Bee: the money-secreting insect making farmers smile

Bees hate to be agitated, they hate intrusion into their quietude, Pastor Elijah, our guide, underscored this to all of us. Should a bee come buzzing and hovering around any of us, he warns, he or she should ignore it. Attempting to ward it off with the wave of the hand will be misconstrued as […]

Bees hate to be agitated, they hate intrusion into their quietude, Pastor Elijah, our guide, underscored this to all of us. Should a bee come buzzing and hovering around any of us, he warns, he or she should ignore it. Attempting to ward it off with the wave of the hand will be misconstrued as an attack, and it will strike with a sting.
Only one of us was stung by a bee, and that was on our way back from the apiaries, but every one of us was stung by the strenuous caution he or she must exercise to avoid being stung by a bee.
Honeybees like a quiet environment. Slight noise agitates them. They hate crowd. They have a sense of recognition of shape and location. The bee that will sting you is never seen by you. They are very sensitive to the smell of their dead. That is why we were sternly warned never to kill any bee buzzing and hovering around whenever we are in the vicinity of their colony. They will attack in their large army.
 Just across the stream lay the three apiaries to which we are guided on tour. Each apiary comprised a group of hives. Each hive is home to a colony, comprising the queen, her drones and her worker-bees.
This is a modern bee farm. Different human communities have evolved their different traditional beekeeping technologies and techniques over the times.
Honeybees produce honey by sucking the nectar of the flora in the surrounding bush and secreting five different enzymes in their body-system on the nectar to convert it to the liquid food exceptionally valued by mankind. Honey is food processed by bees.
Poly-floral bees suck the nectar of various plants while mono-floral bees suck the nectar of only one plant. Accordingly, the types of honey they produce differ in their taste and aroma, so says Dr Joseph Anikwe, a resource person at a technical session of the apicultural workshops for which we had converged.
Majority of humanity is born and bred on the eons-old belief that honey, a broad-spectrum natural sweetener with the highest safety profile among all related foods, cures numerous physiological ailments. Some religious beliefs hold that it cures 99 ailments. It is used, on the strength of related beliefs, to cure numerous peculiar spiritual ailments in many traditional communities in human society over the eons.
In modern times, honey is used by pharmaceutical industries either to manufacture drugs or to coat some drugs. Let your foods be medicine, says Socrates, the Greek philosopher.
“Years ago, I couldn’t read without glasses, but since bees stung me on both sides of my head and at the back of my head, I have been reading without the aid of glasses. I cannot remember when last I used the glasses,” the retired Registrar of the Federal Polytechnic, Ede, Osun State, 79-year-old Alhaji Mosobalaje Asupoto, the patriarch of bitter honey production in Nigeria, alias the Youngest Beekeeper in Africa, always tells anyone who asks him about the medicinal value of bees and honey.
We were on a voyage in search of the conviction to underlie all facts laid before us by our resource persons that today, honey is money in the class of all other commodities in the international market.
They say: Bees secrete honey! Bees secrete money! With the two agricultural workshops organised by the National Board for Technology Incubation (NBTI) and the Nigerian Modern Beekeepers Association, in Oshogbo and Oyan Apiary, Osun State, we toured the apiaries on a voyage of discovery in the expansive region of modern beekeeping and honey production as a money-spinning venture worthy of reckon in the agro-allied sector of the economy in the modern world.
The eyes of the modern human society are, today, increasingly open to the quite fascinating province of beekeeping for the purpose of producing honey, pollen and beeswax. Advanced human societies see it as a viable business venture with a high promise in the agro-allied sector of the economy.
This has, subsequently, broadened the imperative for the development of techno-scientific, inventions, innovations and methods to transform it as such toward the larger economic good.
Today, inventing and innovating new technologies in beekeeping and honey production to meet international quality and quantity demands is the underlying imperative, the sine qua non for the beekeeping venture to factor vitally in the economic growth and prosperity of every society which develops it as a viable enterprise.
At the global level, countries like the US, Russia, Brazil, Germany, Australia, Israel, China are already pathfinders in modern bee farming as a viable economic venture, while in Africa, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Zambia, Kenya, Uganda and South Africa are blazing the trail.
In Israel, a beekeeper pays some of his casual workers who help him carry just some tools around the farm between 8,000 dollars and 10,000 dollars as salary every month, says Dr Joseph Anikwe, while Dr Adedokun Olagunju, another resource person, says, in Kenya and Uganda some of the primary school pupils there pay their school fees by keeping bees.
Dr Olagunju says: Beekeepers in the US, China, Russia and Australia are rich because they are scientific in their approach to the venture.
A barrel of honey, according to recent reports, attracts more foreign exchange than crude oil. A barrel of crude oil is sold at $101 while a barrel of honey is sold at the international market for $1,539, say the reports.
In countries like Ethiopia, which has attained the position of being the world’s 8th largest exporter of honey and the 4th largest exporter of beeswax, modern beekeeping currently provides employment for over two million people.
Countries like Tanzania and Kenya are actively promoting apiculture as a poverty reduction enterprise. Colonies of the common honeybee in Nigeria are of Apismellifera Adansonii. They are called feral colonies.
The beauty of promoting beekeeping in Nigeria, according to some stakeholders in the enterprise, is that the country has one of the best honeys in the world, arising from its comparative advantage to cheaply produce healthy honey in terms of abundant natural vegetation untainted by chemicals and genetic manipulation, favourable weather all-year-round and all the materials needed to manufacture beekeeping equipment.

For most beekeeping and honey production experts, however, these are mere tall claims. Some experts are even more prone to dismissing such unsubstantiated claims as deceptive outright.
For example, a resource person, Dr Kayode Akinwande says: “The honey from Nigeria cannot be accepted for medicinal purposes because of its psycho toxicity level. Nigerian honey cannot treat wounds. That is why it cannot go beyond our borders.
“The Benin Republic will never allow you to cross the border into their country with it because of poor processing and adulteration. This situation is brought about by the lack of censors board which has all the parameters to enforce quality standards of our honey going out.”
Positing that the water content of the world standard quality honey should not rise above 21 percent (some scholars explicate that the water content must be confined to between 17 percent and 21 percent), Dr Akinwande, however admitted there’s nowhere in the world that we don’t get adulterated honey.
The enduring problem of poorly processed and adulterated honey constitutes the gravest concern among those who see promising potentials in the enterprise for substantial economic growth.
According to Dr Adedokun Olagunju, impure honey is different from adulterated honey. Impure honey is the one which has not been well processed; adulterated honey is the one which has some things added to it, decrying sweepingly, “the honey you have on Nigerian roads is nothing but engine oil and sugar. “
In Nigeria, beekeeping and honey production has, over the ages, basically been traditional and of subsistence nature where the main product, honey, has been consumed as food and medicine.
As an agro-allied sub-sector, the venture has remained largely underdeveloped, in sharp contrast to what obtains in many developed and developing countries. In Nigeria, lamentably, the process revolves round the traditional hives, with low honey and wax yield due to the over dependence on traditional tools, rather than the Kenya Top Bar (KTB) and the Lang troth hives.
There is now a growing imperative for beekeeping farmers and honey production entrepreneurs in Nigeria to adopt modern technologies and techniques to improve quality and yield through training for skill acquisition and development through apicultural workshops and knowledge transfer initiatives, such as the ones organised by the National Board for Technology Incubation (NBTI) and the Nigerian Modern Beekeepers Association (NMBA) -formally State of Osun Multipurpose Beekeepers Union Limited (SOMBUL).
Such initiatives are to herald the Nigerian beekeeper to the hall of global millionaire beekeepers by enabling him or her to regulate the sugar and water content of his or her honey; and packaging and branding it for various uses. The initiatives will also adequately train the Nigerian bee farmer on reverse engineering.
The numerous benefits of modern beekeeping and honey production underlie the imperative for the Nigerian beekeeper to develop and adopt modern technologies and techniques.
Experts say: It is one of the most profitable aspects of modern agriculture, offering a natural way to alleviating poverty; the product of beekeeping, natural honey, is a high income generating venture; apart from the age-old established fact that natural honey has medicinal value, its beehive products such as wax, pollen and propolis have currently been discovered to be of high economic value in the international market; and modern beekeeping supports other agricultural activities by facilitating crop pollination and improving crop yield.