Tanzania: Bringing Beekeeping to Hunter-gatherers

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October 14, 2015 – Six of us trudge in a line across a rugged trackless landscape of thorn trees and acacias, dry washes and small hills. Our guide, equipped with a bow and arrows, picks his way across familiar terrain with no semblance of a trail. Second in line is the chief of the band of Hadzabe hunter-gatherers, followed by myself and my diminutive translator Neema. Behind us three young Hadzabe boys have been depu-

as we pass. We’re hours of walking from where the government landcruiser dropped us off, much farther from where we could get another ride. The government officials said they’d come back for us in a week, but I think anxiously about how dependable I’ve found local government functionaries in Africa.

tized to help carry supplies. They carry the materials — two mattresses, ten bee suits, and a case of bottled water — in the African fashion, on their heads, making the procession look particularly like a trail of ants. Occasionally we pass a kraal belonging to members of the Sukuma tribe — a cluster of huts surrounded by a circular barrier of thorn branches. Competitors for land with the Hadzabe, a few Sukuma men in their patterned robes eye us warily

I’ve come a long way. Not just physically, but the entire journey from the suburbs of Orange County, California, to the hinterland of Tanzania. Here I am, traveling on foot through the roadless homeland of the Hadzabe, one of the last hunter-gatherer peoples, and this hasn’t been organized by any other organization; somehow I got myself here myself.

August 2, 2011 — I was driving Jerry Hayes, then of the long-running The Classroom section of American Bee Journal (now editor of Bee Culture), back to his hotel after he had guest spoken for the Orange County Beekeepers Association. As we drove down the bland boulevards near the airport I mentioned that I’d really been inspired by articles in ABJ about beekeeping projects abroad. In particular, just the previous month there had been an article about beekeeping in Nagaland, India, by Alaskan beekeeper Stephen Petersen. I had actually emailed Stephen asking if he needed an assistant, but he did not. Jerry gave me the names of numerous organizations that put on such projects and encouraged me to apply to them. I promptly did so, and within a year I was stepping out into the humid evening air of Nigeria on a project with Winrock International.

My first morning in Africa, I was afraid to even venture out of the hotel.

Hundreds of stingless bee hives in close proximity on the slopes of Kiliminjaro. Also my Washington beekeeper friend Doug Johnson.

To be fair I wasn’t encouraged by the advice the night before that “the police aren’t safe outside at night here, neither are you,” or the fact that every day there were more Boko Haram terrorist attacks in the country. Barely had I sat there more than twenty minutes, however, when Washington beekeeper Doug Johnson came down into the lobby and told me excitedly about his recent adventures in the Danakil badlands of Ethiopia.

“Hey, want to go walk around town?” he asked me. Feeling chastised, I ventured outside with him.

November 11, 2014 — “The next speakers will be representatives of the Hadzabe people,” the translation in my headphones informs me in its tin-

During the conference technical The Prime Minister’s very orderly hives

wearing ill-fitting business suits over traditional necklaces and bracelets, as if someone put suit jackets on a few men who were utterly unfamiliar with the garb. One has a pronounced limp, it’s unclear if the others are just keeping pace with him or they’re all hobbling. They cautiously shuffle down the gentle aisle steps to the center of the room and get behind the podium. They gaze around like the entire building is fascinating and scary. Their leader, the one with the limp, speaks into the microphone in their native language. By the time the translation comes through the headphones they’re already finished and are making their way back toward the aisle.

“Please, help us. We’re very impoverished. We need help. Please help us.”

Doug and I look at each other. What was that about?

That evening, on the balcony of Mount Meru Hotel at the other end of Arusha, glasses clink around me and servers glide through the crowd with platters of hors d’oeuvres. Some attendees are dressed elegantly in fine suits or gowns, some of us are wearing our best safari-formal, having not quite anticipated a soiree hosted by Prime Minister of Tanzania Mizengo Pinda (a beekeeper, it turns out).

ny, disinterested voice. It’s been two years and six projects since I first set foot in Africa, and I’m sitting between Doug Johnson and Stephen Peterson in the tiered seating of the Arusha International Conference Center, in Tanzania, for the Apimondia Africa Symposium 2014. The conference center has a state-of-the-art United Nations look inherited from its days as the U.N. Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The audience sits in a circle of tiered seating around a podium and moderator’s dais. Reflective windows overlooking the scene from the walls house translators providing instant translation in a number of languages.

The hotel is a modern high-rise, the city is mostly dark and somnolent below us. The warm night air feels pleasant.

“You see,” Krysten Ericson of Maasai Honey is telling me, “the Hadzabe are hunter-gatherers. For thousands of years they’ve moved from place to place throughout the year. But now they leave a place and someone builds a resort there. They leave another place and someone builds a ranch there before they come back, so as they keep moving, all the best places get taken. It’s a losing game of musical chairs and now they’re in the most inhospitable scrubland.”

I see the next speakers hobbling down the aisle beside us. They’re

“Oh” I say, remembering the speakers.

“So they need to learn new ways to support themselves. My friend Dr. Kone — he’s the Regional Commissioner — has given them three hundred hives but they don’t know anything about beekeeping, we need someone to go teach them.”

“Oh wow, that sounds interesting,” I say, intrigued. “I would love to do it, I’ll see if any of the organizations I work with are interested.” She hands me her card.

tour three busloads of us spent three days traveling Tanzania visiting different beekeeping sites. If you attend a conference I strongly recommend attending the technical tour, both for the interesting sites you’ll visit, and it’s also where I get to know fellow attendees the best.

In contrast to West Africa, frame hives were common and top bar hives almost completely absent. Both frame hives and traditional cylindrical woven hives were often hung from trees. When on ground-level platforms, hives were contained in fortress-like cages against the avaricious honey badger (who seemingly can scale any fence). There is a long tradition of beekeeping in East Africa and at least one municipality we visited had a traditional beehive on the town emblem. Outside the capital of Dodoma we visited the Prime Minister’s farm, where many well-made top bar hives were housed in a series of stands.

At a few locations we were also shown stingless (mellipona) hives, which are small, and always in logs. (It seems they retrieve logs found with colonies, and will cut access openings in them, but find rehousing them into a man-made box unnecessary or counterproductive.) Later, on the slopes of Kilimanjaro, I met a beekeeper with several hundred stingless hives stacked around his house. I was surprised the local environment could support them since they only fly a few hundred meters, but apparently it did!

A typical hive enclosure to protect against honey badgers. Note also hanging traditional hive on left.

Stingless bee honey is sold for a much higher price than honey bee honey, both because it’s only produced at a fraction of the volume, and because it’s believed to have medicinal value (because it tastes like medicine!). It’s not commonly believed to be shelfstable — suspected to have a high enough water content to ferment — though a bottle I bought appeared to be in pretty good condition years later.

Returning home to California, I continued to ponder the plight of the Hadzabe and if I could find anyone to help them. I contacted various aid organizations but none appeared able to take on another project in Tanzania. Finally, I thought to myself, “This is a worthy cause, I’ll raise money for it myself!”

I also found the collection of donations a convenient solution to the moral quandary of what to do when people insisted they wanted to pay me for “removing” a swarm I was perfectly happy to collect for free. “Oh, I wasn’t going to charge but if you’d like to donate to a good cause ...” (which any one of you could also do to raise funds for a charity ...).

I formed the nonprofit Bee Aid International and began fundraising. This, it turns out, isn’t as easy as it looks and/or I’m not very good at it. The GoFundMe page earned a whopping $60. Speaking at beekeeping clubs was much more effective (special thanks to the Los Angeles County Beekeepers Association and Orange County Beekeepers Association). Speaking at Rotary Clubs was less effective, only one of which (Mission Viejo Rotary Club) supported me with a donation as a result of presenting at their meetings (and while I’m thanking clubs I’d like to recognize the more recent donations of the Ballarat Beekeeping Club and Yarra Valley Beekeeping Club, both in Australia).

By and by the date I had set for the trip arrived, and I had raised a significant chunk of money, though the remaining costs would be made up from my own pocket — at least I’m comfortably safe from any accusations of profiting from the nonprofit.

To get to the Hadzabe, I flew into Nairobi, Kenya (cheaper than Arusha), took the bus across empty stretches of savanna to Arusha, where I met up with my interpreter (whom I’d met the year before). From there we got a ride with my contact, Dr. Kone, to Singida town beside a lake filled with flamin-

Traditional hives on a municipal seal

A flat tire in the middle of nowhere is a mandatory part of the adventure.

gos. I was in for a surprise on arrival — I had assumed he was some kind of government regional development official, he is so humble and unassuming. It wasn’t until he was greeted by two platoons of soldiers saluting at attention that I began to wonder who exactly he was. It was only then that I discovered I’d been corresponding with the governor of Singida region, population 1.3 million!

Dr. Kone directed some local government officials (a mayor he had just appointed) to give me a ride from there to the nearest bush school to the Hadzabe, and finally we hiked several hours to reach the Hadzabe village of Kipamba. Altogether it took more than a week to get from Nairobi to Kipamba.

Kipamba village didn’t resemble the tight clusters of habitations I’d seen elsewhere in Africa, but was perhaps positively urban by Hadzabe standards. Family dwellings had been constructed each a few hundred yards apart, out of sight among the thorn trees and acacias. Each family had a rudimentary brick shed-like structure I think they’d been persuaded to build as an “improvement,” and several grass wigwam-like huts they preferred. (I would agree, they had much better airflow, the brick sheds were dark and sweltering.) Only a few hundred Hadzabe live in Kipamba out of a population of a few thousand, many of whom are still entirely nomadic.

We always try to get women involved in beekeeping projects but it was a bit of a surprise to me when I got my trainees assembled and it was all women. Apparently the men were all out hunting with their bows and arrows. Another interesting cultural note: They were the first and only

by someone who perhaps only had a quick glance at one before being set to making them. The frames inside were double-wide and only half as tall as the box. As such, you won’t be surprised to learn the comb inside pretty much ignored the frames as guides and it was impossible to do any frame manipulation. This unfortunately made a lot of hands-on training I’d have liked to have done very difficult. I did my best to explain the changes to the hive design that were necessary, though the hives were constructed far away in Singida town so I knew they would probably have little ability to influence changes. I had hoped to meet the carpenters but in the end wasn’t able to, but I explained the problem to Dr. Kone when I saw him after, and followed up by emailing hive specifications to him.

people I’ve met who readily eat bee larvae. I explained crucial rudiments of beekeeping and we prepared for our first hands-on beekeeping!

A small number of people have questioned the moral advisability of potentially changing the Hadzabe’s unique culture, but hunter-gathering results in no income to spend on education for their children or necessary medical treatment. On top of this, having already been pushed into lesser productive land, what they’ve done for the past 10,000 years may no longer be adequate to support them. The best we can do is help them gain a foothold in sustainable crafts such as beekeeping. I greatly admire their self-sufficiency and ancient culture, but to refuse to teach them new skills because of this I think would be a patronizing and morally unsupportable position.

The beehives they had were all hung up high in acacia trees, ten to fifteen to a tree. Because they were in amongst the village, such as it is, we prepared to do our beekeeping an hour before sunset to minimize disturbance in the village. Previously they had absolutely no protective gear and any harvesting they did must have been a pretty much smash-andgrab affair at night.

Pierce Manufacturing (you might recognize the name, as they’re a preeminent maker of hot-knives) had generously gifted ten brand new still-in-the-packaging bee suits to this project, which made a crucial difference, allowing ten trainees at a time to participate in hands-on activities, and will certainly make a solid impact on the Hadzabe’s ability to do beekeeping in the future.

While in the village, Neema and I stayed in the small shell of a house that had recently been constructed for a potential future doctor. We slept on the mattresses we’d carried in with us, and had also brought a week’s worth of food — mainly spaghetti and beans (because there’d be no refrigeration and modern dehydrated hiking food wasn’t exactly available). We very soon got tired of this monotonous fare, but the Hadzabe were happy to combine ours with theirs, so I got to eat a variety of unidentified small animals and they enjoyed the beans and pasta. Some of their foods such as baobab porridge were quite nice in fact. In the evenings Neema and I would usually sit with the chief’s large family as they roasted dinner over a camp fire under the infinite stars. Looking around, the surrounding hills were dotted with other families’ fires, and not a street lamp or flicker of a TV was visible anywhere.

Climbing up the trees to get the hives down inevitably resulted in the bees being thoroughly stirred up by the time they reached the ground. Two immediate recommendations were to place hives on platforms near the ground (though honey badgers admittedly can be a huge pest in Tanzania), and/or to at least spread the hives out more like one-a-tree — there are more than enough trees and that should increase the odds of swarms inhabiting empty hives (nearly all beekeeping I’ve seen in Africa depends on swarms moving into hives to increase numbers), and prevents one angry hive from upsetting the others.

The hives themselves were constructed like a caricature of a hive,

At times like this I would contemplate how this scene could be 100,000 B.C.

The day the government officials were supposed to collect us, I was pleasantly surprised to find that they did indeed arrive. They took us back to Singida, where I learned Dr. Kone was in Dar Es Salaam on the coast, so we took a twelve-hour bus to meet him there. I had planned to go from there to meet with a beekeeping cooperative on the Zanzibar islands, but Dr. Kone advised me it would be very unstable there with the election that was about to take place, so instead I took buses a thousand miles to Kampala, Uganda, to meet with a local aid organization there that had requested assistance in beekeeping. But that, clearly, is another story.

Meanwhile in the Hadza village of Kipamba, Maasai Honey was able to base a full-time beekeeper named Zombe starting in 2016 and continuing for 18 months, to provide comprehensive training and guidance. Kipamba village now produces an excellent crop of honey both for their own consumption and sale through Maasai Honey. Their most recent crop was thirty 5-gallon buckets of honey, enough to make a significant impact on their small economy.

Krysten Ericson began Maasai Honey in 2008 after seeing the lack of opportunity faced by women of the Ololosokwan Village on the edge of the Serengeti in northern Tanzania. She enlisted local community members and organized training from experienced beekeepers in the region, and in 2010 the Maasai Honey program began. They built a certified production facility in Ololosokwan Village and a retail outlet in the nearest larger town, Arusha, in addition to selling much of their honey to safari lodges in the region, and, of course, maintaining the support connection to Kipamba. At present they are training 11 women, and have 4 staff members in the village and 3 in Arusha. Krysten reports that coronavirus has really severely impacted sales. Not only the honey sales, but much of the Arusha economy is related to safari tourism so the area has been hit hard economically.

Bee Aid International (beedev.org) still exists and donations collected are being saved up until I or another qualified person can travel to the sites in Uganda, which I may write about in a later article. I haven’t learned my lesson and have started another Go- FundMe campaign, this time to raise

The stingless hives have a removable top. One breaks the honey “pots,” and tilts it so the honey (which isn’t very viscous) will flow through a hole at one end, through a simple filter, to be collected.

Climbing the acacia to bring hives down for an evening inspection

Young Hadzabe men looking at beekeeping pictures on my laptop. I think their homemade chairs are very admirable.

money for PPE for Venezuelan doctors, and it is accruing donations at a much, much better pace.

depending on donations to survive until this blows over. I encourage you to look at their excellent webpage (www.maasaihoney.org) and consider donating to support this valuable organization.

In general, I think everyone should visit Africa at least once in their life and the region of northern Tanzania has some of the best tourism infrastructure. When the world opens up again, you should consider a visit. I can recommend the tourism company operated by enthusiastic beekeeper Simon Mtuy (https://www. nomadicexperience.com/), who can organize some amazing experiences for you as well as some meetings with beekeepers.

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.

Maasai Honey has been going strong, but with 80% of their sales depending on tourism they are now

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