Bees for Development Journal 107
Beekeeping economics – woodland beekeeping in Zambia
many cylindrical bark hives and hanging them in trees. The hives are dispersed throughout a large area of forest to ensure that they are readily occupied by swarms, migrating or absconding honey bee colonies. The wide distribution ensures good access to forage resources, and risks from fire or pests are spread, and thereby minimised.
Socio-economic analysis
The data used for this article is from work published by Wainwright in 1989. Although some of the factors will have changed since that time, the method of analysis remains instructive. In this article we use the 1988 figures and 1988 value in US$ used in the original paper (1.000 Zambian Kwacha (K) = US$0.125). See Table 5 for a benchmark against current figures.
Janet Lowore and Nicola Bradbear, Bees for Development, 1 Agincourt Street, Monmouth NP25 3DZ, UK
Profitability of miombo woodland beekeeping
Wainwright developed a model based on his experiences observing and measuring bark hive beekeeping systems in NWP during the 1980s. To understand profitability it is necessary to calculate return on investment. The main investment in bark hive beekeeping is the labour of the beekeeper. The other factors for production – bees, nectar, bee trees and materials for making hives - are all freely available. It is instructive therefore to calculate the return on investment as the return on each day of labour invested, rather than the return on a financial investment. To work out the net incomes from bark hives, the labour requirements were considered. It is also important to consider the sensitivity of net income to variations in hive occupation rates and production per hive.
Keywords: Angola, bark hive, cropping ratio, DR Congo, local-style hive, log hive, miombo, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zimbabwe In this article we consider the economics of miombo woodland beekeeping in Zambia. Miombo woodlands are the largest forest type in Africa and stretch East-West from Mozambique to Angola and North-South from the southern part of DR Congo to Zimbabwe (White 1983). These woodlands are semi-deciduous, tend to be dominated by low financial value timber species, and are typically on nutrient poor soils. However, their value for beekeeping is acknowledged: “The dominance of Brachystegia, Isoberlinia and Julbernardia provides the basis for beekeeping as a highly significant (culturally, economically and socially) form of land use in miombo woodland” (Campbell et al 2007).
Table 1 shows data collected by Wainwright and used to work out the profitability of bark hives. Purchased equipment such as smokers and veils are not considered because these were optional and many beekeepers did not use them.
The miombo woodland beekeeping system practised in the North Western Province (NWP) of Zambia involves beekeepers making
Photos © BfD
Miombo woodland in Malawi
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