Exploring Beekeeping and Honey Production in Nigeria and Ethiopia

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Nigeria

Rows of yam mounds and mud-walled little houses fly past us as we speed along the narrow dirt trail. Our little convoy of four motorbikes, each with a driver and passenger, occasionally slows to go around the skinny white cows with their huge horns. Farmers look up from maintaining their red-brown yam mounds and wave as we go past. Women in brightly-colored dresses, with loads upon their head bound for market, stand aside in the dappled shade as we pass, and give us friendly smiles. If Nigeria could be boiled down to an abstract general impression, that would be it – rows and rows of yam mounds made of red mud, the verdant green trees, and smiles under astonishing loads carried on heads.

After about twenty minutes the land around us rises into mountainous hills, and the yam fields give way to rocks and scraggly trees. Up and up we go, at times having to get off the motorbikes and walk up particularly steep or treacherous parts of the trail. About two hours later we reach our destination: the remote village of Ogbagi. First reached by motorbike last October, the only other vehicles ever to reach the village were some range rovers in 1956. Despite this isolation all the village houses (small,

Yam fields in Nigeria.

rectangular, mud-walled) have corrugated metal roofs, which presumably were carried up the mountain on people’s heads.

at me to light the brush on fire, presumably to create mass smoke to lose the bees. That would have made a ridiculous fiasco out of a normal bee inspection though, quite contrary to my goal, and instead I just paced around for five minutes, removed my suit, and rejoined the group.

The village’s beekeeper/farmers gather together under a large mango tree. Most farmers in the village maintain a few traditional (hollowed-out log) hives high up in trees, as well as practice “honey hunting.” Over the next two hours I explain the benefits of removable-comb topbar hives and how to make them, and answer questions about bee biology and behavior. Then it’s time to inspect a hive.

The adventure in Ogbagi Village was part of the 2nd of 3 projects I’ve done this year with Winrock International. Winrock does the support and logistics to send volunteers through the USAID Farmer-to-Farmer program to aid in development throughout the world. They do dairy and a lot of fish farming, as well as other things, and of more interest to you and I, they do a lot of beekeeping development.

They only ever open hives at night, so the villagers were amused and curious when I proposed opening a hive during the day. My purpose in doing the inspection is more to show it’s possible than anything else. When I put my protective coveralls on, I’m pretty sure one of the young men is laughing at me. They gather around about thirty feet away as I approach the little granary hut that has a beehive in it.

Usually we’re talking topbar hives, since they generally cost about a 10th as much as a frame hive (notwithstanding the really high prices they apparently go for in America, in the infamous recent “Newbees Beeware” article) and can be produced by beekeepers themselves. Apiculture is often an underappreciated “natural resource” in developing areas, with much room for expansion, low input costs (prices vary by re-

I’d been given a smoking bundle of reeds as a smoker. Unfortunately, with no way to blow smoke into the hive with that, when I open the door of the hut, the bees become angry before I can adequately smoke them. The crowd ran.

Despite this, I still think the “Africanized” bees I’m accustomed to in California are much much worse than any bees I’ve met in Africa. Angry AHBs would be bombarding my veil like someone throwing handfuls of gravel, and finding miraculous ways to get into even the newest most complete suit. These were just your average angry bees.

I inspected the colony as well as one can without removable frames, but could only really determine that there was a lot of uncapped honey. I then closed it up and walked to a nearby clearing to walk in circles for awhile to lose the pursuing bees. My driver came within shouting distance and shouted

I get ready to smoke the bees the traditional way in Nigeria!

A traditional hive near Farin Ruwa, Nigeria.

gion but the highest topbar hive cost I’ve seen is around $16), low management requirements (African bees are tolerant of most things naturally occurring in their area so you’re not constantly fighting diseases, and there are no varroa mites!), and a potential tenfold profit (in Nigeria you can buy a topbar hive for $16 and sell the resultant 10- 12 liters of honey for about $150). My first two projects were in Nigeria and the third was in Ethiopia. In Nigeria the bees (Apis mellifera adansonii) are traditionally kept in hollowed out logs, with lids on either side made of planks or corrugated metal or whatever else was at hand. The logs are kept high up in trees. To harvest the honey they climb the tree at night and using the smoking bundle of reeds – but typically no other protective gear – they remove everything from the beehive.

In Ibadan in the southwest of Nigeria I was told they could buy a Kenyan Topbar Hive (KTBH) for about 2500 niara ($15.82), get 10-12 liters out of it, and sell the honey for 2600N/liter (for a total of $164-$197). A Langstroth hive there produces about 25 liters, but costs 35,000N, ie $222!

Every hive I opened in Nigeria had a lot of small hive beetles in it. Because the Nigerian bee co-evolved with the small hive beetle, they tolerate each-other and it’s not a problem. Between the cheap cost of topbar hives and the lack of a necessity to spend money on medications, it almost sounds to me like I should move to Nigeria, start beekeeping there, and soon be so rich I’ll have nothing better to do than email Americans offering to wire-transfer them money… and then wonder why they don’t take me up on it. There are, of course, some serious challenges to beekeeping in Nigeria though.

There’s a lack of any kind of processing equipment. If you want an extractor or filtration tanks, you’re going to need to order them from somewhere thousands of miles away. Langstroth hives, as I said, are disproportionately expensive (presumably because no one is mass-producing them there). There’s no bulk honey buyer or cooperative system, so every beekeeper either sells his honey personally in the market or to smallscale honey marketers (who then sell it per-

1 Idris Zaria, a beekeeper and cooperative organizer in Kaduna State, Nigeria, as reported to me by beekeeping volunteer Doug Johnson, who met with him.

Nigerian beekeeper group shot.

they are facing.

sonally in the market). The biggest problem, however, is that everyone is afraid of bees. If the fruit grower three plots of land away from you sees you have beehives on your land, he is going to complain, have the local government order you to move them, or sneak over at night and destroy your hives. This causes beekeepers to put their hives so far away from anywhere that it’s burdensome for them to go out there, and theft is a problem. Remotely located bee yards are often raided and destroyed by opportunists. This contrasts sharply with Ethiopia where beehives are commonly kept in the livingroom! (Okay that’s not entirely true – they prefer to put them in the kitchen.) Theft was the most common thing beekeepers I met in Nigeria cited as the most serious problem

Another problem with African bees is that they have a high tendency to abscond. This is a beneficial adaption for the bees, since many diseases are brood based and the bees leave the brood behind when they find themselves facing a disease. Additionally, they survive droughts or dearth periods by moving to a better area for the time. Hive inspections can also cause absconding, but people I talked to1 report that when done right, with the right amount of smoke, you can still inspect hives as often as once a week without causing absconding.

Another observation I made about the A. m. adansonii bees was that they were very crawly – tending to practically abandon a comb as soon as I picked it up and almost all

Working on a Kenya Topbar Hive

(l) Fresh coffee and Blue Nile Falls, can you get more Ethiopian? (r) Note the beehives strapped to the side of the house. This attitude towards beehives is typical in Ethiopia.

being on the outside of the hive by the time I’d inspected all the combs of a KTBH. Additionally, the drones were almost entirely black – at first I thought I was seeing some other insect in the hives!

Nigeria itself is an interesting place. There are train tracks connecting every major town, but the trains haven’t run in ten years. They used to have oil refineries, but they’ve fallen into disrepair. Though Nigeria is a major oil producer, they now have to export their oil to refineries in Sao Tome & Principe (owned by a former Nigerian president I’m told) and re-import it. There’s currently a terrorist group (Boko Haram) active in Nigeria, primarily in the north. Every day they were in the paper for violence somewhere in the country. One day they raided a prison down the road from where fellow beekeeping volunteer Doug Johnson was working and released 112 inmates. My return to the capital, Abuja, was delayed for a day at the end of my 2nd assignment because Boko Haram had threatened to bomb “hotels Westerners frequent” and the city was locked down. But it’s okay their only complaint is “western education.” Oh wait.

Ethiopia After my second project in Nigeria (this time in Nasarawa State near the middle), I flew directly to Ethiopia to begin another Winrock project there. Prior to this I would have imagined Ethiopia as a desolate desert full of rocks and camels. It turns out Ethiopia is mostly mountainous, with rolling green slopes, frequent rain, and wood smoke hanging low over quaint villages of huts in mountain valleys. I believe they also have African savannah in the Great Rift Valley and tropical jungles in the south.

In contrast to Nigeria, Ethiopia has a very long beekeeping tradition. Far from the fear of bees I found in Nigeria, many farmers in Ethiopia keep bees, and everyone seems very comfortable living very close to bee-

2 Murutse 2012. 3 Kerealem 2008. 4 Amssalu 2004. 5 Meixner 2011. 6 Kerealem 2008. Ethiopian shaded apiary

hives. In fact, 79% of the traditional hives were found to be kept inside people’s houses in a recent survey in a village in the midlands of Tigray2 (near the stove was the preferred location, to keep them warm). That result was the highest of three study areas in that research, but the overall average was still 41% being kept in the house, and if not inside the house, 94.7% of them keep the hives in the immediate vicinity of their house3. Clearly, Ethiopians are very comfortable with their bees, and I was quite impressed with how advanced their traditional beekeeping methods are.

North Ethiopia.” They were both extremely helpful and their books informed me of many interesting facts about traditional beekeeping.

There seems to be some confusion about exactly which subspecies’ are present in Ethiopia. A 2004 study4, which both my interpreters held to be accurate, identified five subspecies in the country: A. m. jemenitica, A. m. scutellata, A. m. bandasii, A. m. monticola & a new subspecies they called “A m. woyi gambella.” However, a 2011 study5 I find persuasive argues that based on morphological studies, the bees of Ethiopia do not belong to any of the above-mentioned subspecies, but one new species proposed to be called A. m. simenses. Furthermore, the beekeepers themselves differentiate between types of bees found locally, mainly by color, but they attest that there are definite behavioral differences. Kerealem in the Amhara region identified these as “wanzie” (“nearly yellow” in color and the bee of preference among 61% of the 1034 beekeepers his team surveyed), “shanko” (black), and “tinjutie” (grey in color)6. Girmay, writing in the

I conducted training in three different locations in Ethiopia: Bahir Dar and Finot Selam in the western Amhara region, and in a little town called Korem in the mountains of the Tigray region. I had the great pleasure of working with two very knowledgeable interpreters, Kerealem Ejigu, a graduate student in beekeeping and an author of “Beekeeping in Amhara Region” and Girmay Murutse, also a graduate student in beekeeping and author of “Honeybee Colonies and Beekeeping Production Systems in

Closeup of traditional hives lashed to the side of the house, in the traditional Ethiopian manner.

Tigray region, found that beekeepers mainly distinguished between “red” and “black” bees. Both Girmay and Kerealem were very doubtful of the “one unique species” hypotheses, but the supporting research seems pretty sound to me – perhaps more research in this area is necessary.

Traditional hives in Ethiopia are woven cylinders, somewhat conical, plastered with mud, dung and ash. They are typically hung from eaves around the house, though sometimes they are on their own stands. Beekeepers remove the back (wider) end to remove honey combs, while leaving the brood (which is always situated closest to the entrance). They apparently know how to com-

This apiary enclosure is ONLY accessible through the house, making it feel more like a room of the house than an outdoor shed.

an average of $6.69 in Amhara and $34.29- $45.718 in Tigray9. While the Amhara prices may seem cheap, keep in mind the average monthly income for this same group of farmers was $12.94 (15% of their total income coming from beekeeping).10 From my polling of the beekeepers in my training session they seemed to get an average price of about $0.92 / pound in Amhara and $4.55 in Tigray. As you can see there’s a huge difference in both colony and honey prices between Amhara and Tigray, this is because white honey from Tigray is of renowned quality (I’m told it won first prize in a worldwide honey-tasting contest) and it’s bought by packers and sold throughout Europe and the Middle East. It has a natural water content of 14% (we confirmed this with refractometers), whereas the “normal” water content for honey is 17%. This also leads to it crystallizing extremely quickly.

Beekeepers also catch swarms by placing bait hives (which look like smaller versions of the normal woven hives) up in trees and transferring the swarms into normal hives a few days after they become occupied. One of the few things they didn’t seem to have a traditional method of doing was making splits – to increase colony numbers their main method is maintaining small hives in gourds, which, because of the small size, will swarm much more frequently (I like to call these “swarmin’ gourds”), and catching these swarms. Because hives are right beside their houses, they claim they almost always know when a colony is swarming. They wait for the swarm to alight somewhere and apparently take the queen, put her in a queen cage they construct of bamboo, and move her into a hive. The swarm will then follow (this presumably requires the hive to be placed in the immediate vicinity of the swarm?). I also learned that they can make a queen excluder out of paperclips, and make a queen cage out of woven grass that the bees will chew through in about three days. Altogether, as you can see, their “traditional” beekeeping is very advanced.

bine weak colonies (spraying the bees with milk so they’ll clean each-other and thus mingle their queen pheromone), and some beekeepers even add extensions to their hives during honey season, essentially giving them horizontal supers7!

I inquired about the price of a traditional hive, and was told that certain people specialize in making them and the going rate (at least in Korem) is 10 kilograms of grain in exchange for the hive. Girmay and Kerealem both reported that beekeepers buy and sell colonies of bees in the local market. Beekeepers bring the entire hive with them to the market for potential buyers to inspect, and the price ranges from $2.29-12.57, with

The government recently decided to modernize the beekeeping sector. Their efforts to do so are in many ways a classic example of good intentions being implemented without an understanding of the important details. Though there seems to be a consensus among beekeepers working in development that topbar hives are better for impoverished farmers, and most of the developing world uses Langstroth frame hives, the government of Ethiopia decided to order tens of thousands of a frame hive called the “zander” type to be made. I’m told the government organized unemployed youth and had them produce 35,000 zander hives the first year, 45,000 the next, and 55,000 the third. As such, of the beekeepers I met with, while

7 Murutse 2012. 8 Prices converted from birr at the current rate of 17.5 birr to $1. 9 Amhara prices from Kerealem 2008, Tigray prices from Gebremeskel 2012. 10 Kerealem 2008.

One of the training class members holds one of the hive tools I brought.

94% had traditional hives (8.4 of them on average), only 23% had topbar hives (and none in Tigray), and a surprising 69% had frame hives (with an average number of 5.9). Because the builders were not beekeepers (and the beekeepers didn’t know what wasn’t of acceptable quality either), most of these frame hives are very badly built – the spacing is all wrong and the wiring is loose, leading to cross combing and double-combing. Additionally, while economies of scale has reduced the cost of a frame hive to about $46.40, that is still a huge expense to local beekeepers.

Ethiopia also seems to have the peculiar situation of a lack of demand for wax and a lack of supply of wax. Beekeepers can’t find buyers, and they also can’t find a source of foundation. Obviously, there’s a shortage of foundation presses, but also, while the government used to also make mass orders of wax and redistribute it as foundation, they recently found all the samples to be too contaminated for use11. Crop farmers apparently have just enough access to pesticides to cause trouble12 13 (it’s not well regulated), and the brief boom in the wax market quickly led to adulterated wax being sold. Since they don’t know effective ways to check the quality of wax against contamination and adulteration, large scale processors simply aren’t buying it locally any more.14

In my inspections of the hives the bees behaved similarly to those in Nigeria (ie very crawly), and I was most struck by how badly constructed all their frame hives were. Though small hive beetles were pervasive in Nigeria, I didn’t see any in Ethiopia. I did, however, see bee lice in many of the Ethiopian hives. They look like slightly smaller and lighter-colored varroa mites. Beekeepers were anxious to know if I had

11 Murutse 2012. 12 Chemicals used include Malathion, Sevin, DDT, 2-4 D and Aceton (Kerealem 2009). 13 Kerealem 2009. 14 Murutse 2012. 15 Murutse 2012. Author (center) holds a cake of beeswax.

Mountain apiary in Ethiopia.

any solutions for the problems of bee-eater birds and honey badgers, which I didn’t (though they already knew to keep their hives elevated off the ground, and against honey badgers recommend “have a dog”). In Tigray the beekeepers also claimed to have an interesting disease problem, to quote Girmay’s book:

be attacked by humedia. The bees with humedia will return to the hive and contaminate other bees inside the hive. The bees show wrinkle walking in the entrance of the hive and fall down15.”

Despite their extensive experience, I still felt like my trip was useful. They aren’t in the habit of inspecting their hives regularly in Ethiopia, so I taught the beekeepers I met with a lot about what to look for in their hives and how to interpret what they see. They also had many interesting questions about finer points of bee biology and behavior. There were some very entrenched misconceptions, such as, most shockingly, I couldn’t convince some beekeepers that smoke doesn’t make bees angry. Even after I thought I’d thoroughly covered the topic

“humedia was ordered second following drought [as a problem], the farmers explained humedia could occur in the dry season and rainy season of the year associated with cloud occurrence. At times when there is a red colored cloud, some red to yellowish colored powder falls down from the sky. The powder is spread in the vegetations of the surrounding then bees that are foraging for pollen and nectar from the vegetation will

of “smoke keeps bees calm,” I’d get a random question while talking about the next subject — “but when you’re working a hive and your hives are close together how do you prevent the smoke from drifting over and making the next hive angry?”

There were some funny questions about the United States as well. In Nigeria, I got asked, “You don’t have local chiefs? Even in the villages?” (chiefs aren’t just like mayors – it’s a hereditary title) And in Ethiopia: “Are these the same kind of camels you have in the States? … what do you mean you don’t have camels?”

Altogether it was a fantastic experience and I look forward to doing more similar projects in the future. I would like to thank the Orange County (California) Beekeepers Association and David Marder of Bee

Murutse, Girmay and Tesfay, Yayneshet, “Honeybee Colonies and Beekeeping Production Systems in North Ethiopia” 2012 Lambert Academic Publishing LOHMAN APIARIES

since 1946 Quality Queens and Packages

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Busters for the donated materials they sent me with, as well as the fine people at Winrock who made it possible and the numerous people I emailed with random questions.

Gebremeskel, Daniel, Managing Director of Comel Honey Processing Facility, personal communication, June 3rd 2012

Kebede, Adebabay, Ejigu, Kerealem, Aynalem, Tessema, Jenberie, Abebe “Beekeeping in the Amhara Region” Amhara Region Agricultural Research Institute (2008)

Works Cited:

Ejigu, Kerealem, Gebey, Tilahun and Preston, T R 2009: Constraints and prospects for apiculture research and development in Amhara region, Ethiopia. Livestock Research for Rural Development. Volume 21, Article #172. Retrieved May 25, 2012, from http://www.lrrd.org/lrrd21/10/ejig21172.htm

Meixner, Marina, Leta, Messele Abebe, Koeniger, Nikolaus, Fuchs, Stefan (2011) “The honey bees of Ethiopia represent a new subspecies of Apis mellifera—Apis mellifera simensis n. ssp.”Apidologie

Federal Government of Ethiopia, Proclamation No 660/2009: “A Proclamation to Provide for Apiculture Resources Development and Protection” December 24th 2009

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