BARINGO, Kenya- Have you ever tasted honey from Baringo? Rooted in the North Rift region, Baringo apparently produces honey that tastes like butterscotch and is gaining popularity internationally.
Beekeeping has long been practised in the county and inherited by the communities over several generations.
The county is currently leading in honey production nationally, but it has the potential to help Kenya rival world-leading honey-producing countries like Ethiopia and Israel.
In Baringo, less rain, desertification, and higher temperatures, and unusual flowering periods during the past few years have resulted in unfavourable environmental conditions for the bees.
Bees play a vital role in pollination, increasing agricultural produce, improving its quality and even enhancing plants’ resistance to pests.
But now, the Baringo County Conservation Association (BCCA) is developing the honey value chain to ensure that revenue from the raw product remains within the arid and semi-arid region.
They plan to establish a factory to bottle the honey at source and also build a cottage industry for products like candle wax and soap.
They will also connect artisanal producers to markets in Nairobi and beyond, increasing household income and boosting the wider economy.
Bee farmers have been trained in each step of the beekeeping process so that, despite changing temperatures, they can continue to produce and sell their honey.
They have slightly modified traditional log beehives by installing a wire mesh queen excluder in the middle. This gives the bees an exclusive area to build cobs and store pure honey.
Since bees like cool conditions, the conventional log hive is somewhat thick, which prevents heat from entering the hive.
“In contrast to the log hives, bees no longer enter these hives because of the impacts of climate change, which have rendered the other hives extremely hot. Due to this, we have had to modernize the conventional bee hive by including a queen excluder, which allows us to collect honey in considerably larger volumes,” said David Yator, a bee farmer and a Baringo County.
Speaking to this publication at a bee hive factory located at Radat shopping centre along the Nakuru-Marigat road, Yator said the traditional log hive is a little bit thick, which doesn’t allow heat to penetrate the hive since the bees like to be in cold or cool temperatures.
Yator continued, “The log hives are very sustainable in that they are easy to make and repair in case they are damaged.”
The dried-out earthwood trees are used to make the log hives.
We do not cut down old trees to construct these log hives. However, we gather the logs and deliver them to the dried-out trees. We turn the logs into functional log hives that the bees can live in,” Yator said.
Yator added that the community is supporting planting trees.
“You cannot claim we are destroying trees because we are building log hives. You don’t go to another farm searching for the logs; someone goes to their farms. Climate change is a natural phenomenon; humans have not created it,” Yator clarified.
It was discovered that installing bee hives with cool temperatures will draw in more bees due to the high temperatures, according to Faith Changwon, a director at the Rachemo Honey Marketing Cooperative Society Limited and another bee farmer.
“The honey-producing chamber contains the queen and the young bees, and we use these improved bee hives because we want to harvest more honey and because there are bee products like wax, honey, and bee venom (which is what the young bees feed on),” said Changwon.
The queen bee is a significant asset to the hive. It commands the hive and lives up to four years before dying of old age. Normal bees live for between 30 and 35 days.
The queen is fed a special diet called royal jelly, which gives her a longer life span.
Changwon further revealed that at Rachemo, they process an average of 500 kg to 600 kg of honey per month.
“In a year, this translates to around 6 tonnes. And one kilogramme of honey costs KSh 700. We sell the honey at Radat, which is along Nakuru – Marigat road,” she explained.
Susan Jepkemoi, the BCCA’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO), told this publication that bees produce huge quantities of wild honey across the county—an estimated 50,000 kg—which could be an enormously valuable product if it could be processed locally and sold as bottled honey, soap, or other ‘value-added’ products.
“But there is no processing infrastructure; beekeepers need more training on modern honey production. Also, there is no one to market or sell the honey collectively for the benefit of local people. The result: huge potential profits are lost,” she said.
Jepkemoi said that BCCA hopes to strengthen bee farmers’ ability to adapt to climate change through a financial and technical relationship with like-minded partners.
Through a comprehensive strategy vulnerable to the effects of climate change, BCCA promotes policy discourse, research on agricultural adaptation for food security and nutrition, and the growth of civil society’s capacity.
