Checking out Kenyan beekeeping

I had the chance to visit Nairobi, Kenya, this week on a work trip, so I thought I would skip the usual tourist traps and see what I could learn about beekeeping in Kenya. It turns out there was a lot to learn! 

For one thing, my driver, Eric, was a beekeeper. He is a member of the Kamba people from eastern Kenya -- a group famous for their beekeeping skills. He keeps 20 hives at his shamba (farm or garden) about 240 km outside Nairobi. In old-school Kenyan fashion, he keeps his bees in hollow logs and scrapes the comb out (he mimicked reaching his arm inside the log) to extract the honey.

While I didn't get to see Eric's apiary, I did get him to drive me to the local beekeeping supply store. The Hive Group Ltd. runs pollination services all over the country and, as a result, sells honey from all over the country. It also has multiple retail outlets in major cities.

Among my souvenirs from Kenya is this eight-way bee escape -- a tool I had never seen before and immediately wanted to try when I do my first honey extraction in June. Last year, I fought the bees for their honey. This year, we'll outsmart them. While I had never seen such a device, they're apparently popular elsewhere in former British colonies, as this video from New Zealand can attest.

Honey from Kitui County, which is the Kamba heartland, is supposed to be some of the best honey. But it all looked amazing, to be completely honest. Like all beekeepers, the people at The Hive Group were happy to chat about bees (nyuki in Swahili).

Project Manager Richard Kyalo Philip showed Eric and me one of the modern versions of a traditional log hive. This one works like a horizontal hive with round frames instead of rectangular ones.

The curved lid folds back to give you access to the frames, so no more shoving your arm up into a log full of bees and honey comb. (Eric was intrigues.) The set costs about $100.

They also use top-bar hives, which appear to be popular in Kenya, as well as the old Western standard Langstroth hives. The shop was busy with people coming in to buy equipment and get into the business.

A story from May 19 in Kenya's Daily Nation newspaper reports that Kenya's beekeepers are struggling with hive losses and falling far short of the national demand for honey even as the number of beekeepers is growing. Like other country's they may have to start importing honey from elsewhere.

The Hive Group has been around about 10 years and is so connected to Kenya's beekeeping scene that they are Number 001 among the members of the Kenyan Beekeeping Association (which is headquartered just around the corner).

If anybody in Nairobi is looking to expand their apiary by catching/relocating a swarm, I found one for them. On my first day in town, I took a walk through Uhuru Park where I noticed a stream of bees beelining for a hole in a metal light pole.

World Bee Day

Happy World Bee Day!

Today is the day we appreciate those relentlessly busy little workers who pollinate our plants (including many of the foods we eat every day), provide us honey and beeswax candles -- all without asking for anything in return. At least none has so far.

Of course, there's the small issue for some people that honeybees are not native to the U.S. They are, to put it bluntly, an invasive species that competes with native bees for resources. And unlike those native bees -- bumblebees, carpenter bees, mason bees, leaf cutters and the like -- honey bees are not solitary and they don't leave most of the pollen they find in the flower.

Instead, they collect pollen on their back legs and nectar in their secondary stomachs and then make a bee line back to hive where they deposit both for public consumption.

Honeybees are are having a hard time again, however. This year billions of bees have died due to another apparent run of colony collapse disorder. Those are the industrial bees -- the ones who travel the country every spring pollinating almonds, squash, apples, oranges and dozens if not hundreds of other crops.

Here at Thistle Hill, our bees stay put. They forage their little hearts out on our own abundance of fruit trees, locusts, serviceberries, wineberries and loads more wild sources. And they stuff it all away in the honey supers atop their hives. 

Since the nectar flow began in April, my bees have been building up quite a supply of honey. I'll probably begin harvesting in early June. I can't wait.

An experiment

I ruined one of the wax-coated plastic foundations that the bees build their honeycombs on, so I thought I'd try something a little different and let the bees to what they do naturally.

I gave the Khaki hive, which is new and very enthusiastic, a frame with no foundation to build comb on. Two wires running across the frame are there to stabilize the comb, but otherwise, the rest is up to the bees.

They have not disappointed. After starting with a small bit of comb in the top center of the frame, they have filled the entire space with beautiful new wax and too-to-be honey. 

This kind of comb honey is very popular with certain folks, who, I assume, eat the wax along with the honey. So I'll likely take this from them when they finish, chop it up and add it to some of my jarred honey when I start harvesting in early June.

A New Queen in Town

Several weeks ago, life in the Blue hive changed suddenly. While the hive was busy as usual, the eggs and larvae disappeared. 

That only happens when the queen dies or leaves with a swarm. 

In this case, it looked like the queen had died. She was always hard to locate and may have been killed during an inspection -- something that happens sometimes.

The bees quickly set about make several new queens using recently laid eggs. Queens take 16 days to mature and about a week to mate and begin making new bees.

During the most recent inspection on May 9 I found proof that there's a new queen in town. 

Blue hive survived a bear attack last year and went on to produce almost 30 pounds of honey. They are double-tough.

Week 7: Going with the Flow

We are officially in the middle of the spring nectar flow, which means the bees are packing away all the sugary goodness they can find -- mostly from black locust, honey locust, black walnut, and black cherry at my house the moment.

The nectar flow triggers the bees to multiply rapidly. Between future bees and future honey, I am continually adding boxes and frames the apiary. The frames simulate the way bees naturally build honeycomb but hurry the process along a bit by giving them something to build on.

The process can take a few weeks as teams of young bees generate small amounts of wax from plates on their abdomens and build the honeycomb up bit by bit. What starts out looks like something from Tron eventually becomes storage for nectar, pollen and baby bees. (The rice-looking things are eggs.)