COMMUNITY OUTREACH MONTHLY REPORT
OCTOBER 2018
BEEKEEPING Hive maintenance is essential for making beekeeping life easy and will hopefully result in healthier bee colonies as well as providing enough space for large colonies. Maintaining your hives will ultimately facilitate more occupation of your bees leading to an ultimate honey flow whenever the season becomes favorable. In the month of October, DSWT Community outreach in conjunction with the bee farmers continued with thorough hive maintenance in the 3 main villages where DSWT has erected the bee fence. The maintenance was aimed at welcoming the flowering in the coming months which will lead to quantified nectar build up for the bee work. Whenever hive maintenance is carried out, infestations of termites and woodlice are manually removed as they invade the hives during the hot weather hence affecting the wooden hives if not controlled. Windbreak is also very key in bee-keeping as wind is said to push bees away changing their operation route for foraging. Lucky enough, DSWT hives have been erected along the Tsavo East border where there are healthy trees which act as our windbreakers hence keeping our bees from absconding. During the month, a least 130 hives were inspected of prevailing diseases and invading woodlice, cleaned and well set ready for new occupations; Date of maintenance
15/10/18 16/10/18 18/10/18 19/10/18 20/10/18 23/10/18
Village
Day
Syusyani Syusyani Syusyani Iviani Ngiluni Ngiluni
Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 1 Day 2
Hives inspected and maintained. 20 26 24 37 25 -
TREE SAPLINGS DONATION Illegal logging for poles and timber has put forests around conservation areas to the verge of extinction. Kenya intends to raise the forest cover by 10 percent in its vision 2030 which forms part of the flagship projects in the economic blueprint. DSWT continued to offer tree saplings to community members especially in Mtito region. Community lands have been mapped out for reforestation efforts by the counties. Among the trees said to do well in this ecosystem include, the Neem tree and the Melia which have been donated annually by DSWT. This year 500 neem saplings were donated in the month of October. We as stakeholders in conservation efforts anticipate a positive climate change in future as we help the communities actualize the envisioned forest coverage.
CHILDREN PLANTING FORESTS In October 2018, DSWT launched a new project aimed at inspiring school children to start planting trees early. The two-pronged approach involved a large-scale seed-balling initiative in Chyulu Hills National Park (CHNP) and a tree planting competition involving 731 school children from 4 different schools also bordering CHNP. Just a few weeks prior, a large wild fire caught on the edges of Kikunduku Primary School. Fortunately, the school was spared; however, a large area of the bordering Park was burnt. This seemed like a perfect opportunity to involve the students in a reseeding effort to help speed up the reforestation process and educate them on the importance of forests and their protection. On 25 October 2018, with approximately 450,000 seed balls supplied by Seed Balls Kenya, over 300 students participated in the largest seed-balling effort in Kenya to date. These seed balls consisted of a mix of 4 different locally indigenous acacia species coated in a thick layer of protective char dust. This coating will protect the seeds from predation and provide a small amount of nutrients to give the seeds a jump-start as soon as adequate rainfall triggers the germination process. Not all of the seeds will become trees, but even if only 5% survive, this will equate to over 20,000 trees, planted in the space of about 1 hour. And 10 years from now, those students will be able to gaze across the fence from their old school and point proudly at the forest that they created.
In addition to the seed balling, 3 other schools were also involved along with Kikunduku in a separate tree planting competition. DSWT provided 2.7 million seeds of 5 different dry land species that were handed out to 731 students to take home and plant on their farms. We will monitor their progress for a year at which point the winner and runner up from each school will receive a large cash prize. The school with the highest average number of trees per student will also receive a large cash donation to be used toward a conservation-related project. As this is the first time this concept has been trialled, we are unsure of what the results will be. However, if even 1 in 10 children participates in the competition and only manages to turn 1 in 10 seeds into a 1-year-old tree, we will have succeeded in creating nearly 30,000 trees at less than half the cost of our nursery grown saplings. The trees will eventually provide forage for livestock and bees, wood and charcoal fuel (without depending on protected areas), shade and erosion control to name just a few benefits. More importantly, the exercise will hopefully inspire a new generation of tree planters. The competition was received with a huge amount of excitement from the students who were adamant that they would not be bettered by their neighbouring schools. The project was made possible by the sale of carbon credits by the Chyulu Hills Conservation Trust, which is a partnership between DSWT and several other stakeholders in the Chyulu Hills, committed to protecting this incredible ecosystem.
The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust is reliant on your kind support in order to keep our community outreach projects running. For more information about these projects please visit www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.com/community or email info@dswt.org