Foreign bees needed to grow local apiculture industry

Barbados may have to explore the option of importing bees if it wants to expand the apiculture industry.

Senior Agricultural Officer Bret Taylor, speaking during the Estimates debates in the Lower House on Friday, said because local bees are aggressive, there may be a need to “bring in foreign bees”.

“We may need to bring in queens that are not as aggressive and that are high producers here into Barbados, and that would be a factor as to how we go about it [increasing the bee population],” he said.

Another key to expanding the industry, he said, is getting more people involved.

According to Taylor, Barbados currently has approximately 738 hives being managed by 81 active beekeepers.

“Only a few of those 81 beekeepers actually do it full time. There is one beekeeper who probably has about 200 hives himself, so the rest of the hives are spread across the 80 or so beekeepers that we have in the island,” he pointed out.

Taylor said that while the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security has trained approximately 366 persons over the past four years in beekeeping, the majority of them are not putting what they learned to use.

He said 45 of those trainees were provided with complete beekeeping kits, but only 14 are active.

“So there has been a slow uptake in apiculture. There have been challenges to persons who have done it. During that time we had Hurricane Elsa, we had the ash fall, we had even periods of drought, and then last year we had periods where we had lots of rain. Some of these factors affect the rearing of bees and production of honey,” Taylor explained.

Minister of Agriculture and Food Security Indar Weir agreed with Taylor that Barbados need “to source bees in order for us to get to the scale that we need to get to”.

Meanwhile, Chief Agricultural Officer Keeley Holder said that while Barbados is now developing the industry, other Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries have been working to grow their apiculture sector.

She said Guyana’s honey is now on supermarket shelves in Barbados while Grenada has won gold at the World Honey Show in the past.

Holder said the Ministry has been working with the Apiculture Association of Barbados which has already identified forages for bees.

“But to really start to push forward the apiculture industry, we need to be able to classify which of those are better for pollen, which are better for nectar, because then that informs the farmers who are getting into beekeeping, those who have land, which types of forages to plant, so that they can then increase the amount of forage that is available for the bees.

“Additionally, as Mr Taylor indicated, there has been some indication that the bees that we have here are not the European bee so that has implications as well. The European honey bee would tend to have a hive of 50 000 to 60 000 bees. Bees that are more Africanized would tend to be about 10 000 to 12 000 in a hive,” she said.

The Chief Agricultural Officer said last weekend the Ministry engaged members of the Apiculture Association of Barbados in discussions regarding beekeeping management and other challenges affecting the sector.

(AH)