Safeguard Bees and Beekeepers in Madagascar

A key part of project Renitantely is providing our beekeepers with skills such as honey and wax harvesting and keeping hives healthy. Successful beekeeping involves developing an understanding of intensive skills and complicated scientific concepts, so it is fairly unrealistic to expect people to fully remember all of these concepts after the initial training workshop.

This presents a challenge for the Renitantely team, since many of our project beekeepers are illiterate or haven’t received a full education. As such, written documents for our beekeepers to refer to following the training workshop are not the most useful resources we can provide. However, SEED strives to ensure that our training has a lasting educational benefit, and during the first phase of Project Renitantely the team came up with a creative solution: Visual Learning Aids (VLAs).

These innovative educational resources use imagery that is easy to understand and give clear visual reminders about the various stages of the beekeeping process. During each training workshop led by our beekeeping technicians, new concepts are introduced using interactive demonstrations that can be consolidated with the VLAs. Then, following the workshops, each beekeeper receives a laminated copy of the VLAs to take home with them for future use.

VLAs are also used to communicate technical beekeeping skills, such as splitting a hive in order to populate another hive. Designing these technical VLAs involves breaking the process down into simple steps that can be diagrammed in an intuitive image.

During the second phase of Renitantely, SEED will continue to develop VLAs to more effectively communicate beekeeping skills and expand the knowledge that we can share through these resources.

At the end of August, Project Renitantely’s first phase officially came to an end. To celebrate the successful completion of project activities, we decided to profile one of our most successful beekeepers and look at how his time participating in the project has made a difference to his life.

When Perosy joined the project in 2016, he had just one year of beekeeping experience under his belt. He mostly relied on rice and cassava farming to support his two young children and beekeeping only represented a small portion of his income. Fast-forward to 2019 and now the majority of Perosy’s income comes from selling honey – so much so that he now pays other people to work in his rice fields!

When we first made contact with Perosy in 2016, he told us that his biggest problem was a lack of hives which limited his ability to make more money from beekeeping. Thanks to comprehensive hive-building training workshops, Perosy can now build his own hives instead of having to invest large amounts of money into purchasing them from elsewhere. This has enabled Perosy to quadruple the number of hives in his Apiary which means more bees, more honey, and more money!

Perosy has been wise with his honey-induced increase in income and has taken steps to diversify his livelihood. In addition to the money made through farming and beekeeping, Perosy has invested some of his earnings into opening up a shop next to his home. With this diversified livelihood, Perosy has made his family’s future more secure. He has also drastically improved his quality of life, spending less of his time performing hard manual labour in his fields.

While Perosy is certainly one of the most successful beekeepers on the project, he is by no means alone in having achieved a great deal. Across the project, hive numbers have been growing steadily as more and more beekeepers have started to use their newly-acquired skills to build their own hives. Just in the last year of the project, the number of hives owned by project beekeepers has grown by an amazing 129%, meaning beekeepers have been producing more honey (and earning more money) than ever!