Beekeeping in Guinea

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In the Republic of Guinea in July of 2014, there were an estimated 2,995 Kenyan topbar (KTB) hives, 165,625 traditional hives, 3,748 cases of Ebola (some 500 still actually alive at the time), and there was me trying to stuff 2.8 million francs into a refrigerator. You may feel a bit confused about this. I understand. In addition to simple “Guinea,” there’s Guinea- Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, Papua New Guinea, as well as Guyana and French Guyana. Guinea (sometimes called Conakry Guinea, using the capital city to distinguish it) is just south of Guinea-Bissau on the Western bulge of Africa.

Guinea uses the Guinean Franc, of which at the time the largest note was 10,000 francs, equal to about $1.48. The $414, meant for all the up-country expenses of a beekeeping project, translated at that rate to several bricks of bills. I felt like a druglord with these blocks of currency, and my hotel room had no safe. It did, however, have a refrigerator with a lock built into the door. The key was conveniently left in it. So I found myself locking my hoard of cold hard cash and laptop in the fridge. This may have seemed a cool solution, but an additional complication appeared when I took my laptop out to use it and the crisply chilled computer immediately started gathering so much condensation from the humidity in the room that I feared for its safety, and thereafter unplugged the fridge.

In 1953 Winthrop Rockefeller founded the first model farm that would eventually become what is today the international agricultural development organization Winrock International. Winrock International now implements 150 ongoing projects in over 40 countries, including the

USAID farmer-to-farmer program, which I am grateful to have the opportunity to participate in as a beekeeping volunteer. Winrock is based in Little Rock, Arkansas, but has local field staff in all the countries in which they operate, and I have found all their staff to be genuine and sincere people with a passion for their work.

four hours of slogging through traffic to get out of the capital, Conakry, which is built on a long peninsula. When it’s not raining in Conakry, the sun simmers the many mouldering puddles for rather fetid effect. At one point a nearby car tipped so far into a water-filled pot-hole it was left with only two wheels in contact with the pavement, as helpless as an overturned beetle. Once one gets out of the city the countryside is quite nice though, hilly, and green, sparsely populated with little clusters of huts steaming in the sun. The bucolic landscape was punctuated with the occasional bustling little town of decaying old colonial buildings, and in each of these as we got further into the interior we saw fewer people in jeans, more traditional garb, and eventually the occasional woman in a full burqa. Frequently we passed roadside stands where plastic bottles of some red looking liquid was being sold. I naively asked what this popular drink

Winrock’s local partner for beekeeping projects in Guinea is the Federation des Apiculteurs de Guinée (FAPI), which consists of a federation of 25 unions of a total of 127 local beekeeping groups and three related artisan groups (woodworkers, metalsmiths, and tailors). In 2014 they had 5,301 members (including 1,200 women). FAPI’s headquarters is in the interior in the town of Labé, and all three projects I would eventually do in Guinea were in the vicinity of Labé.

“Our normal driver died yesterday,” I was informed, so Winrock Guinea had a new driver, Kamera, take me out to the field. It took about

Some of the beautiful huts very much in current use

FAPI trainer Khalidou Balde demonstrates opening a hive.

was and was informed this is how gasoline is sold here.

Arriving in Labé the first time, we stopped in front of the “tourist hotel” in town but after Kamera went in to talk to them, he came back and we continued, without it being quite clearly explained to me. Twenty minutes later we were pulling into the cute little village of Sanpiring, where the project was to be based. It consisted of mainly rectangular cottages and a smaller number of thatched huts, with small fields of corn between them. The whole village was encircled by a low outer wall, beyond which the bush remained largely in its natural state, goats grazed, and a few hundred beehives sat under trees in the surrounding area. I learned that I

For every Kenyan topbar (KTB) hive in Guinea there are about 50 traditional hives. They are most commonly woven (sometimes reinforced with not-so-picturesque modern plastic tarp), but sometimes they’re made from hollow logs. They’re cheap ($0.85-$2.14 per) and involve no management. Basically one waits until they think it’s full, lights a fire under it at night, and collects everything. This produces very low quality honey since inevitably brood and bees are smashed in amongst the harvest, so promoting topbars is a clear improvement. I figured as long as they were clearly going to continue producing and using traditional hives they may as well improve them too, so I suggested they add a removable back-end like they do in Ethiopia so they can remove the honey comb without destroying the hive (in linear hives the bees tend to put the brood in the “front” and the honey in the back), Everyone gets involved in soap making.

in California were enthusiastically repaired overnight, fit for use the very next day. We (aid organizations in general) don’t like to make gift giving a big part of these projects, as it fosters the expectation that they can just wait to get all kinds of useful material goods from projects instead of making them themselves, but the suits are certainly useful for enabling participation. Lack of adequate protective gear is a serious impediment among the local beekeepers. I always include a lesson on making a suit from available materials but in the meantime the donated suits are very valuable.

Most participants came from nearby, but a number came from distant villages for the training, and we also made visits to a number of other villages. The second project in 2015 was conducted in the village of Doumba an hour west of Labé, a verdant treefilled village with a greater number of large beautiful thatched huts; and the third project in 2016 was in the village of Lafou on the road to Senegal, where the Akon Lighting Africa charity had blotted out the stars with electric lampposts. On this third project we also had a Peace Corps volunteer, Monica, join us (see also her account of it at: https://moniinmali.wordpress.com/2016/08/02/beekeeping-t raining/). Peace Corps had withdrawn from Guinea during the 2014 Ebola outbreak, and she had been posted to Mali, but then the instability in Mali caused her to be evacuated back to the States, but as of 2016 the Peace Corps was back in Guinea.

would be staying in someone’s spare room in the village, and also that “we had a Peace Corps volunteer named Dave here, but he died.”

Days in the village began with no reference to a clock, when enough participants had gathered in the small meeting hall. All three Guinea projects had around 30 participants in the main group, of which about ten would be women. Until around noon we’d have classroom sessions on bee biology or beekeeping methodology. After lunch about six to eight of us would go out for practical hands-on beekeeping. Special thanks here are due for California beekeeper David Marder who donated a number of old beekeeping suits. Rips and tears that weren’t worth the trouble of repairing

but my translator, Monsieur Damba, refused to translate anything that seemed to be promoting traditional hives.

I was also told there were some “duh-dunt” hives some French volunteers had left years ago. This was a mystery to me until I finally saw these weathered old square wooden hives in the bush, and I realized the word they were saying was “Dadant.” Dadant was once a common alternative set of dimensions for a hive (originally 10.5” x 19” though there were a few modified versions). Because I didn’t have a measuring tool at hand I was unable to ascertain whether these were actual Dadant style hives, hives bought originally from the Dadant company, or perhaps the word “dadant” was being used generically for frame hives (the original Charles Dadant was a French emigrant to the U.S. and popularized frame hives in France).

In Guinea there are almost no frame hives because they lack access to the precision-cut lumber or extractors. As with similar places in Africa, the intention is to get people into bee management through KTB hives before trying to move on to frame hives.

Questioning of the participants indicates they get 33-55 lbs. honey per Kenyan (KTB) and 11-22 lbs. per traditional hive annually. They get between $3.26 and $4.37 per lb. for their honey, so a single KTB will earn them $107.58 - $240.35 a year. With a per capita GDP of just $742.45, that means even a single hive can make a big difference, and we all know once you get started you don’t stay with only one hive for long.

FAPI has two trainers on staff, a young man named Khalidou and a young woman named Aissatou. Both have graduated from a local agricultural college. Aissatou’s inspiring example I believe helps combat gender expectations in the country, and Khalidou is a very good trainer. Additionally, seeing their familiar faces at all three projects gave me a comforting sense of continuity.

Khalidou teaches the others to open the hives away from themselves “in case there’s a reptile,” which, I assume there’s a story here. (Another unusual pest I was informed about: “They have another problem in the mountains — chimpanzees.”) Khalidou skillfully narrates to the others what he’s doing and why, in the local language. I interject when I see something we haven’t discussed yet, since Khalidou always has the basics well

FAPI trainer

Aissatou demonstrates how

to prepare aloe

vera for use in balms and lotions.

in hand, and what I say must be translated. Often the topbar width is off, causing cross-combing. Fortunately I have a high tech measuring tool I use on any suspect topbars — they need to be 32mm for African bees, which happens to be the exact width of a Coca-Cola or Fanta bottle cap. Length of topbars is less crucial but I keep telling them they should standardize them so they’re interchangable between hives.

cifically a comb attached to a topbar). Due to high absconding behavior one just expects the bees to leave in dearth seasons and return when conditions are good. Swarm capturing is hazardous because it’s as likely to be a bad tempered absconded colony as a docile swarm. The bees aren’t usually terribly aggressive, and we can usually take our gloves off, though I wouldn’t mess with them without a suit and some gloves close at hand, in case I need them. I can only recall one occasion where the bees became so aggressive we all had to spend awhile walking broad circles through foliage to lose our angry bee followers before returning to the village.

The African bees (Apis mellifera adonsonii in this case) scuttle about the frames more than European bees, and often after going through all the frames in a topbar nearly all the bees are in a cluster underneath the hive (while not technically correct, I inevitably end up referring to a comb attached to a topbar as a “frame,” out of habit and because neither “comb” nor “topbar” alone I feel adequately conveys spe-

On the days we made wax products, the local young women would suddenly appear like a flock of colorful birds, clad in beautiful brightly patterned dresses. Previously they’ve

Downtime: Karim makes tea while Khalidou and Fatimata look on.

Some of the people involved in the third project, including the Peace Corps volunteer, Monica

had little use for beeswax, often simply discarding it. So I teach them how to make lotions and balms and candles and … as of the third project I was informed they were still not significantly making or selling wax products. Not everything is a success.

The interpreter for the second and third projects, Monsieur Damba

The three projects in Guinea were the first time I’ve been able to return to the same sites in subsequent years, and I loved having the opportunity see the people involved in the first project looking visibly more prosperous two years later. These were also the first projects in which I stayed with locals in the village instead of at a hotel. When we were done for the day, instead of sitting alone in a bad hotel with unreliable electricity, I wiled away the hours with the locals on the porch of the little house we were staying in, liberated from the expectation there’d ever be electricity. A transistor radio kept us apprised of the latest in the 2014 World Cup, which everyone was following, and the dire reports of the spreading Ebola outbreak all around us.

Several months earlier, a two year old boy named Emile playfully entered a hollow tree in the forests of a southern province of Guinea. Deforestation had driven fruit bats from a different area into this hollow tree, and it seems they carried the Ebola virus. The boy soon died, followed by his immediate family, followed by most of his village, in a rapidly expanding wave of death. Ebola, it turns out, is extremely contagious by direct contact, and once contracted, one develops a cough, a headache, an achy back, and there is a 66% chance that within the next 21 days you’ll die while bleeding out of your eyes. There’s no cure, and it was all around us, though not in the immediate vicinity of Labé yet. It was present in the capital, however, and my big fear was that we’d become unable to leave through the capital and have to embark on some overland odyssey to unstable Mali or distant Senegal.

I tried to determine what obstacles they were encountering but have not yet been able to sort it out. If you are in the market for completely chemical free beeswax though, I can tell you where you can find a lot of it with no current buyers.

But meanwhile in the village of Sanpiring, the children all ran laughing amongst the huts like a school of minnows, the young girls sat together doing their homework, and the adults visited their brothers and cousins, slowly collecting together on porches every evening. Baro Kassambara, my Winrock colleague in the field for the first project, would slowly make tea by pouring the brew repeatedly between a cup and kettle as the stars came out above us and the only light that remained was the glowing embers under the kettle and lightning flashing on the horizon. The call to prayer rings out from his phone and we all make our way by flashlight along the narrow paths hedged in by corn to the little village mosque. Baro

himself had been born in Timbuktu in neighboring Mali, but as radical insurgents flying a sinister black flag had taken over that portion of Mali, he was temporarily in Guinea.

I found a lot of problems faced by the beekeeping sector in Guinea to be larger than individual beekeeping skills. Because most of the beehives I visited were communally owned, no individual person was taking responsibility for them and they were often poorly maintained as a result. There followed concerns about the equal distribution of profits, and questions about the responsibilities of the local groups versus the unions and federation. The Federation, with staff and (some) resources, is in a good position to buy honey and professionally pack and distribute it, but they are constrained by resources and have been buying on credit and only able to pay the beekeepers months later, which is hard for the beekeepers. There are corruption problems trying to sell in the capital, and significant licensing problems that must be overcome to export honey to America or Europe.

Because I am not actually an expert at exporting honey out of Africa, through my own organization, Bee Aid International, I brought in someone who was. In Ethiopia in 2012 I had met Daniel Gebremeskel who runs a honey processing plant and honey export business there (https:// comel.fm.alibaba.com/) (see my article in September 2012 ABJ). Ethiopians don’t end up in Guinea often (they’re 3,500 miles apart, compared to only about 2,500 miles between Los Angeles and New York, and getting to New York rarely leaves you stranded in Cote D’Ivoire for three days), so it was almost as interesting a cultural interchange between Daniel and the locals as it was for me. He gave a very good presentation to the FAPI staff, sharing his substantial experience with them. He hoped to return as well but there have been very few beekeeping USAID projects since 2016 so I haven’t been back myself.

Another problem faced in Guinea is seemingly punitive French policies that continue to this day. In 1958 Guinea was the first French colony to declare independence, which they did while declining to join the loose French commonwealth of other former colonies. As a result, France ripped up all the railways and other infrastructure they had built before departing. There had apparently been a honey processing plant in Labé but

A topbar comb ready to be harvested

its equipment was all either removed or wrecked. There also had formerly been an airport in Labé which is now an empty field people attempt to build on, but the government harasses them because on paper it’s still an airfield. In the one remaining airport with intercontinental flights, in the capital, an employee told me Air France owns the airport and charges any other airline by the minute to be on the ground there, which explains why my Ghanabound outward flight embarked and

disembarked passengers simultaneously in what appeared to be a desperate hurry. But on the bright side the French legacy has left them with croissants which utterly eclipse what I thought was a “croissant” in California, so there’s that.

Driving back to the capital we passed Ebola response medical convoys headed into the interior. Twice on our return, at police checkpoints they made us completely unload the car for their inspection, in presumed

Some locally made candles

Author, Ibro the Winrock country director for Guinea, and Daniel from Ethiopia

hopes we’d bribe them to let us pass unmolested, as taxis with as many as 13 locals in a sedan style car were waved past. With Daniel, whom I had invited and therefore felt like I

own sake). Less than a mile from the hotel in Conakry, in the dark of night, soldiers detained us for two hours, which was only defused after we sent calls up the line to the embassy. Welcome to Conakry. We had made it!

Thirty hours after arriving in the capital, I was lying in the hotel bed, listening to the beautifully warbling call to prayer in the pre-dawn hours, and the pouring rain pattering serenely against the windows, coughing, with a headache and aching back.

epiloGue:

After 21 days of quarantine I was pleased to find myself still alive, and on day 22 I was on a flight to Tanzania to work with the Hadzabe hunter gatherers, but that’s another story!

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.

was playing host to, I felt particularly self-conscious about these instances of blatant corruption (I’m sure you’ll agree that government obstructionism in Ethiopia seems to be for its

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