Conrad Berube's video: 2012 bees for babar progress report Farmer to Farmer Ghana part 1

2012 bees for babar progress report/Farmer to Farmer Ghana Visit http://beesforbabar.org or http://www3.telus.net/conrad/htmghana/bees_for_babar.htm to learn more about Bees for Babar contents: start times wild nests: 1:15 traditional honey harvesting: 3:30 sting avoidance: 5:00 Kenya top bar hive (KTBH) basics: 9:15 Partial script of this video: Ghana, like most parts of Africa, has healthy populations of native races of honeybees which provide a ready resource for folks who would like to go beyond traditional honey hunting practices. The wild nests shown here were all in a single baobob tree. It is easy to imagine how the honey in such nests would represent a great temptation to the wide array of other insects, birds, and mammals on the continent which have been known to harrass the bees for their sweet stores. Because there are far more such marauding pests in the tropics than in temperate zones, African races of bees are much more defensive than their conspecifics adapted to the temperate zone. Traditional honey hunting is conducted at night because bees will not normally fly then-- except towards the torches that are used both for light and to drive off or kill the bees enveloping their combs. Honey hunting is often a solitary undertaking as practitioners prefer to keep the best harvesting trees a secret-- so I was unable to get any footage of such-- but I was able to purchase some wild honey from a local honey hunter. It was pretty obvious that some improvements could be made to wild honey collection to improve the quality and hygiene and therfore increase the value of the final product. It was gratifying that that this honey hunter showed up for the training course we provided and I hope he begins to employ some of the techniques we offered—at least to close up those holes in his storage jug so the bees don't just take back the honey he harvested. Traditionally "tapped" honey is extracted by setting hot charcoal on top of the combs robbed from wild nests. The warmed honey flows through perforated metal plates and is the collected from beneath. It has a smoky even burned flavour which cannot be removed with any amount of filtering. In this training exercise participants placed a blade of grass down their backs to represent a harassing bee. They then set off to make their way through vegetation with their hands loosely covering their eyes to try to dislodge their grass stems in the same way that would be used to evade pursuing bees...