Why Farmers in Zimbabwe Are Shifting to Bees
Without the need for dedicated land or water, honeybees offer a more stable climate future.
Without the need for dedicated land or water, honeybees offer a more stable climate future.
I’m not an expert beekeeper; My cousin in County Longford is an expert beekeeper, and I’ve learned a lot from him. I’m a guy who had a beehive, and got some honey once a year. I’m just writing about what it was like to get the hive, so you can avoid some of the same mistakes.
Since then—and in the face of rising anti-immigrant sentiment in the European Union over the past decade—Bybi has worked to integrate new arrivals to Copenhagen by taking care of honeybees.
Today, Honey Fingers, the Melbourne-based apiary run by architect Nic Dowse, carries the torch for artists interested in honey with a space for this growing community.
A natural beekeeper I know who adheres to all the latest trends in chemical-free beekeeping lost 40 of his 48 hives in 2017. And according to the state apiarist, up to 80 percent of Tennessee’s honeybee colonies died in the 2016-2017 period. As Mr. Salatin would say, “Folks, this ain’t normal.”
I wanted to connect as many ‘honey peoples’ as possible because I felt that they had been forgotten. The ‘bee custodians’, as I like to call them as opposed to beekeepers, had held the space for bees throughout our previous generations. And yet the hunter-gatherer is pitched at the bottom of the strata of livelihoods.
Honeybees have seen a dramatic rise in public awareness and beekeeping has exponentially increased in popularity, however the mindset of industrial farming is still alarmingly prevalent in beekeeping practice, and how it is discussed and taught to the next generation of beekeepers.
In considering the Sun Hive alongside my personal experiences of distress, I do not mean to use the bees as a metaphor, to plunder nature for her poetry. Instead I wish to suggest that our reductive attitudes towards both bees and human health may be symptomatic of a prevailing mindset of exploitation and control.
We no longer have rights to share this content as Seedstock are moving to a subscription model. As of 21/12/16, this content is still available to view at this link.
Are monofloral honeys all they’re cracked up to be, or are they yet another empty money-making scheme, exposing vulnerable honeybees to the toxic environments of monocultures?
Bees are essential to food production. In response to the massive, global colony collapse problem, myriad urban beekeeping organizations have cropped up around the country.
Traditional African beekeeping methods offer better protection against hive-destroying varroa mites than pesticides which, according to a study, are losing their potency.