Dear friends

Climate change, Covid and our imperative to be highly cost effective, are rapidly changing the ways that Bees for Development seeks to best serve beekeepers in the poorest nations. For these past months we have been enjoying weekly Zoom meetings with many of our partner organisations, and this has opened for us new ways of seeing and sharing, and new ways of working together.

Starting next month we invite 500 of you to join us too – to think about Beeswax Trade on 7 October – see details of how to join on page 18.

This edition of BfD Journal 136 again arrives electronically in your in-box because the world’s postal systems remain in disarray. We are aware that many of you are missing the paper copies for use in training events.

At a summer natural beekeeping event in Italy - Tom Seeley’s instructions for using bee lining to find wild nesting honey bee colonies was put to good use. Now a new Resilient Bee Project has been initiated to create a network of guardian beekeepers being watchful of precious wild honey bee colonies. Read more from page 3.

Gladstone Solomon reports on the Africanised honey bee collectors of Trinidad (page 7), and page 10 brings news of beekeeping empowering Maasai women in Tanzania.

We bring you much other news too, with reports from our beekeeping friends worldwide, still working during Covid.

Nicola Bradbear Director, Bees for Development