Wampiti Beekeepers Association: Toni's visit

Profitable honey beekeeping-

WBA was delighted to receive Toni Downs in August 2015, when same came with donations from friends and beekeepers who wished to promote our beekeeping practice. We take this opportunity to thank once again everyone who participated in the fundraising campaign which gave us equipments like smokers, veils, candle molds, books, video CDs and many others items.
Toni came to our association at a time when we really needed help in equipment and practical skills and knowledge as well as motivation.
Toni is a beekeeper in the Caribbean and she gave us a lot of advise, guidance and solutions to some of our challenges. She also helped us on value addition to avoid vendors from buying our honey at a cheap price. She gave us ideas on how to identify markets for our products so we can keep more profit.
Toni opened our hives and experienced the behaviors of our bees, and she experienced how we keep bees in various types of beehives like log hives, Kenyan top bar hives and frame hives.
She visited different apiaries from various communities in various floral environments. Toni identified some challenges which we didn’t realize directly such as limited nectar sources and some flowering plants in our community produce less nectar and some produce more pollen.

We visited Mr. Ochuli who last year planted 2 acres of sesame (simsim) with a target of providing adequate nectar to his bees but to his surprise, his hives became more strong with bees and produced many swarms where he ended up with 15 hives in his apiary getting colonized. Therefore sesame helped to provide pollen to bees rather than nectar as was expected. We discussed this and Toni suggested Mr. Ochuli to plant simsim as an early crop for pollen and bee growth and then sunflower to follow so that there will be lots of bees from the simsim to collect the nectar and make honey from the sunflower crop.

Toni found the following:
• Members sell honey in combs to vendors at $1.1 per kilogram
• Honey production went down since flowers are limited due to deforestation (charcoal burning)
• Poor marketing skills for our products
• People cut down trees for burning charcoal as their source of income (economic activity)
• Log hives are more productive than moveable comb hives (top bars and frame hives).
• Members don’t process their honey
• Bees are not occupying new hives (swarms) as in prior years.
She restored hope in members who were losing hope in beekeeping! Along with Madame Nora, she demonstrated with members how to make products from beeswax and honey such as soap, lotion and candles. Members also learned how to dip wicks into hot wax to make candles. This excited many people, especially men, who realized that they can easily make candles for use in their houses when they run out of kerosene at late hours and can’t go to stores for more.
Well, she found African bees are not killer bees like most statements say and most beekeepers from WBA work bees during time with ease.

More news about her visit to WBA and Uganda will be available from her soon please keep checking the site.

For now we are communicating with Toni to come up with a simple piece of equipment that we can build and use it to squeeze honey out of our combs while maintaining hygiene as a group/club.
This would help us get a better price and allow us to skip vendors who use excuses such as; honey was poorly processed to persuade beekeepers into selling honey to them at a very cheap price.
See some of the activities in photos below (more photos are available in our facebook group: blessed honeybeekeepers Uganda