Bangladesh Field Team reflects on the successful impacts F2F has had on the Bangladesh Association for Social Advancement (BASA).  

“F2F assistance helped with specialty knowledge related to beekeeping including honey, pollen and royal jelly production. It has been immensely beneficial. The benefits continue as the trained people have trained others.” – AKM Shirajul Islam, Executive Director

Pollen production can be an excellent opportunity for the beekeepers of Bangladesh to maximize profitability and obtain sustainability, however, given the lack of knowledge and skills to produce high-value bee-products including, high-quality honey, the potential benefit of beekeeping as a business has not realized.  

Currently, Bangladeshi beekeepers are extracting only honey and wax from their beehives, whereas they can easily collect other high-value bee-products, like pollen. Pollen is an important high-value bee-product for its nutritional and medicinal benefit to human health and more importantly, for its use as nutritious bee feed. Bees feed on honey and pollen during the flowering seasons of nectar-bearing plants, usually eight months out of the year in Bangladesh.  The beekeepers suffer high costs to feed their bees in the flowering offseason. In that period, they use sugar syrup and pollen substitute, which do not provide good nourishment for their bees. As a result, the beekeepers lose a significant number of bees, ultimately affecting their honey production and profitability. When the bees collect nectar from flowers, they bring along pollen trapped on their legs which they use inside the hives to make their food. Pollen can be collected easily using traps at the entrance of beehives. Collection of these pollen grains using a pollen trap can help the beekeepers gain additional benefits from beekeeping which will lead to better sustainability for their business. Beekeepers can use a portion of the collected pollen to feed the bees in the offseason and sell the rest to earn additional income.   

Having worked a long time to improve beekeeping and organize beekeepers in order to develop a strong apiary industry, the NGO, Bangladesh Association for Social Advancement (BASA), realized the potential of collecting and processing pollen to help strengthen beekeeping as a profitable business. As part of this initiative, and with the funding support of Palli Karma-Sahayak Foundation (PKSF), BASA worked with the Farmer-to-Farmer (F2F) volunteer, Michael Embrey, to train 64 BASA staff and their beneficiary beekeepers on the potential, collection and processing of pollen, making pollen traps, and the different uses of pollen. The volunteer brought three different types of pollen trap as samples from the US for demonstration and helped design and build pollen traps applicable for local beehives utilizing local materials and expertise. During the training, the volunteer demonstrated how to collect pollen using a locally made trap and how to process the collected pollen. In addition, the volunteer conducted training on the improved beekeeping, marketing and partnership development for enhancing beekeeping in Bangladesh. 

After the F2F training, BASA built 118 pollen traps and distributed them among 118 beekeepers. BASA staff helped the beekeepers install the traps in their beehives and demonstrated the techniques of collection and processing pollen using F2F training information. Because of the endeavor, the beekeepers were able to collect 98 Kg pollen in the recent mustard flowering season from December 2017 to February 2018. The production level ranged from 0.65 to 1.5 Kg per beekeeper. This type of pollen production success is a first for the beekeepers in Bangladesh.  With this success, the beekeepers are relieved from having to pay to feed their bees in the offseason and they are planning to expand their facility of pollen collection as well as explore access to local and export markets with the assistance of BASA in the next season. Mr. Jagadish Chandra Saha, an experienced Beekeeping Expert in the country and Consultant at BASA stated, “Based on F2F training we provided pollen traps and technical support to our beneficiary beekeepers and have had tremendous results from them in producing pollen. We hope to disseminate these techniques to a wider section of beekeepers. We’re confident that this will add a new dimension and help flourish the beekeeping industry in Bangladesh.”  

According to Mr. Rezaul Karim, Value Chain Facilitator, BASA, the beekeepers who observed or heard about this success are very excited to install pollen traps in their beehives to collect pollen. BASA is planning to disseminate F2F volunteer techniques of pollen production to their 314 beneficiary beekeepers with special emphasis on young men and women in collaboration with PKSF, two other beekeepers welfare associations: Bangladesh Beekeepers Foundation and Mouchashi Kallyan Samities. Meanwhile, the Government of Bangladesh has emphasized to the Department of Agriculture Extension the desire to introduce beekeeping all over the country in order to increase oilseed production through bee pollination, as well as increase honey production to help increase food security. In this current context, the noble initiative of BASA is expected to expand beekeeping as a profitable and sustainable business and help create entrepreneurial opportunities for young, unemployed, rural men and women.  

Osun State in southwestern Nigeria is lush, its rolling hills clad in low forests, cacao stands, and fields of corn, yam, pepper and cassava. Oil palms dot the landscape, and the bright reddish oil extracted from the palm’s pulp can be bought at any roadside stand. It also happens to be a great area for raising bees, which is why I was there.

For 10 days in late June, I worked with faculty from Osun State Polytechnic (OSPoly) and community members from the nearby town of Iree as a volunteer for the USAID John Ogonowski and Doug Bereuter Farmer-to-Farmer Program. OSPoly is in the opening stages of establishing an agriculture program, so I came to teach a short beekeeping course, establish an apiary and help the staff develop a curriculum.

We learned about bee behavior and hive management, practiced rendering wax and making secondary hive products, built a smoker, stalked bees and talked honey.

It was wonderful to share my passion for bees and beekeeping with such an interested and excited group of staff, students and community members. And the assistance and friendship of Winrock International’s Nigeria staff made the trip a true pleasure. I look forward to keeping in touch with the staff at OSPoly as they continue to get their beekeeping program up and running.

Today’s blog post is from apiculture expert Kris Fricke after his second Farmer-to-Farmer assignment in Guinea, where he provided technical assistance to the Beekeepers Federation in Guinea (FAPI) on modern beekeeping practices and farming as a business:

“It was fun returning to an area I had previously been near and seeing some of the same people. I can tell the relationship feels much more real and solid when I’m not someone they’ll never see again. I am enjoying building on my relationship with FAPI and the FAPI staff. Over the last year I have at numerous times thought about FAPI and how best to help them, and I’m sure I will continue even more so to feel personally committed to this partnership.

Visiting Sanpiring [where the previous volunteer assignment was conducted] and seeing everyone was one of the most joyful things I can remember in a long time. ‘Many people have come here before, but only you have come back,’ they told me.

Saying goodbye [at the end of the assignment] is always hard, but for the first time there was more or less an understanding that FAPI will be having me back next year, so I was able to say ‘I’ll see you next year!’”

Kris manages his own non-profit, Bee Aid International. Read more about his experience in Guinea on his site: http://www.worldbeedev.org/#!Guinea-2015/chor/5600a4f10cf2a7bb74b33a60

Today’s blog post comes from volunteer Ed Levi, after completing his Farmer-to-Farmer (F2F) assignment in Bangladesh:

“I’ve done numerous F2F assignments around the world but this is my first contribution to the blog. In fact, this is the first time I’ve ever contributed to any blog. But not only was I asked to blog about my assignment but I’m also aware of the value and the fact that this last assignment was something special. I thought I’d share.

Having done three previous assignments in Bangladesh, I was already familiar with many of the staff and some of the issues which needed addressing in my sector of honey production and all that involves. But this latest assignment was clearly different. That’s not to say that not all assignments have their particulars that create interesting challenges and, when successful, however large or small, have their rewards.

The host for this assignment was actually another branch of Winrock International and the USAID for Climate-Resilient Ecosystems and Livelihoods (CREL) Program for Bangladesh. After my briefing with Winrock’s F2F staff in Dhaka I was handed over to the Dhaka CREL staff for more briefing. In fact, I’d been in touch with both staffs some weeks prior to my arrival and was already excited about this assignment. Beyond CREL being involved in the issues its name infers, they were ready and prepared to make some real differences in the honey sector of Bangladesh.

This assignment involved the bees and the products they produce in the Sundarbans. The Sundarbans is a National Forest in the southwest of the county and is really the mouth of the delta of the major rivers that make up Bangladesh. It is the largest mangrove forest in the world and the home to the largest population of Bengal tigers. Although it is called a forest, it is in fact, a huge jungle with no roads and no human inhabitants. It has a complex network of waterways that are used for access and transportation. It is also the seasonal home of the wild, giant specie of honeybees known as Apis dorsata.

Apis dorsata, like all honeybees live in a complex, family structure and require nectar and pollen for their food and offspring development. Unlike the bees we normally know, Apis dorsata refuses to live in cavities but rather hangs large single combs from branches and eaves. It also migrates with the flower’s seasons and is known to go as far as 200 km. The wild bees of the Sundarbans are known to go as far north as northern Bangladesh, then come south for the mustard and other crops into the middle of the country and then down into the Sundarbans for the wild flowers of the jungle. They start arriving in the Sundarbans in late September and into October. At each location, colonies need to build new nests and collect new honey.

For thousands of years the honey hunters (Mawalis) of the Sundarbans have collected that honey. They don’t keep bees but hunt them and collect their honey. For years they did this in ways that weren’t sustainable as they didn’t understand that taking the brood with the honey was reducing the wild bees’ populations. But some 15 years ago they learned more sustainable methods and now, for the most part, leave the brood and some amount of honey in place when the harvest their crops.

The goal of this assignment was to further the goals of sustainable practices and help the Mawalis through the development of a value-chain to produce a high quality product that will better support them and also create other related industries for the people who live in the adjacent towns around the Sundarbans. Clearly this assignment was not expected to reach the goal but to size up the potential and design a strategy for working toward that goal. This required some organization building, working with local authorities, defining some quality standards and ways they can be implemented, suggesting how the value-chain can be structured and suggest adjacent industries that can both feed into the Mawalis’ work and process the products in ways that respect the qualities of honey produced in the Sundarbans. It was also noted that the by-product of beeswax from the wild bees had special qualities that are worthy of value-added processes that can be done in cottage industry settings.

For me, it was all exciting; to be working with wild honeybees, with the traditions of thousands of years of honey hunters/collectors and helping to design a structure that would maintain the integrity of the jungle and its bees while creating some very special products. All along the way I worked with a very capable team of people and with people who were as excited as I am about the prospects. What can be better than a quality product that comes from the wild bees that collect the honey produced from the nectars of the flowers of a protected jungle?”

–Ed Levi

Our May volunteer of the month is apiculture expert Ed Levi, who has volunteered with Winrock’s Farmer-to-Farmer (F2F) program since 1995. Twenty years and 10 countries later, Ed continues to show his dedication to helping those in need around the world.

Over the years, Ed has introduced improved beekeeping technologies and techniques to farmers in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Ethiopia, and Guinea; provided training on honey processing and marketing in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan; and demonstrated ways to produce new products from hive by-products in Nigeria, in addition to numerous other volunteer assignments.

Ed (right) and trainees in Nigeria

Ed is sure that he gains just as much from each assignment as his beneficiaries do. “It has been fun learning how to adapt to different challenges. Even though I am going over there to teach, I always learn,” he asserts.

On his latest volunteer assignment in Senegal, Ed conducted training of trainers on all aspects of beekeeping, to help the International Center for Practical Training improve their support to beekeepers. Ed describes this volunteer trip as being particularly memorable, in part because he was able to lodge at a remote school/compound, where he witnessed a strong sense of community and commitment to collective action. “It was really, really special; it was a neat place,” he explains. “There were hugs and tears when I left.”

Inspecting beekeeping practices in Senegal

Ed is humble about his contributions, noting, “When I started beekeeping I never thought it would lead to one of my passions, travelling. I feel so very privileged to do what I do, meet the people that I meet, and hopefully make a difference. As a volunteer with Farmer-to-Farmer, the most important thing for me is to hear that my hosts have made progress.”

He has, indeed, made a difference. In Nepal, for example, individuals that attended Ed’s training more than a decade ago still speak fondly of their training. One beekeeper recently noted,

“The training opened my eyes to beekeeping as a business, and as a result, I increased my business from two to 60 hives. Everything I have gained in my honeybee business is due to the contributions of Ed Levi!“

Another former trainee asserts, “Now we are producing antibiotic free honey, and all the credit goes to volunteer Ed Levi’s training!”

In his 20 years of volunteer service with Winrock and Farmer-to-Farmer, Ed has directly assisted over 1,400 individuals. Not many people can say they have done that!

[Thank you, Ed, for all that you have done for your Farmer-to-Farmer hosts and beneficiaries!]