In late 2018 different people from different worlds found themselves in a 4x4 vehicle winding our way through beautiful pristine African bush. The common denominator between these two groups of people are honey bees. One the one hand, we had a urban beekeeper and the other a traditional honey hunter. The easiest way to summarize this adventure is to say that it open eyes and changed perspectives for us all. From our perspective, an urban beekeeper, we thought how lucky are these communities to call this pristine environment home. With multitudes of trees and flowers, it is a beekeepers dream that we only wish we had in the city. The traditional honey hunter spent a good long while prodding and investigating the modern Langstroth bee hive we had brought along.
Although communication was difficult between us, we had the impression that they knew of modern beehives with frames, but didn't quite exactly know how they worked, and how the bees established themselves inside the wooden box. That is what we where here to do.
To cut a long story short. The objective of the day was for two different beekeepers from two different worlds to share their methods of beekeeping. We were to see for the first time a traditional bark hive, and the honey hunters where to see a modern Langhstroth beehive. A modern bee hive is just a box without bees. Today we were to do what is called a honey bee colony transfer, by swapping the bee colony from the traditional bark hive into the new modern bee hive. Bee transfer is just technical jargon for a bee removal, which we have done by the hundreds when safely relocating honey bees for clients in the city. The basic process includes removing all of the comb and attach this is sequence to the frames of the modern hive. The comb is the wax part of a bee colony filled with honey, pollen, bee larvae and eggs. We would then carefully tip all of the honey bees, and most importantly the queen bee, into the modern hive to rejoin to their comb. I suppose you may be thinking: ''well why where you doing this?'' Keep you eye out for our next article in this series and we'll go into that a little bit more