Bees for Development Journal 140
September 2021
Bark hive beekeeping and forest maintenance – Part I Janet Lowore, Programme Manager, Bees for Development Bark is a marvellous and versatile material and is widely used to make bee hives, particularly in miombo forest areas such as north-western Zambia. The use of bark is much criticised by foresters, and development professionals, as being harmful to forests. In this series of articles, we examine these criticisms in detail and propose an alternative paradigm.
Beekeepers test a small part of the bark before harvesting and if the grain is vertical, and not crossgrained, they leave it. These factors: size, species, form and grain mean that only a small percentage of trees in a forest meet the exacting requirements.
Sustainability The main criticism of bark hives is that the removal of bark causes the tree to die. Yet cutting trees to make planks also causes trees to die and top-bar hives and frame-hives, often promoted as ‘better’ alternatives to bark hives, are made of planks. So, killing trees is not the problem here – we also use trees for many other purposes! Is the rate of use equal or less than the rate of replenishment? The answer is a function of how many hives are made each year, from a hectare of a given forest and the rate of re-growth. It is rare for any human activity to have no impact on the environment. With bark hive beekeeping, we accept that making hives harms individual trees, but what about the forest as a whole? Is the forest harmed, or indeed helped, by the sum of all the activities of bark hive beekeepers? The focus of these articles is Zambia, where miombo forest beekeeping has been most studied - miombo forest
Bark bee hive making involves peeling the pliable bark off a tree and allowing it to re-form into its natural cylinder shape, then pegging the overlapping edges together. Both ends are closed using a circle of bark or wood and the hive is allowed to dry before hanging in a tree to attract a swarm of bees. Only certain tree species are suitable for making bark hives. In the North Western Province (NWP) of Zambia the preferred species include Brachystegia boehmii, Brachystegia spiciformis and Julbernardia paniculata. Trees of the right size and shape must be selected but some trees which appear suitable do not have the necessary crossgrained fibres to give the resulting hive its strength.
Images © Bees for Development
Hives are placed many metres apart, a pattern which reflects the dispersed way trees are used for hive making – tree use is not intensively concentrated
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