BEEKEEPING
&
DEVELOPMENT 39
THE SOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY OF BEEKEEPING by
Eleanor Fisher, United Kingdom
Eleanor Fisher is an anthropologist who has undertaken eighteen months of ethnographic research in
Ugalla Game Reserve, Tabora Region, Tanzania. During this time she lived in the beekeeping camp of the Chairman of the Tabora Beekeepers’ Co-operative Society. In this article she questions whether it is
necessarily best to change existing beekeeping tehcnology.
In B&D37 Horst Wendorf discussed successes and failures associated with a project introducing top-bar hive beekeeping in Zambia. He stated that “bark hive beekeeping and honey gathering are methods which cannot be developed further due to limitations regarding quality, yields and workloads”. Furthermore he considered these methods destructive and difficult to sustain due to deforestation.
However, by focusing on the need for development through intervention it is possible to miss a very important feature of local beekeeping. Local methods using bark or log hives are socially, culturally and economically sustainable, and need not depend on external assistance. (1 am not able to comment on honey gathering.) For people who live with harsh economic realities, who are familiar with the failures of development projects, the importance of self-sufficiency cannot be over-emphasised.
Kasontwa ‘B' beekeeping camp
No-one would wish to deny the value of positive change in people's lives. However one must question the extent to which a radical change in beekeeping methods will really assist people or environments. If technological intervention is necessary it should be carried out with extreme care.
Honey produced at Kasontwa ‘B’ being poured into a drum for transportation
Drawing on research from south Tabora Region, Tanzania, want to focus on the sustainability of beekeeping from a social perspective. This is often over-looked although such consideration can lead to constructive insights covering ecological sustainability. |
The practices I focus on are ‘local’ ways of beekeeping, not a ‘traditional system’. Beekeeping has been created and recreated over the years, incorporating many changes. What is important is its continued relevance in the lives of people who regard it as a valuable means of survival.
Beekeeping is mainly done by men, although some women have been drawn to the occupation. Log and bark hives are hung in the miombo woodlands in localities know as ‘camps’. Because these camps are 50 to 200 km from beekeepers’ homes, groups of men travel and live together through the harvesting season. An established beekeeper may own 500-1500 hives distributed between different locations.
Extensive parts of the so-called ‘natural’ woodlands in western Tanzania were inhabited until people were resettled elsewhere during the sleeping sickness epidemics between 1925 and 1940. It is in these areas that beekeepers return to hang their bee hives. Beekeeping camps are used over several generations. For example, along the Ugalla River, many camps were ‘opened’ in the late 1920s and continue to be used by people TWELVE
A Bees for Development publication
