Dear friends

Bees for Development’s offices are in Monmouth, a small town in South Wales in the west of Britain. From here we publish this Journal and distribute it worldwide, provide training resources to beekeepers in developing countries, manage our international projects, and run our Information Service. Recently we have created a small shop and Information Centre to raise local awareness of bees and beekeeping. Many British people are now enthusiastic to become beekeepers, and this new area is often full of visitors asking about the craft: we are happy to see beekeeping’s new profile as a cool and modern activity! For many years we have been working to enable bee product trade in many countries, and now for the first time we are selling ourselves.

Our shop stocks produce from local beekeepers, as well as African honey and candles, and a range of equipment for sustainable beekeeping. A very important aspect is to inform visitors about the goods they are buying and who produced them, and we display a great range of secondary products made with honey and beeswax. We are pleased that Ghana and Madagascar have now joined the list of African nations eligible to export honey to the EU (see page 9) and hope to soon feature their honeys alongside the other beautiful bee products in our display.