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I just spent two weeks in southern Mexico working on a project to teach coffee farmers how to keep bees with help from Jose Luis Zarate and Jose Carlos Vargas in Coffee Kids’ Oaxaca office. The beekeeping project has grown parallel to and integrated into Coffee Kids work.For three years I have been picking at the idea of visiting Coffee Kids partners CECOCAFEN in Nicaragua, CAMPO and FomCafe in Oaxaca, as well as other cooperatives in Chiapas. This year Professor Dewey Caron, a leading beekeeping scientist with 40 years of teaching experience here and in Latin America, accompanied me. Among his books is one on killer bees.Dewey and I are building a three-part manual of best practices in beekeeping for coffee cooperatives that already produce honey or are thinking about it.After a long tradition as a natural sweetener in Central America, honey production went into steep decline when killer bees swept through the region in the 1980’s destroying all traditional beekeeping methods. In the last 15-20 years pent-up demand and a readiness to adopt modern methods have brought honey back, partly as a popular local sweetener, but more importantly as a source of supplemental income for those dependent upon coffee’s wildly fluctuating world prices.
The manual we created has three parts in a Q-and-A format. Part one deals with technical matters, such as production of one’s own equipment or handling queen bees. The second section covers organizational matters, such as cooperative governance, the role of the executive director and the distribution of money among members. The final section treats the marketing of the honey. For example, how does the cooperative “brand” its products? How do they spread their efforts between local, national and international markets?In our discussions with managers and farmers we confirmed several of our pre-conceptions and made several counter-intuitive discoveries. In the first category, none of the beekeepers was a “hobbyist” as is widely the case in U.S; all wanted to produce honey for additional income. In the second, some cooperatives chose not to try to sell honey for the highest (Fair Trade, organic) prices, because they were able to sell everything they produced at the local level.One of the beekeeping heroes we met was Alfredo Contreras, a second-generation beekeeper with CAMPO. With an extraordinary “hive-side manner,” Contreras is passionate about teaching and about including women, long marginalized from primary economic activities.What made this project particularly fulfilling was that we were not two gringos bringing tablets of wisdom and experience from afar, but rather gatherers of information learning and sharing knowledge with other experience beekeepers. Like collectors of folk music we “recorded” what we found and then let others share the results.
