Beekeeping Development Project: Kyrgyzstan
Text of the article
If you were to follow the ancient Silk Road east out of Europe across a thousand miles of grassy plains, through Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, north of Afghanistan and south of Kazakhstan, the “Mountains of Heaven” would rise up like a serrated wall before you. You would journey into their imposing embrace in the broad and fertile Fergana Valley, at the end of which lies the 3,000-year-old city of Osh, under a rocky outcrop noted in ancient sources as the “Stone Tower.” You have arrived in Kyrgyzstan.
Once, caravans of snorting camels had stopped here to prepare to cross the mountains, but now it is dusty and post-soviet, full of crumbling monuments and grey apartment blocks. A statue of Lenin still graces a central square, his hand outstretched as if to say “look upon my works!” but you turn your back on him and head toward the mountains, past a prouder, more modern statue of Kyrgyz folk hero Manas astride his horse holding his sword valiantly aloft. Follow the approximate route of the Silk Road for two more hours by car up winding roads surrounded by increasingly large green hills, occasionally waiting for shepherds on horseback to move their sheep off the road, until you come to a village named Kenesh beside the icey Kara Darya river.
The river valley seems stark and empty in the cold of early Spring. Other than the village and river, there is nothing in sight but grass and distant herds of sheep or horses. The “Mountains of Heaven,” the Tian Shan, loom at one end, and the Fergana Valley at the other. The village itself consists of a smattering of dusty off-white houses punctuated with cheery red or
Beekeeping Development Kyrgyzstan
and I had traded the onset of Autumn in Australia, where I’d been living, for two weeks in the crisp beginnings of Spring in Kyrgyzstan.
blue hand-carved wooden scrollwork along the eaves. Each house has its own yard delineated by a rustic fence of rough branches, and each yard contains a kitchen garden, some fruit trees in the very beginnings of blossom, the family horses and maybe a cow or two. Some sheds and barns are actually thatched. The car rolls into one such yard, I walk past a row of strangely large beehives set under some cherry trees resplendent with pinkish-white blossoms; I have arrived at my destination.
After this very long and arduous journey I was excited in the morning to have a look at those hives and see what the situation was. With the several trainees assembled in the flowery yard, we went to inspect the beehives under the cherry trees … only to find every single one full of dead bees. Freshly piled on the baseboard, diagnosis: recent and sudden. It would seem that in preparation to not have an embarrassing amount of varroa mites when the “bee expert” arrived, they had given them an extra strong dose of miticide the day before I arrived. I mentally facepalm and look to the sky, thinking of all the USAID money that went into getting me to this remote village, to say nothing of my volunteered time. Welcome to aid work.
We no longer live in the days of Bactrian camels plodding the silk road, but still it took me 44.5 hours to fly from Melbourne to Canton to Paris to Istanbul to the Kyrgyz capital at Bishkek. Snow storms had blocked the passes to drive from from Bishkek to Kenesh so it had taken one more flight from Bishkek to Osh, and here I was, exhausted. It was March 2016,
Interpreter Nurzat
models the equipment in front of one of the hives
that had been
killed.
Project:
The living hives in Kenesh
This project was one of many put on by a non-governmental organization with the inspiring name of ACDI-VOCA. The funding comes from United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through their Farmer-to-Farmer program. To quote the scope of work for this project:
For the last decades large-scale bee farms stopped their operations, and many new individual farmers engaged in bee-keeping face difficulties with management and maintenance of bee farms, breeds, reproduction, diseases, feed and sanitary norms.
To improve and update bee-keeping technologies, the host is requesting a volunteer expert to assess and analyze the current situation in bee-
The described “corpus” hives
in a horizontal line like a topbar hive with frames. During winter they use dividers to pack in three individual hives of six (giant) frames each per box, and, during spring and summer they lug these massive chests up to the flower-covered mountain slopes and shift the frames so each hive is in its own box without dividers. This was the style of nearly all the hives I would see in the country.
It can be tempting, when one learns of a system so different, to start evangelizing the beekeeping innovations of the Reverend Lorenzo Langstroth as they have become canon to us — the Kyrgyz use the same knowledge of beespace and frames, it’s just not our orthodox interpretation of box dimensions. But maybe this system works better for them in these conditions. They are high altitude (the mountains are essentially the northern arm of the Himalayas), and have cold snowy winters, so maybe combining three to a box like this is what they must do. I always travel with an open mind — after all, things I took for granted in California didn’t work for me in Australia. I listen intently and observe, and then by way of sharing, I describe the Langstroth hives I use. Maybe they’ll be interested in the ease I describe of moving boxes and adding supers … but then again, they don’t need to remove supers to look at brood, so maybe they think I’m the one who is backwards. They do tell me they have a type of hive like I’m describing, with boxes on top of boxes, which they call the “corpus” hive. When I later encountered it, however, I found it uses supers that are absolutely massive (see photo), such that one person would probably struggle to lift one alone, which kind of achieves the worst of both worlds.
keeping industry in the area, assist the host to develop strategies for long-term sustainability and to adopt modern technologies.
So let’s start with these dead bees before us. Proper dosage and integrated pest management: What miticide do they use? The locals shrug, they don’t know. Well, show me the container? Oh it’s all written in Chinese. We’re off to a fantastic start here.
Soon, however, we were back in business, of a sort, because a short walk or horse-ride to the other side of the village and there was an older villager with dozens of hives full of live bees under some leafy trees by a gorge. These hives, like the dead ones, consisted of huge rectangular wooden boxes like steamer trunks. The frames were much bigger than our “deep” frames and the hives contained about 20 frames each, all
Here I am on local transportation. Note also the kalpak hat.
The bees themselves were incredibly docile, as if they had never received the memo that stinging was a thing they could do. The beekeeper applied just the slightest whiff of smoke, and no bee ever gave anyone even an aggressive buzz. There were light head veils available which on this occasion one non-beekeeper donned, but most of the other nonbeekeeper family members and villagers who my presence had attracted were at ease and confident in the bees’ non-aggression, crowding casually right around the open hives. I never saw a full suit in all my travels in Kyrgyzstan.
One piece of headgear I did see a lot was the distinctive Kyrgyz felt hat known as a “kalpak,” a white felt domed hat that sits almost comically high on the head, with a small upturned brim and usually some simple but beautiful curly embroidery. It was explained to me that the big air pocket the hat creates keeps the head warm in winter and cool in summer. I was gifted one and though it felt silly at first, I was soon un-self-consciously wearing it all around the country (and then before leaving the country picked up half a dozen because all my friends clearly needed one. Last New Year’s Eve found half a dozen Australians in kalpaks ringing in the new year in my tiny Australian hamlet).
With half the beehives in this village dead, and not nearly as many beekeepers to work with as I was led to expect, I looked around this remote wind-swept place, shivering, and wondered how I could make it worth the trouble. I had an interpreter, a young woman named Nurzat on her first interpreter gig. She was clearly anxious about whether she’d do it well enough but in fact she really went above and beyond. Realizing that we didn’t really have much to do out here in Kenesh, she somehow lined up a whole slew of beekeepers for us to meet down the valley by the larger town of Kurshab. I really don’t know how she did this since she wasn’t already plugged in to the beekeeping community, but I couldn’t praise her enough in the final report.
We caught a ride with the brother of the village headman, who was headed in to Osh. Back down the valley (but we had to proceed up-valley first, because the downriver bridge had been swept away years ago), down to Kurshab, a slightly larger town just where the river met the Fergana Valley. In this town Nurzat’s in-laws
This particularly beautiful yurta was actually a restaurant. Author had a delicious dish of manti (perogis in hot yogurt) in it.
had a house, it was a nice house, but most notably there was a yurt in the yard (or a “yurta” as they seem to call them). I have found the Kyrgyz to be practically allergic to being indoors (even with highs in the fifties they would still take most meals at a table outside, happy and oblivious to my chattering teeth), and to have a pure enduring love for their iconic yurtas.
while up in the high hills and mountains and probably many beekeepers too — the beekeepers I met with nearly all had a house in town surrounded by their hives, but took them up into the mountains for summer.
Because of a risk of theft, hives would not be left unattended, but accompanied by the beekeeper or at least a family member 24/7. While this may seem costly in time or money, and the price they get for honey is certainly less than we like, the cost of living is itself so much lower that one person can support themselves and family with a hundred hives. How I envy them! Give me a yurta, a hundred hives, and a horse. Looks off wistfully into the distance.
The Kyrgyz flag is red with a golden pastry-like stylized yurta in the center. The yurta, the traditional dwelling of their nomadic ancestors, they fondly hang on to and I noticed many houses in town had a yurta in the yard. Later, as my perambulations took me further into the hills, I would see that many herdsmen still stayed in yurtas
So many horses. Wild horses. Herds of horses. Horses everywhere.
The described bee trailer. Note the different entrance shapes to allow bees to find the correct entrance.
Before, after, or both, every beekeeper we visited would offer me tea and a smorgasbord of fresh homemade jams and other fresh delicacies either made at home or by a neighbor. Even the tea was often picked by the wife from local plants. For dinner every day in the Osh area we had a dish known as “osh,” a rice pilaf with meat in it. When I returned for my second project in the east of Kyrgyzstan, I was staying in a crumbling Russian hotel that was a bit of a cliché of itself — assigned seating in the canteen! Tickets for meals! Borsht again? But when I ate out, the food seemed to be cousins of dishes I’d seen in Turkey — the Kyrgyz culture is part of a Turkic-Mongol cultural continuum across central Asia.
Everywhere I go, I find beekeepers to be an innovative lot, and Kyrgyz-
This time I headed east from the Kyrgyz capital by car to near the large The light-blue structure on the trailer is the bunk house.
vised a workable mite management regimen, but often they didn’t actually know the name of what they were using. I’m a big believer in rotating treatments, and Randy Oliver’s research and diagrams — some of which I use on these projects, with his permission. One thing I love about our industry is how accessible all the influential people in it are. A question comes up I don’t know the answer to, I find I can email the expert whose research most closely touches on the question and they will usually answer within 24 hours, and, deep in the most obscure bush, I have the answer in my inbox.
Several of the more experienced local beekeepers seemed to be adept at queen breeding, and yet, one practice I saw over and over again was that beekeepers in Kyrgyzstan seemed to generally significantly rely on queens from far away in Ukraine. Even though it was hard to get them, there seemed to be a persistent belief that such queens are inherently better than anything locally bred could be. I am a firm believer in locally adapted stock. I’ve seen again and again on these projects beekeepers hoping I’ll bring them some golden bullet, expressing eagerness and hope I’ll have some revolutionary new idea, but whatever change I really do recommend, they don’t really want to hear. In Egypt it was allowing hives to grow beyond one box in size (“ten frames? Time to split!” they say). Here it was breeding and buying local queens. Of note, Drs Sheppard and Meixner’s research on bees in the area have identified a distinct subspecies, Apis mellifera pomonella, the name referencing their co-evolution in particularly close conjunction with apples, which apparently originated in the same region (see Sheppard & Meixner, “Apis mellifera pomonella, a new honey bee subspecies from Central Asia,” Apidologie, 367-375, 2003).
stan was no exception. I witnessed many clever homemade tools and interesting techniques. While it seems most common to simply put beehives on the back of a flatbed, one man who was also a math and chemistry teacher at the local high school had built an impressive bee trailer with 120 hives built into it, which could be accessed from pull-out drawers on the inside. Within the trailer was a miniature extracting room with two fold-out bunks, a fold-out workbench over the extractor, and the extractor itself which drained into storage tanks slung under the trailer.
Meeting with beekeepers, I continued to discuss and share technical details of dimensions of different types of hives and their pros and cons, as well as scientifically-informed mite treatment. Most beekeepers had de-
August 11th, 2017, Australia – I wake up wrapped in blankets against the Antarctic winter cold. I’m supposed to fly to Congo that evening. I put on my glasses and blearily look at my phone to see what emails came in overnight and find I am not in fact going to Congo; the plan has changed and I’m instead going back to Kyrgyzstan! If you had asked me in high school if I wanted to be a professional beekeeper I might have said, “No, I want to travel!” Little did I know.
mountain lake of Issyk-Kul, a lake so big you can barely see the mountains on the far side (and a comfortable temperature for swimming in. Bobbing out there in the refreshing water, you can look back at the beach, and you’ll only see a smattering of yurtas on the shore, before a backdrop of magnificent mountains, and you may truly wonder what century you’re in). Up here in the mountains in the summer I saw first hand a great number of pastoralists living in their yurtas in quiet mountain valleys. One day as I walked along the road in the steep forested valley in which I was staying, I encountered some young men with pet eagles. Not hawks or falcons, these raptors were huge and I recalled having read of the eagle hunting done in the central Asian mountains. I happily paid the lads the equivalent of about $3 to have my picture taken with an eagle perched (on thick leather gloves) on each arm. One lad proceeded to take literally 114 photos on my phone while the other failed to figure out he should take the lens-cap off my DSLR, we had no common language and of course my hands were held in the grip of terrifyingly large talons. When I later told my host of the eagles, he made a face and said, “They probably don’t even actually hunt with them,” as if it is a positively shameful dereliction of duty to NOT hunt with eagles. Adds “have pet eagle” to Kyrgyz dream life.
Early in my arrival in Australia, in 2016, one of those old guys that haunt beekeeping meetings (you know the type) had declared for one and all that you should never put “stickies” (i.e., extracted frames), back in the beehive because “they will have begun to ferment and any alcohol will kill all your bees!” At the time I had rolled my eyes, because I think giving stickies to hives is the best way to clean them up, even if you’re just going take them off 24 hours later to put them in storage (but in Australia you must put them on the hive they came from unless you want to literally play with fire, since you can’t treat for AFB and must depend on barrier quarantine). I bring this up now because here in Eastern Kyrgyzstan, I met a Russian beekeeper who swears alcohol aids queen acceptance and was out there dribbling vodka right into hives as he introduced queens!!
In addition to reliance on foreignbred queens, another obstacle to the local beekeepers became apparent to me. Kyrgyzstan had been a part of
the Soviet Union and during that time they had been freely able to transport their product throughout the vast Soviet empire. Now Kyrgyzstan is just a place the size of Nebraska that’s sepa-
rated from the big markets in Russia by several international borders. My sources told me even getting into the markets in the capital of Bishkek was hard because you had to know
“Son, I have to go to work, please saddle my horse.”
This is not the ocean, this is Lake Issyk-Kul!
A Kyrgyz beekeeper engaged in queen rearing near Kurshab
Most families had a raised outdoor table like this. Other than us two on the outside, most people must sit cross-legged at it. It was seemingly never too cold to prevent the locals from eating at these outdoor tables.
the right people and those people favored their existing friends (and, they alleged, adulterated the honey). This was beyond my purview as a technical expert, though I suggested a strong national beekeeping federation could maybe help with these issues. I was informed that such an organization did exist but the people I talked to did not believe it was effective. I left a suggestion with the development office that they bring some specialists in these larger issues to help with the national federation.
I will admit, like probably most of you, when I had first heard of Kyrgyzstan, my response was probably “Klargobarkastan? That’s surely a
Four mating nucs integrated into one box, each with an entrance on a different side. I really like the detachable landing pads.
Melbourne (47 Fahrenheit) to Sydney to Los Angeles (had to run to catch connection) to Atlanta (first Five Guys burger in years) to Managua, Nicaragua (is that volcano supposed to be smoking?), where another story begins. (That story will appear in our September issue).
Kris Fricke is the “beekeeper-in-chief” of Bee Aid International, www.beedev. org, and also runs Great Ocean Road Honey Company in Victoria, Australia.
made-up place like Bashkortostan!” But I came to love the kind, earnest, hard-working people in this bucolic place whose loveliness is perhaps preserved by the fact that most in the West have no idea what or where it is. The fact that there is still a place on this earth where people regularly live in comfortable yurts in the mountains with their hives and ride their horse to go visit their neighbor warms my heart.
By and by the second project ended, and I had to leave the flowery mountain pastures. A day’s drive back to Bishkek, followed by 96 hours of flying: Bishkek to Istanbul (interrogated by secret police) to Dubai to
Links in the article
This is the plain-text version, extracted from the printed pages for readers who use screen readers, text-only browsers, or prefer reflowable text. Captions and sidebars appear where they fell in the page layout. The typeset pages are available in the reader.