Bees for Development Journal 141 January 2022
Bark hive beekeeping and forest maintenance - Part II Janet Lowore, Programme Manager, Bees for Development Part I considered whether bark hive making causes deforestation. It does not. The number of trees suitable for making hives within any given area of forest are relatively few, and most of the trees in an area used for forest beekeeping are retained – because they are the wrong species, the wrong shape or the wrong size for hives. Smaller trees are left until they grow larger. In this article we recognise that the first people to notice whether bark hive making causes a shortage of trees will be the beekeepers themselves. Based on research done 2015-2018 in north-western Zambia, we report beekeeper perspectives on this and wider questions about resource availability.
Beekeeping in the landscape Inevitably resource usage varies from place to place. In Mwinilunga trading and village life tend to take place near the roadside, while farming – including the permanent and semi-permanent fields of cassava and maize - is done on suitable land within a few kilometres of a village (although more distant fields are also used). Most hives are located at sites further into the forest, often a day’s walk away from the roadside. A forest hive site is indistinguishable from the surrounding mature forest, with hives located very sparsely, placed on tree branches and spaced 50m apart, spread over many hectares. There is no fence or boundary. Beekeepers have their own sites and know the sites of other beekeepers and will locate hives in more than one place to take advantage of natural variations in flowering patterns, topography and vegetation. Of the beekeepers interviewed during my research, 88% had more than one hive site and about 40% of those sites were inherited from an older relative, indicating that the same sites have been used for many years.
Beekeepers in Mwinilunga obtain food by growing crops, for example maize, and cash, by selling honey. Both activities are necessary for their survival. Maize farming involves the total removal of forest, including de-stumping
