How can it have been this long??

It’s been so long – I’m sure John Carter will have forgotten about his problem with my comments but just to clarify: As I said, projects like his which build schools I believe fulfil a very valuable function in the field of development.

The irony is that we are now building a Centre of Excellence for Beekeeping!! Whether it will differ sufficiently from all the white elephants I have been so critical in the past remains to be seen.

Following our work assessing the beekeeping industry in the Gambia, it became very clear that the use of Kenyan top-bar hives as promoted by most development projects to farmer’s and prospective beekeeping associations was not working. There are some obvious reasons for this: poor construction, a lack of training in management, a cultural resistance to maintenance and doing everything in the dark. What was not clear was whether, with well-made equipment, good training, conscientious maintenance and daylight work the KTB really is the appropriate technology in a Gambian setting. Many questions remained: Can the African bee tolerate high levels of ‘management? Even with management, are average honey and wax yields high enough to justify the initial cost of the hive? Can we improve colonisation rates so hives don’t remain empty, and therefore unproductive, for such long periods? Is the African bee’s tendency to abscond an insurmountable barrier to bee ‘keeping’ in the Gambia?

In order to answer these questions, we first looked for an existing apiary where we could carry out some trials. It is a sad indictment of the Gambian beekeeping industry to say that we could find nothing – the only solution was for us to create one ourselves. And that’s where we are now. We have a 10 year agreement on a 2-hectare site in Lamin village. We have designed comparative experiments for KTB hives and traditional hives, all of which will begin in October 2010 after the rains have finished. We hope by end of July 2011 to have some initial results which will indicate whether we should continue to promote KTB hives or not.

Obviously, this plan requires that we stay on – we’ve agreed to stay for two more years. The children are the main consideration otherwise I think we would stay indefinitely. For the next few years, they will have a fantastic childhood, but the standard of formal education here is really poor. I know we are not conscientious enough to home school them properly so we will have to come back to ‘civilisation’ before it’s too late for them to catch up.