know people. It's a very privileged way. You go out into very rural areas, you go into their homes and part of their lives, and it's something that you're not— you're very rarely able to do in other ways.

It does sound really, really rewarding. Katerina, what's the best thing for you about being involved?

I think it's very similar to what Don said, just the people. When you go out there and you spend time and you talk to them and you get to be part of their lives and to see that what you're doing, which when you're far away might not seem much, you know, when you're miles and miles away and all you're doing is kind of just, you know, making sure you get a report or making sure things are delivered or, you know, making sure you're helping with challenges. You're not sure that what you're doing means a lot until you get there. And then you see that it's just an absolute— it's a life-changing skill for them. It just opens so many doors. And I mean, I'll share a story if I may, just very quickly.

Of course.

So when I went out there, one of the things I always like to do is I ask, what do the individuals do with the money after they've sold honey, right? So I always ask this question and then you always get different answers. So some groups will say, we use the money to buy jerry cans so we can go more easily to get water, for example, from the river. Other groups might say, we bought a pig, a female pig as a group, and every time it had piglets, one of the group members was able to get the piglet. So there's like an investment there. But then you hear a few other things like, oh, I used the money to buy a hoe, and then I dug the soil, made bricks, I sold the bricks, and with the money from the bricks, I paid for my child's education.

Wow.

So you see that it's not about it's not an end. What we do is actually the means to something bigger for them. And you hear that over and over, these stories, and all you have to do is sit down and talk to people when you're there and you just see it and you see how excited they are. And that actually makes the biggest difference. And then, sorry, to just go a little bit also to the side of the bees and the farming. You know, at first there is a big worry that, okay, are we encouraging them to do something for monetary reasons? So will they maybe— there's a risk that maybe they don't appreciate and respect that this is also part of the ecosystem they're in and they need to obviously not overdo it. But many years later, you go, you revisit, you see that they have not increased necessarily the number of beehives in an apiary, it's still to the average of maybe 10 or whatever is possible. They realize that. But then what we see is that they become advocates, right? So then they become— they go talk to farmers and they tell them, they try to convince them not to use pesticides, or they try to convince them not to do slash and burn, or they become then mediators. in promoting better farming, better protection for bees, and so on. And this, I think, for me is part of the magic of what we do, because, you know, at the end of the day, we will at some point, like Dawn said earlier, move away. And to see that people keep doing this is just— it means that we're doing something right. And that gives, at least to me, it just makes me feel that— It's all worthwhile.

Oh, definitely. And it must be so nice to kind of see that you're not going and just giving some charity and they're taking it and just saying thank you very much. Like, they're building on it, aren't they? They're taking the honey, they're investing it, and they're doing different things. That must be really, really nice to see. Um, the next question that I've got— and obviously as a beekeeper, like, I'm genuinely interested in terms of the, the kind of how the beekeeping is different over there. So let me get that question up here, and what I will do at this point is I will bring up some questions. So I think, I think, Dawn, you're going to run us through a presentation here, so I'll get the presentation up for you and I'll try and keep up. If I'm going too fast or too slow, just let me know. Everyone should be able to see that now, but how is the beekeeping different then?

Well, the beekeeping is different between the UK and Africa, and also within Africa, particularly between West Africa and East Africa. One of the main things is, in this country of course, bees collect their stores so that they can get through the winter. In Africa, they collect their stores so that they can get through the rainy season, so that's the main difference, and in many parts of Africa you have 2 rainy seasons, so you might get 2 harvests, so there are quite, there are various differences within that. The other difference within East and West Africa is, in West Africa, I'm being very generalistic, coming basically from the work we've done in Ghana, is that you have a lot of honey hunters. There's not real tradition of hives, so in each village there'd be a honey hunter who would go out, they'd know where there were bees living wild, and they'd collect the honey from there, whereas in East Africa there's more of a tradition of using hives. And this example that you're going through now— could you go back a couple, is that possible?

As I was flicking through, I was thinking I'm going too quickly.

This example has come from Uganda, and these are the same hives that we're using in the deaf school in Rwanda. So the hives are being made by local people using local materials. So they're quite big, They've got the long sort of raffia stems and then there's some type of grass, whatever is local to it, woven in and out, and then they're mudded on the outside, so you see the 3 stages of construction there. If we go to the next one, at one end, as shown on the left-hand photo here, there'll be 2 small holes, sometimes 3, and that's where the bees will go in, so they'd be a bit like the hole, the gap we'd have in the nationals or whatever we're using in the UK. At the other end you've got a much bigger hole and that would have a bung in it, which is in the next photo. The big thing on this is the harvesting of course, because you harvest from the opposite end to where the bees have gone in, on the assumption that they're going to put their brood at the entrance where they enter, and as they go further back in the hive you'll get more of the honey, And in the middle, of course, you're going to get combs which are a mix of the two. So when you want— can we go on to the next one? This is the bung that will go in the far end, so when you want to harvest, you pull this bung out and you put your hand in and you'll pull out the combs from the end. So the first, in theory, is the first combs that come out will be full of honey, and then you'll get a mixture of honey and brood, and then the far ones will be brood, and really you should only be taking the combs which have got the honey, although we have found that actually, you know, the brood is highly nutritious, and in some areas where the colonies are really strong, people can get away with eating some of the brood. In areas where the colonies aren't so strong, we're putting a lot of emphasis on just don't take too much honey, but it's a very destructive process. Many of the areas that Bees Abroad work, we're actually using these Kenyan top bar hives. I've actually got 2 of these in my own garden that we use, so basically it's a box, not quite rectangular, with bars across the top. The bars don't have frames in them, they're just simply bars, so the bees will go in the holes at one end, which you can see on here. Again, they'll fill from one end, so you've got the brood at one end and the honey at the other, but you can lift those top bars off and have a look and see what's there, so it makes it much more easier than the sort of the raffia cylindrical hives that we saw before. These cost more money than the raffia hives, but they last longer, and in Rwanda we've tried to do a study as to which is better, because people want modern hives, which often means nationals, but nationals are very hard to make, hard to maintain, and of course you haven't got any foundation, so we encourage top bar hives or the local hives if there are local hives around.

So I'll just jump in there, Dawn, so we've got a question on that saying, do these hives make swarming more common? So do you want to just touch on kind of like swarming, does it exist, How do they manage it? What do you have to do?

Yes, there is swarming, and often there's more swarming than we get in the UK. I don't think swarming is any more common in any particular hive. One of the issues is that you can get absconding, so whereas some people might look in their hives, you know, once a week in order to get rid of queen cells, if you did that with an African bee, the whole lot would just decide to leave. You know, we don't want any interference, we're going. So you don't do that, you know, you just leave. Once you've got a colony in there, you just leave it. The only time you go in is when you go in to harvest your honey. So no, I don't think it makes a great deal of difference on the swarming. You have to— the bees are smaller, they are different, and you can't interfere with them.

A question that I've got is, like, you hear about Africanized bees, like, do you encounter that over there? Like, what's the bee's temperament like?

Well, these are African bees, they're not the Africanized which are a crossbreed, they definitely can be angrier. When you interfere with a hive, instead of say 10 coming out, you'll get thousands coming out. Instead of, if you go under a tree in this country, you know, within a few minutes they'll all have gone back, where it can take you 45 minutes to get rid of the bees. So they come out in greater numbers so that if they are really angry and you get stung, then the consequences are far greater.

Goodness.

Particularly when you're taking the honey, so you have to be very well dressed. But saying that, in Rwanda, where people have been keeping bees for hundreds if not thousands of years, traditionally they keep the hives up in the tree, they climb up the tree almost naked, to take the honey on the basis that if they see a bee on them, it's easier to get rid of it than if it's crawling up underneath your clothes. So they'd go at night when the bees aren't out, collect the honey that way, and hope to get down from the tree before there's any trouble.

Wow, that sounds scary. So a question from Louise, they're saying, is there any treatment for varroa? And I guess the kind of preceding question would be like, is there varroa there? Is it a problem? Do you do anything for it, or is it just not something that you encounter?

No, I don't know what Caterina has found, but we've not really encountered it before. We've had small hive beetle occasionally, but generally the bees, as long as it's a fairly strong colony, the bees can get rid of the small hive beetle. Ants seem to be a bigger problem than anything else.

Yeah, it's an interesting one. Sorry, Caterina, you can answer the next one here, which is, how do you inspect and manage pests and diseases in the basket hive? So do you want to tell us a bit about the ants?

Well, I think I don't have as much experience in the traditional beehive, the basket one, so maybe Dawn can answer that, but for the top bar, you do it as you would normally with your National or your Langstroth or whatever you use. But when it comes to something like ants, which is the biggest pest, I agree with Dawn, that's the one we see most often, there are measures that you can put in place, like put buckets with oil in them or something and put the hive stands in those buckets, or there's all sorts of ways. But do you have experience, do you know about the basket hives and how the management is?

There really isn't a problem with them, that there will be things living in the basket hives, I mean, just as You take a roof off a, um, in this country and you'll find earwigs underneath it, but, um, they, they don't really seem to get diseases and pests. One thing is we're not interfering with them a great deal, you know, it's a very natural way of dealing with them, they're not under a great deal of stress and they seem to cope very well.

Cool, so I'll flick through the rest of the presentation if you, if you want to say anything about it, there's only, there's only a few more slides. Just give us some kind of examples of the people that you're working with there. Is there anything more to say about these? And then we'll jump on to the next question in a little bit. I'm guessing that's some honey. Wow, there's quite a lot of honey there, isn't there? What does the honey taste like?

Well, it's like here, it depends where they're getting the honey from. In Ghana, where we've been working, there's quite a lot of oil palm. It tastes like cough medicine, but in other parts it tastes very nice.

Oh nice. I've had some, I've had some Zambian honey before and it was, it was a bit cough medicine-y, but they said, yeah, they had, it was 2 different harvests and one was really dark, like literally black. And then there was one that was like a little bit lighter but still pretty dark. Is it, is that, is that generally what you get or is it really like you get a huge variety of colors? Yeah.

It is. It, it, it really varies. It really depends because as well, a lot of the people we work with, um, are also farmers. So, you know, they might have coffee plantations and the bees will, you know, the beehives will be amongst the plantation, or they might have— sometimes they have avocados, you know, they'll have all sorts. So it really depends on what's around. The honey I had from Uganda was very floral, from the Rwenzori Mountains, and they have a lot of coffee there.

Nice, right? So the next question is the second to last question. We'll show some more of the photos as well. But so you've maybe touched on it before, but why is beekeeping so important for these communities? And we'll go with Katerina first.

I think the biggest reason is because it, you know, it gives them a means to continue doing something for themselves and grow it if they wish to do so. So, and because we work with, you know, marginalized groups, as we mentioned, the importance goes beyond the economic. It's about them having a role in the community, them being able to influence their surrounding and their environment and their own life, of course. The group you see here, for example, these are women on Kome Island in Tanzania. Traditionally, women— it's a very male-dominated island in terms of money-producing activities, and the men do fishing. But Lake Victoria has actually been overfished, so income has been a lot less, and these women are left very often to fend for themselves and their families. So again, what we did there is we trained them in beekeeping, specifically women, and we gave them equipment and we showed them how to maintain apiaries, and then we also created a link for them an access to the Mwanza market, the near market where they can potentially sell the honey they produce. So then what this means, apart from the fact that now they have their own money, they're also making decisions at home, they're also being able to choose how the money is spent in their household. And then as women, they're able to together come up with other projects, other entrepreneurial work that they might want to do. So the importance is is very much about that empowerment that we keep mentioning, about allowing them to do something that is within their own control and skillset, and they can build on it at their own pace.

Yeah.

It's really interesting what you say about like the empowering. And again, it's the beekeeping is just that short, small step at the beginning, and then it just leads onto so much more, doesn't it? I love the look of not only this guy, he looks really happy, but his top bar hive in the tree looks really, really cool. isn't it? Do you want to add anything to that, Dawn, as to why it's so important for the communities?

Yeah, well, I think it's extremely different across— we work with a lot of different communities, and people want to take on beekeeping for different reasons. I mean, some of them, it's just simply they're subsistence farmers, and anything to earn a bit more money, you know, to go into the family pot, it's really important. And then other ones, it's, you know, there's a real social reason for it. One of the first projects we had in Rwanda, it was part of a much wider project that had brought people together after the genocide, so there's a huge range of reasons. I mean, if you think Africa is, it's a vast country with, you know, huge numbers of different people, different cultures, and people want to do beekeeping for a lot of different reasons.

I'm just kind of like in awe at some of these pictures here.

This one is one of our students from the deaf school when he's gone back, that's working with his mother I think back in his home village.

Oh wow, it must be so nice to kind of follow the story of them like as you're helping them but then also—

This one here is the same one, this is the students in their school uniform and we went into the local village to buy the kit we needed to build the top bar hives, so we had to buy a saw and nails and the wood, and then we bought, you know, the equipment so that we could do some processing of the wax. So there was a whole lot to it for the students, you know, in addition to just keeping bees, you know, they learned about farming, they learned about marketing and money and, you know, carpentry, and Huge range of skills that you need as a beekeeper.

It's really interesting, so I'll flick through some more of the pictures here. All I'm thinking, and kind of while I'm looking at it there, is, is there any scope— and I guess it would be really difficult to manage, but you know, you've got all of these different honeys and all of these different projects, and I'm guessing that they can sell their honey in Africa, but they could probably sell it for a huge amount more in the UK. Has that ever been explored, or I'm guessing it would be really difficult to do?

We have actually, we have really tried. What's difficult is of course certification and passing the tests required. The amount of honey they produce, the volume is not— I think there's a question as well I can see, the expected average yield is not as high as what we see in in Western countries per year. And given that the local market has already much more demand than there is supply, we have not been able to justify the cost of passing the tests and the certifications to sell a small volume abroad. What we do sometimes is we do bring honey from the countries we're in and we organize honey tastings Yes, we're very lucky. We have an ambassador, Sarah Wyndham-Lewis. She's a honey sommelier and she helps us with a lot of the honey tasting events we do. So we try to, of course, raise awareness of the honey, but it's actually very difficult in practice to export.

Yeah, and as you were saying that, I was thinking, yeah, it's a bit of a silly idea because, of course, you want the local community to to benefit from that honey, and if they've got the demand for it, then it would be crazy to bring it over here. But I love the idea of a honey tasting event of all of these different kind of really unique honeys. That would be great. It leads me on to my final question, which somebody else, Adam in fact, Adam Goodall, who helps me with my blogs, has asked, which is— so he says, good evening, and then he just says, how can we help? So like, for anybody watching this kind of either now or in the future, like, what can people do? Like, what initiatives do you have?

How do you want people to support Well, we are a majority volunteer-led charity, so we welcome anyone who wants to help us out with what we're doing in the capacity they can.

We have—

all our projects are managed by volunteer partnership managers, so anyone who wishes to get involved in a project, we would love to have more volunteers do that for us because that means we can potentially take on more projects. At the moment, of course, we can only take as many as we have people to manage them. So that would be one that would be huge for us. Of course, for those who perhaps cannot do that, a donation is something that you can do. There's no, of course, strings attached to that. But Lawrence, you have done something which I think is huge for us. You have twinned your hives with actually Dawn's project in Rwanda. So if anyone wants to join the hive twinning like you have done, that would also be really exciting for us because what it is, it's we're trying to build a community, a global community of people who believe in supporting individuals in becoming beekeepers and linking them to those participants in our projects. So that would be for us one huge way to help out. Actually, Lawrence, I don't know if you know this, but you're not the only twin. We've got another individual, and we've also got the Hilton Hotel in London that's twinned with Rwanda.

Wow.

So, you know, you're part of that family. So what we're trying to build is a community of people who people and businesses, I suppose, that twin with the projects. And, you know, they can get together. So we hope in the future to bring you and the other twins closer to the projects through meeting the partnership managers, talking more about the projects in depth, having those sort of smaller updates that not everybody gets. And hopefully at one time, at one point, get you to meet participants whether it's online or in person, however we can do it. But that's another way that people can also help us because then it's this commitment that, you know, you believe also in what we're doing and in the potential of the people we work with.

It's great. I love the idea of the hive twinning. As soon as I saw it, I thought, definitely going to be up for doing that because it's just nice to connect, isn't it? You think like, I don't have a connection with these people because they live so far away and like obviously far less privileged, but we keep bees, like we're beekeepers. So it's nice, just like we've got that connection, that real connection there. Um, I've said previously, I, I'd love to come out and do some filming at some point. I think it would be really good and just really like eye-opening, but very interesting for, for everybody on YouTube to, to see that. Um, is there anything you want to add, Dawn? I've got a couple of questions in the chat, uh, just unrelated about beekeeping things, but in terms of how can people help specifically you maybe, or your project? Is there anything additional they could do?

Well, I just reiterate what Catharina said about partnership managers. You know, we do have more— quite a lot of people who write in and say, you know, they'd like support from Bees Abroad, but we are limited by the number of people who— the partnership managers we have. So anybody who is a beekeeper and would like to learn about beekeeping, and you'll get a lot of support, you can go out to a project with a current partnership manager and learn what to do, that would be a really good way of doing it.

Excellent, so just Walker Bee Ranch has asked, what is twinning? So do you want to just kind of like go into a little bit more detail of what the twinning programme is and like how people can sign up for it?

Yes, so you can go on our website and see that in hive twinning, but essentially what you do is you choose a project from projects that are available for twinning. And as individuals, there is a certain price per hive that you can twin with on an annual basis, and then throughout the year you get those very personal updates exclusive updates from what's going on with the project that you've twinned with. You get a certificate. We do have some other goodies as well, small ones that you get, but also we have events that we organize that are more personal, more inclusive of the twins and whoever is involved in the project, whether it's the participants or the partnership manager. And that way you can get involved involved and you can know a lot more and much closer about the project that we're doing and know that you're also supporting it. And so at the end of sort of the year, you would have not just donated but also been part of that journey that the individuals go through as they're being trained, as their hives are being put up, as they get colonized, and so on.

Excellent. And so I definitely recommend it. Like I say, I've twinned one of my hives with, with the people over in Rwanda, and I really would recommend it. Jay cuts straight to it though. He says, where do we send the money? What is the website? Is it beesabroad.com?

Yeah, it's beesabroad.org.uk.

.org.uk. So there you go, beesabroad.org.uk, and you can do the hive twinning there, you can donate there, and I think you can volunteer there as well. Is that right?

Absolutely, yeah. And, um, you can also always contact us if you have any questions. It's just info@beesabroad.org.uk. So if you have any questions or ideas, you know, and you want to help us a different way, we're just a, we're just a small team and it's very easy to get to know all of us if you wanted to. So do reach out if you want to.

Yeah, I'm just scrolling back to Mem's comment there saying he'd like to introduce you to a group that would potentially be interested. So there you go, it's info@beesaboard.com.

.org.uk.

I got it wrong the second time as well, it's .org.uk, but people will remember it now because I definitely didn't remember it. Right, so there's a couple of bee-related questions here before we finish. So Hazelmere Honey says, what are the expected average yields of the different types of hives? Do you want to answer that one, Joel?

Yeah, the top bar hives will yield less than something like a National or a Langstroth, and the local cylindrical hives generally yield less than that again, but it does depend on the size. Some of the ones in the photos were quite large, sometimes they're quite small, And so it does depend on the size of the hive. The main thing is, I mean, just as in this country, it's how good is the forage and how good has the year been. So the yield is less than you get here for whatever reason, but it is extremely variable, and I do know in Rwanda that the yields have dropped significantly over the last 10 years, because a lot of the forest has been cut down, it's a hugely overpopulated country, and they've got a lot of problems with pests and diseases in agriculture, and pesticides are really reducing the size of the colonies, which is reducing the size of the yields. So I think it's very difficult to give an answer to the yield, except it will be less than you would expect to get in Britain.

Yeah, it's good to kind of just just to gauge that. Sorry, Katerina, were you going to say something?

I was just going to say, in Uganda, the numbers we're seeing are between 10 and 15 kilograms per year per hive. So that's roughly the amount. But I think what is a much better picture to think about is we've done a few estimates, you know, And 5 beehives in Uganda will earn you enough honey and money from that to send the kid to school. So to give you just an idea of the value of the honey yield that you can get. And there has been a time where honey was actually, I think in Nigeria, more expensive than oil. It is a valuable commodity.

It is a very, very valuable Yeah, you can get as much, honey costs about the same as it does in Britain, and if you think that people's, these people's income is a fraction of what you earn, so yes, 5 hives getting your 10 kilos, it makes a huge difference to a family's income.

Yeah, it must make a real, real big difference. There's another question here from Hazelmere Honey, and it's a really interesting one. So saying, do you get many entries into the National Honey Show? He says that he believes that there's a class open to everyone across the globe. Has that ever happened? Have you ever brought some back for judging or testing? Oh, you have? Okay, Katerina, go on.

Do you want to tell us about it? Yes, I think our Sierra Leone honey has got an award in the National Honey Show. So there is, I believe, a charity section that we do try to enter, and we did get an award for the Sierra Leone one last year. Yeah.

It's— I'm just going to put this one up here saying about 5 hives for a school year is mind-blowing. It really is. You definitely need to do more of the honey tasting, like doing it with like maybe say like at the National Honey Show and just taking people out for an hour and just tasting some of the different honeys and charging people for it. I think people will pay really good money for that. And like while you're doing the honey tasting, you could be talking about kind of like what you do and how people can help But I do like, in terms of a money generation activity, like, it wouldn't take— you only need a jar of each honey to do it. And, and the range, I can just imagine, like, you could have 30 different types of honey there, couldn't you? I, I— if you do it, I'll be there. I'll be number one on the list.

We'll let you know. We'll let you know when we organize one. But have you ever tried to bring, uh, honey over from in Suitcase that's not properly sealed in the factory, it could mess up your whole bag.

Yeah, we've done it, we've given talks at places and done fundraising, and I've got a selection of honey from a few countries, and we often do, you know, get a little McDonald's stick and people can try, well, we've got 6 or 7 different honeys, I think, I think it'd be really, really good.

And just, and just talking about like the, the honey, the beehives where it's come from, the different forage that's available out there, like it's— you're kind of like talking about it and tasting it at the same time. I think it'd be really good, and I do think people would pay a decent amount of money to do that. So I think it would help with money generation. I've just popped that up there from Walker Bee Ranch as well, saying he will share it. I would say to anybody who's watching it now or later on, you You know, if you can share it as much as you possibly can, it's just good to get the word out there. Um, so we've come to the end. I've really enjoyed that. Like, it is absolutely amazing what you do. Keep up the really good work. Have you, have you both got kind of anything else you'd like to add?

No, just a very big thank you again, Laurence. Uh, great chat and also great questions that have come through.

Yes, thank you. Thank you for the opportunity.

No worries, we will definitely speak again soon, but I will, I will close the stream there for now, and I'll see you all soon.