Initial Setbacks: Short Report on MSWAKINI Primary School Beekeeping Project (Copy)
Dr. Nicephor Pius Lesio, Rik Munshi
The project area was visited and inspected by the team. We opened few hives. It was a general inspection for development monitoring. A few things that were detected include:
16 hives are occupied with bee colonies.
For the four hives that had no colonies we corrected the entrances. The entrances seemed to be too small for bees to enter, and for two of them, the bees even clustered outside for sometimes but failed to enter. For the other two the bees could enter, but were too small for the queen as she has relatively larger size than other bees.
We replaced some hive top covers which were blown away by strong winds of the area. We also tied the hives with binding wire to avoid such covers to be blown away in future.
We checked development of some colonies. Few colonies are strong but many are weak (few number of bees per colony). We believe the weal ones came to the hive while weak, and form that time there has not been abundance of flowers for the bees to feed on. The few flowers occurred were enough for the bees to sustain life but not to gain a lot of strength. We believe there will be flowers to give them food for growth of strength in the near future. There will be a need of re-inspecting the hives again in March for prediction of harvests of this year. Date of inspection will depend on when the long rains start.
We found only a few pests (especially wax moth) in hives, which indicates that the site is good. Otherwise, we would find much more occurrence of the moths and also other pests such as hive beetles.
Our Next Steps:
Beekeeping project management: Our field side have not had strong commitment to the project. For instance, we do not get the updates on the project as quick as things may occur. One of the reasons is that involvement of the beneficiaries (students and community members that received training) has been very low, although they were expected to be upfront for all the project matters. Probably it is their fault or maybe we have not been able to push them enough to take up their responsibility. In this case we suggest that no more investment on the project in terms of project expansion until we are able to manage this small project we have. Instead, we urge our team to work harder in managing the project and also involving the students and the community in the project. Once we are satisfied that the project is well managed then we suggest for expansion.
Tree planting and fencing: According to Head Teacher, preparation for planting live fence polls is in good progress. We suggest that continues as planned. However, preparation for tree planting is minimal. Process for getting suitable seedlings for the area is long and has not started. We suggest we postpone tree planting for this year and start the process as early as situation allows after the long rains. We think we re-discuss this amongst the project team in Tanzania.
Honey harvests this year: We don’t have much hope for good harvest this year. BUT if we do everything correctly from now on, the colonies we have now will remain strong in hives after the June (or July) harvesting season. This will lead to having more than one harvest next year.
Data collection/Information sheet filling: This has not been done. Probably we need to discuss it again and see how it can be done (with a help of the Head teacher).