The history and appreciation of honeybees in our environment

The objective of this article is to briefly sensitise and raise awareness to the public, especially farmers and students, on the importance and the contribution of honey bees in the making of honey and wax from our flowering plants and trees in The Gambia.

The contents of this article will therefore focus on the following:

I. The introduction
ii. History of honeybees and their importance in agricultural crop production.
iii. Honeybees as social insects and their division of labour
iv. Production of honey with some of its constraints
v. Beekeeping project with teachers on training at The Gambia College in 1985/86.

1. Introduction
Parents, teachers and the entire public should understand that for youths and adults to acquire training skills in beekeeping and other agricultural areas for self-employment, there is need for the required discipline and the good character that is required for success in this agricultural skill training.

2. History of honey bees and their importance in agricultural crop production
The people in The Gambia and other West African countries have been keeping bees for quite a long time. Evidence has shown that Egyptian paintings on beekeeping started over 4000 years ago.  Beekeeping training programmes are good for unemployed young people and adults in The Gambia and therefore should be encouraged and supported.

Such training programmes are conducted by the Gambia Cooperative Beekeepers and the Sifoe Farm. These institutions should be emulated to facilitate the production of honey on a larger scale.  In The Gambia and other parts of Africa, the population is growing and more farming areas are needed for the production of food crops. It therefore requires more bees to pollinate vegetable gardens and fruit tree crops.  Bee pollination for more crops is essential if a big harvest is required. This is why honeybees are important to farmers, beekeepers, vegetable gardeners and fruit tree growers.

Skills training programmes on beekeeping conducted in The Gambia is making more and more people want to become beekeepers as soon as they acquire the skill and know the nutritional, economic and medical benefits of bees in their environment.

The vegetation of The Gambia is ideal for beekeeping - a place with plant species such as mangrove, citrus, mango, oil palm and many others including vegetable flowering plants, providing food for bees with nectar and some with pollen.  Mixed honey is sometimes produced due to the different plant species visited by bees.

3. Honeybees as social insects and their division of labour
There are about 25,000 species of bees in the world, the majority of these are found in the Tropics and of these about 5000 species are found in Africa.  The honey for human consumption and medicine is normally collected from honeybees.

A big colony of social honeybees has different bees of 40,000- 60,000 worker bees  which are females and about 400 drones which are males,  with only one queen bee, a female. There is a division of labour between the members of a honeybee family. When a scout bee finds a good nectar or pollen source, it returns to the hive to tell other bees where they can find the same flowers by performing the orientation dance indicating quality of nectar, direction, distance of not more than 200 metres away and the flying direction to food source in relation to the sun.

The queen bee lays about 2000 eggs a day when adequate food from plants is brought to the hive.  The only work of the drone is to fly out and find a new queen to mate with in the air and after that the drone will die due to the destruction of the male organs in its body during copulation.  In brief, the description of the worker bees; jobs are cleaning of the old cells, feeding the brood (larvae), producing the building with wax, guarding the entrance, ventilating, feeding the queen and busy with collecting nectar, pollen, water and resin. After doing these activities for 20-30 days they die.

Before the first new queen appears from the big queen cells, the old queen bee leaves the hive in a swarm together with half of the bees in the hive known as swarming. The swarm settles down in a place not too far and there some scout bees fly out to find an empty hive or tree trunk where the swam can settle peacefully. The new emerged queen bee in the hive tries to find other queen cells to kill the queens inside the hive because she wants to be the only queen in the hive.  Other abnormalities in the hive like a strong smell, inadequate space and others can make a bee family to swarm multiplying the numbers of bees in a given environment by dividing the bee family into two.

4. The production of honey and wax with some constraints
Most honey is produced from the nectar which is the sugar water in flowers or where the palm wine tappers have cut palms. Here the bees will go to get this sugary juice.  In the process of honey making, the worker bee licks the nectar with its tongue where it goes to the honey stomach. When the bee enters the hive, this nectar is delivered through its trunk where other bees will receive this nectar and place it in cells for some of the water to evaporate until the water content is very low.  

Then the product becomes ripe honey and the bees will seal the cells for the honey to be stored in the cells with additional enzymes from the bees. The bees collect the surplus of the honey and pollen so as to survive during other periods in the years when bees have fewer flowers.  Beekeepers are advised not to take the surplus honey in hives as bees can swarm or abscond if too much honey is removed and taken away from them.

Despite the beekeeping potential for revenue generation, a multitude of constraints which militate against its effective and efficient management are encountered by the beekeeper.  These confronted constraints need urgent action with a view to putting the beekeeping project into a more viable venture. These constraints include pests such as termites, ants, wax moths, beetles, wasps and man who is the worst enemy of bees.  Many farmers use dangerous pesticides on their crops that can kill bees.  Thieves go at night to harvest or spoil the hive by fire.

Farmers and extension officers should spray their dangerous insecticides at night when the bees are not around, collecting nectar and pollen from flowers in the fields. The honey produced is for human consumption and medicine. The wax from bees is used to make shoes, shoe polish, wax candles, skin ointment, furniture polish, soap, shampoo, for sealing containers and many other products.

5. Beekeeping project with teachers in training at The Gambia College 1985-86
Whilst working for The Gambia College as senior Agricultural Education lecturer and acting head of the Science Department, I realise that the location of the college is not far from Nyambai Forest where there are flowering trees and plants.  As this area has the potential for a successful beekeeping project, I was motivated, and with my acquired beekeeping skills from African and British universities, I decided to engage myself and students in the planning and implementation of beekeeping together with other agricultural projects in the college in order to achieve the following aims and objective:

i. To improve the nutritional status and income generating capacity of the students
ii. To acquire training skills in beekeeping for the teachers in the college and the entire community.
iii. To improve on the beekeeping skills and management for teachers to disseminate the knowledge and skills to schools for the benefit of young Gambians.

Our beekeeping project in the college had ten top bar hives, ideal for village beekeeping, so that teachers posted in villages after their training will be able to practice with pupils the knowledge and skills associated with beekeeping in their schools. The top bee hives were located at the back of the students’ dormitories  at a safe distance to avoid students in classrooms being stung.

In college, students used limited harvest equipment such as machete, strainer, a brush and a smoker to harvest honey and wax. The students wore protective clothing during harvesting to protect themselves from bee stings. The top bar hives suitable for village beekeeping can be made from wood, straw, packing boxes, bamboo sticks, clay, oil drum halves and many others. Top bar hives have a series of wood bars or sticks across the top of the hive to which the bees attach their honey combs.  Students were able to remove the honey and wax safely without destroying the bees in this type of hive.

The expected output from the college’s one year beekeeping project from ten hives was an average of 7kgs of honey and 1kg of wax per harvest every three months.  No harvesting was done during the rain season (July, August and September).

The cost of honey then was D30 per liter and was D40 per kilo.
For honey:  7x3x10=210L x D30= D6,300
Wax: 1x3x10- 30kgs x D40= D1200.

Therefore the income  realised from the project from honey and wax was D7,500. It could have been more, depending on the quantity of flowers available for the bees. The people of The Gambia should therefore be aware of the fact that if the honeybees in our environment are in trouble, our flowering plants and fruit trees will also be in trouble, because the majority of plants and fruit trees are pollinated by bees for crop production on which we depend for food.  

It is our duty therefore to protect them, and provide an environment conducive for their existence. It is not enough to raise awareness but there is need to protect them from pests and harmful chemicals which the farmers use in the field.