Dear friends

This edition of BfD Journal brings you some new and amazing bee stories. Opposite you can read how honey is being used to cure patients at a hospital in Sierra Leone – honey has been found to provide better treatment than conventional antibiotics: one of the reasons is because honey is too complex, diverse and natural for bugs to develop resistance. Bees for Development Ghana is helping the hospital to keep bees so that they can harvest their own, high quality honey on site.

Next you can read the story of Danilo Colomela from Italy – he decided to ‘go-it-alone’ to learn beekeeping – and followed his own natural method using top-bar hives. Now he has colonies of honey bees that survive well without any form of treatment, and is pleased with his honey harvest of very clean and natural honey from healthy honey bees, free from any residues of medications against Varroa.

Following is an article by Wolfgang Ritter explaining why ‘the African way’ of beekeeping in simple hives with little human interference is ‘the healthy way’ too. And this approach is further endorsed by George Williams’ article on page 13. It is not just that frame hives do not work well for tropical African honey bees, neither do they fit well with local socio-economic conditions.

And now for something completely different!

what3words is a really simple way to describe location, and can be a very helpful way to record precisely where your bee hives are situated. The inventors of what3words have assigned every 3 metres square in the whole world with a unique 3 word address that will never change! The threeword addresses are easy to remember and share, and are as accurate as GPS coordinates. You can look yours up at their website what3words.com, and quite often the words, although completely random, seem to have some funny relevance For example, BfD’s office what3words address is: northward.drones.catch!

Nicola Bradbear Director, Bees for Development