Movement for conserving bees in the Western Ghats

Just like bees, we are also social animals. But, this COVID-19 pandemic enforces “SOCIAL DISTANCING” on us. It was difficult for us to keep away from bees. Because of all the restrictions, we couldn’t carry out the planned activities.

On the brighter side, we engaged with one local carpenter, Mr. Sunil Mestri, who designs wooden sculptures. He is a born artist who can shape any wood piece into attractive figures with incredible details.

At AERF, we always try to build the capacity of local communities through different incentive-based initiatives and projects. Using this Bee campaign as an opportunity, we asked Mr. Mestri to prepare a Bee-Box using his skills and traditional knowledge.

The basic idea behind this initiative is to conserve honey bees of the Northern Western Ghats of Maharashtra by using the existing skill sets and traditional knowledge of local communities to increase their involvement in this great cause. Also, this will generate secondary income sources for these communities which will eventually encourage the local communities to participate in the campaign actively.

After several sessions with Mr. Mestri, we got our first “BEEFRIENDLY BOX”.

For these bee-friendly boxes, we majorly focused on 3 things, the overall structure of the box, the size of each frame and compartment, and the minimum use of chemicals like colors and polishes.

We believe that by creating such bee-friendly boxes, the environment, as well as bees, will be benefitted. Also, as the foraging of honey bees increases in the coming months, we will use these boxes to place bee colonies in them.

Using our failure assessment, we tried to seek more and more knowledge regarding apiculture. Fortunately, we got an opportunity to meet Mr. Pandurang Kadam.

He is a resident of Devrkh village, Sangameshwar, and was selected by “Under The Mango Tree Society (UTMTA)”, Gujarat, for apiculture training.

UTMT Society promotes beekeeping with indigenous bees like Apis cerana indica and Trigona to increase agricultural productivity and enhance biodiversity, incomes, and livelihoods of marginal farmers in India.

While talking to him we got to know about Beekeeping using clay pots. He told us that it’s a traditional and very effective practice for beekeeping. By searching for more information about this practice, we got to know that this is not a new practice. Many local communities in Africa practice this technique for Apiculture. Our next objective is to study this technique and try to introduce it at our project sites.