Beekeeping Development Project: Nicaragua

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Development Project: Nicaragua

In the back of the pick-up, I keep nervously glancing between the billowing plume of smoke rising from the volcano behind us, and the traffic in front of us. The line of cars and trucks grinds to a halt. The only vehicles coming the opposite direction on this two lane highway, it becomes evident, are ones from our lane that have given up and turned around. On either side, the road is hemmed in by the leafy verdant outer sprawl of the Nicaraguan capital; bougainvillea blending with colorful laundry waving on lines, cinderblock houses almost hidden by the irrepressible branches that tumble around and over them. People get out of their cars and chat with one another. I don’t know what everyone is saying, I don’t speak Spanish, but I gather no one is actually concerned about the volcano;

Volcano plume visible from the Managua airport

the volcano is normal, the traffic is not. We’re a bit panicked because Dr. Johan van Veen, head of the Entomology and Apiology Department of the National University of Costa Rica, has a plane to catch and time is ticking away.

about how he could improve the lot of locals.

One day while Vincent was on his way to visit a USAID water project in Tipitapa, at an intersection a little girl approached his beat-up Ford Ranger to sell him a bottle of native (melipona) bee honey. He suddenly remembered working with the beekeepers of the Middlesex Beekeeping Group in Boston twenty years earlier. He had been a chef, they’d regularly come into his restaurant and ultimately taught him beekeeping. Beekeeping was the answer! He bought the bottle of honey.

In the back of the truck with me is Vincent Cosgrove, a cheerful and energetic American who runs an organization in Nicaragua called Sweet Progress. Vincent had first come to Nicaragua in 2013 as an entrepreneur in the healthcare industry. He found himself in Tipitapa, a satellite town of Managua, and there was a problem: 62% unemployment, 82% among the women, meant that no one had money for even much-needed healthcare services. Where others might have moved on to somewhere with more money, he instead started thinking

He started helping locals form coops, especially of women’s groups. They needed equipment and training, he set about tackling both these issues. For equipment he realized just giving people things would be unsustainable and not create a sense of ownership, so Sweet Progress organizes micro-loans for equipment that are paid back in the form of honey over four years, with no interest. In this manner the groups are able to get necessary resources without becoming trapped on a repayment treadmill. Vincent came originally as an entrepreneur, but he doesn’t make a profit out of this, he has found the greater satisfaction of helping others.

As to training, Vincent has worked tirelessly to bring in volunteers for training, and organizations as partners — among them non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and universities in the region and in the U.S. Volunteer teams have taught seminars (342 of them apparently) on not only directly beekeeping-related activities but also business management and

leadership, and some activities not related to beekeeping at all. In 2018 for example, Sweet Progress delivered 27 classes per month, reaching a total of 344 women, 83 teenage girls, and 143 teenage boys.

As of this writing (March 2019), Sweet Progress, working with the American Nicaragua Foundation and Professor Van Veen, has started construction on an FDA registered honey processing plant expected to triple the annual earnings of the coops. He anticipates within five years the co-ops will be producing 3,800 tons of organic honey per year, infusing $9,500,000 into local communities. They are also finalizing the export of 54 tons of raw honey, which he notes, “marks the first time a charity organization has connected a honey project to the global market in the Western Hemisphere.” I am impressed, export is always a goal to strive for in underdeveloped communities. Merely selling honey to neighbors doesn’t actually bring wealth into the community, but exporting does.

I first came into contact with Vincent in 2014, when I was answering the phone for the Orange County (California) Beekeeping Association, and he called asking if we would be interested in organizing a team of volunteers to come down. I was quickly able to assemble a “dream team” of five experienced beekeepers enthusiastic to go. Sadly, international events intervened and the planned trip dissolved amid clouds of tear gas and the clatter of stones against riot shields — the Nicaraguan government had nationalized a vast swath of land as part of an ill-conceived China-funded scheme to build their own “Panama Canal” across the country. The result: thousands of farmers kicked off their land, marching the streets, clashing with government forces. This was 2015 and 2016. Cows now graze in the recovering scar where the canal was barely begun. In 2017 I finally found myself in Nicaragua … for reasons entirely unrelated to Sweet Progress.

I was able to spend my first day in the country with Vincent and Dr. Van Veen though. On this occasion Dr. Van Veen was giving a presentation at the National Agricultural College near Tipitapa. As other students herded cattle past outside, some thirty students sat in a classroom while Dr. Van Veen made a PowerPoint presentation about beekeeping. It was almost unbearably hot, the numerous ceiling mounted fans only granting a little

reaucratic complexities between two organizations and changing plans.

relief if one was directly below one. The beekeeping presentation seemed very interesting, with a lot of specific information about different types of flora in the area, and I wished I could understand it, but it was of course in Spanish. After the general beekeeping presentation, by popular demand he made a presentation about native stingless bees, which I was even more regretful I couldn’t understand because I find stingless bees fascinating. Stingless bees are kept in artificial hives in Nicaragua, as I would see later, and their honey harvested.

Partners for the Americas is a U.S. based non-profit NGO founded in 1964, dedicated to development and aid in the Americas. Among other things, they administer USAID funded Farmer-to-Farmer programs. After a day off to “adjust” during which I had joined Vincent and Dr. Van Veen, I was off to the north of the country!

It was a four-hour drive from Managua. Halfway, we stopped for lunch in the town of Esteli, where a wall covered with a mural depicting the civil war (1978-1990) was also pockmarked with bullet-holes from that same war. An air raid siren began its banshee wail and I quickly scanned the horizon, thinking one of the numerous smoldering volcanoes had finally erupted, but no one around me seemed phased.

After the presentations, we had to hurry to make the airport, and got mired in traffic. Eventually, desperate, we followed other cars into a side street and navigated the labyrinthine city sprawl, sometimes having to go around pigs sleeping in the street, or reverse around corners with barely centimeters to spare on either side after coming to an impassable chokepoint in the narrow streets. Miraculously we made it to the airport in time for Dr. Van Veen to catch his flight.

“They just do that to mark noon,” my driver said after it ended and conversation could resume. Then the bells of the nearby cathedral began to toll. “They do that too,” he added. I rather preferred the bells.

To get to where the project would be based, we continued up into forested mountains in which pink-tiled adobes peeked out from among the trees, until we came to the town of Somoto. It had quiet cobbled streets with more pedestrians than cars, in which shopkeepers and residents often could be found sitting on their streetside steps in the evening.

My presence in Nicaragua felt uniquely peculiar in some ways. So close to home and yet so far: I lived thirty years of my life two hours from the Mexican border in California, and yet to make this first visit of mine to Mesoamerica I traveled two thirds of the way backwards around the world, from Kyrgyzstan (see June American Bee Journal) to Australia, where I now reside, only to immediately depart for Nicaragua. It would have been less than half the distance to simply travel west from Kyrgyzstan but the whole thing had become entangled in bu-

The local host organization was Fabretto — named after Padre Fabretto, a much beloved priest who had worked tirelessly and selflessly to improve conditions for the children and

Municipal building overlooking Somoto’s central square, built as a functional fortification

youth of Nicaragua. When he died suddenly in 1990, the Fabretto organization continued to operate the many schools and projects he had run. Padre Fabretto himself is currently winding his way through the slow process of being sainted.

Marcus, my Fabretto liaison, gave me a tour of their Somoto headquarters, which was also a primary school, and then we headed out to visit some beehives! A few kilometers out of town, by a mud adobe house, we pulled on yellow bee suits as chickens pecked around us. And then … we pulled on second bee suits over the first. Yes. Africanized bees.

From my personal experience, purebred African bees in Africa are not as bad as the hybridized Africanized bees I became extremely familiar with in California. The bees in Africa are certainly more aggressive than good gentle European stock, and I always approach them fully suited, but I can usually take off my gloves if not the veil, while around me beekeepers are usually wearing all kinds of haphazard homemade suits. Approaching an Africanized hive in California on the other hand, I always wear a full suit with duct tape over the zippers and ankles and wrists, and often that is not sufficient as the angry whirlwind of bees pelts my veil like thrown gravel, and by sheer force of will bees end up in my suit anyway. No one has ever proposed wearing two layers of suit in Africa, but here we are, in Nicaragua.

A whimsically decorated stingless (melipona) bee hive

produced by the Comjeruma RL co-op

It was difficult to get photos of beekeeping on this

project because it

was not possible to not be wearing

thick gloves near

the bees.

frames in them, the extra space filled with robust buttresses of burr comb.

In California we still fight it. We religiously requeen any swarm we catch in Southern California, we make sure we have the marked queen we know isn’t Africanized, and if we find they’ve requeened themselves, we re-requeen with a marked European queen. Not here in Nicaragua; they’ve accepted that Africanized bees are what they have, and so, double suits. On the plus side, Africanized bees are much more resilient against pests and they don’t seem to have to worry about varroa.

“Let’s fix this toppled hive,” I say. “They say they will do it later,” says Marcus.

“You see a problem like this, you should fix it immediately,” I say.

“They call him ‘El Gato,’” Marcus tells me the next day as we’re headed to another bee site.

“The cat?” I ask. “Yes, the cat,” he says, chuckling. “Why?” I ask. “His eyes.” We meet El Gato by his family home, another adobe farm-house in the quiet shade of large trees. Unusual for the area, his eyes are green, and they gleam intently. Cat-like. He is very young, maybe 18. We look at the fifteen hives he runs. They’re perfectly maintained, standing straight and clean, everything in order inside and out. His enthusiasm is apparent in his gleaming eyes as he answers my questions through Marcus’ translation, and talks about his bees. We grin at each other; the mutual love of a craft transcends language.

This first apiary we visited, I could tell the hives were very badly looked after. The dark burr-comb connecting frames was so thick and solid it was clear these hives hadn’t been inspected in months. One was lying on its side nearly submerged in tall grass; another leaned precariously on a failing stand. Several didn’t have enough

El Gato’s family

house

In these training projects I sometimes talk about “aptitude” for keeping bees. You can train someone without the aptitude until the drones come home, but someone who isn’t enthusiastic, or can’t overcome their apprehension of working with bees, will never become a beekeeper. Someone like El Gato is a real resource. He’ll do great, he’ll inspire, encourage, and ultimately train others around him. Later Fabretto transferred the hives from the first family to El Gato’s care. I never did learn his real name, no one calls him anything other than El Gato. At least he still has a name other than “the bee guy,” as so many of the rest of us are known in our local communities.

El Gato also showed us two stingless bee hives, they were small and oblong, like a large shoebox, and whimsically decorated to look like a house. He had gotten them pre-made from another local beekeeping co-op (Comjeruma RL). The bees (a melipona species) were small and skittish like fruit flies, and only occupied a third of the box, seeming uninterested in the rest. I was able to transfer some knowledge I myself had only picked up the other day — in Dr. Van Veen’s stingless bee presentation the hives had all been longer vertically than horizontally; I suggested that maybe these hives were made for a different species and the local stingless bees would prefer a more vertical arrangement.

We were able to try some of the stingless bee honey (they produce only a few cups of honey each per year), which was very tart. I’ve always found it very interesting how different stingless bee honey can taste from honeybee honey from presumably the same plants.

A street in the quiet mountain village of San Jose de Cusmapa Transportation parked at the “end of the road,” community of La Naranja

community called La Naranja. There, at the end of the road, we found three adobes with the cracked plaster of a Zorro film, under a lush tropical canopy and surrounded by banana trees (but no oranges that I recall, despite the name). Several young men came to receive bags of flour and supplies that Marcus was unloading from the back of the Land Cruiser for them. Then he looked at me with surprise. “This boy says he knows you.”

The stingless hives

examined were divided into three

sections but the bees seemed to prefer to occupy

It turns out he had been at the Sweet Progress training I had gone to. Small world.

just one.

As Vincent later explained to me, Sweet Progress actually partners with Fabretto, inviting Fabretto beekeepers to come down to training seminars and including Fabretto honey in their packaging since they are able to leverage a better price for the beekeepers.

On the weekend we drove an hour deeper into the mountains to the tiny mountain town of San Jose de Cusmapa, draped over some ridges high in the mountains. In this very quiet town there seemed to be fewer than half a dozen vehicles, and the clip-clop of horses or donkeys down the cobbled streets was very common. While Fabretto’s headquarters is in the national capital, this small town, founded by Padre Fabretto himself, I gather is kind of its heart and soul. I stayed in a guest house with several European volunteers working for Fabretto as teachers at the local school. One day while exploring the outskirts on horseback with a French volunteer, our local guide said, “It’s two more hours this way to Honduras.”

The hives in La Naranja were pretty good, though with a bit more small hive beetles than I’d quite like to see. I prescribed rotating out the dark comb a bit more. Small hive beetles really love dark comb.

Back in San Jose de Cusmapa, we later visited the Fabretto hive-making carpenters in their workshop. Sometimes there is a big disconnect between people making hives and the beekeepers, but it was nice to see they had already tweaked the design and were very willing to discuss potential improvements. Returning to Somoto we visited some other beekeepers, and another nearby organization that made and sold beehives. Both the technicians this organization sent to the field with us were women, and we worked for the longest sustained time of this trip going through hives. I had been concerned that in the tropical heat it might be impractical to spend hours working

“By car?” I asked naively. The French girl laughed. “No one drives here. By horse.”

We did drive on one of the days, up and down some absolutely hairraising narrow dirt roads on the mountain slopes to a very remote

Rural Nicaraguan traffic jam

bees wearing two layers of suits, but it proved doable.

I made a presentation at the Fabretto headquarters. It was supposed to be for the students but apparently there was a miscommunication and no students were informed. Instead all of Fabretto’s teachers came. My computer, which had worked an hour earlier, of course chose the moment we started to fail. Par for the course in aid work. Presentation goes on without PowerPoint. The fallback plan for a fallback audience. This is aid work.

After two short weeks I was watching the ominous volcanic plumes receding from the window of an aircraft. Simmering instability looms unmistakably over the landscape and is written with bullet-holes in the plaster walls, and yet there is such hope and selflessness here too. Despite the threat of eruptions of violence, people like Padre Fabretto and Vincent Cosgrove, their organizations and volunteers, continue undeterred. Regimes come and go, manmade plumes of smoke will again reach up into the sky, but as long as there is a need for education and hope among the people, the organizations and volunteers dedicated to providing it will remain.

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. He would also like to thank Vincent Cosgrove for patiently answering inane questions such as what kind of car he was driving when he thought up Sweet Progress, and recommends you check out https://sweet progressvirtue.org/ which has a very good introductory video.

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