Talking Bees

The morning before we left Mamfe I had an interesting conversation with James, a man who was having trouble with his bees up in the rainforest. While we were talking he was getting his motorbike ready for the rainy season (when it becomes about the only form of transport with any chance of getting about) and he had spent most of the day busily tinkering. He was concerned about his bees in the rainforest because he is struggling in Ote and the surrounding rainforest villages.

Although he can get bees for his Kenyan Top Bar hives and they seem happy for a time they keep disappearing.  However he noted that although around the forest floor there seem to be no bees up in the canopy there are swarms (and there are huge numbers of flowers at this level which might be the key). I suggested that perhaps we should investigate moving back to traditional hives high up in the tree tops?

It would make it harder to work on the hives as you would have to climb to the top of the trees it would at least mean that the bees wouldn’t keep absconding and the farmers would have honey and wax.

We need to look into getting more sustainable hives that can be hoisted into the tree canopy but does not require cutting up the brood to harvest the honey.

There are some people still using traditional hives, and they are still getting loads of honey though some of them are out of the forest or at the edges (so maybe that makes a difference).

It might be worthwhile looking into studies and doing some tests when we get back to the UK to find the best sort of hives and areas to locate the hives in to find a solution (if anyone has had the same problem please get in touch!)  

There are a few factors that we have been looking into that might be at work here. We wonder whether the hives are in too shady a place on the forest floor, if we can raise the hives so that they suspended just under the canopy then they will have more sun, but without being out in the open. Alternatively, it could be that the food baring plants are not plentiful on the forest floor, and this is causing the bees to abscond- most likely it is a combination of the two factors.

Although we are aware that if we move the bees to a place that is too sunny it can get too hot for them so a balance must be found. Secondly moving them to the tops of the trees could expose the bees to other elements such as the rain in the wet season which could cause problems. Perhaps moving the hives depending on the time of year may be the best solution, but this will need to be investigated. Brian had been hoping to divide some colonies and increase the stock for the village, but possibly the problems are more fundamental than this although we won’t know how wide spread this problem is until we get to Ote and so this will be our immediate focus on arrival.

First Few Days...Buea and Beyond

From the airport we headed out of Douala on the road for Buea, a town about 2 hours slow driving west of Douala. The town in perched 950m up, on the side of Mt Cameroon, the biggest volcano in the country. The temperature and humidity dropped off rapidly as we climbed until on arrival it felt like a pleasant English summer evening. That night we stayed in the hotel Mendoza, and old British army officer’s mess, which feels as though nothing has changed since the 1960’s (although these days it is a whole lot dirtier).

My first night was a comfortable one and sleeping late till 11am I sadly missed going to church - although I’m not overly religious, it always promises to be an amazingly colourful and soulful experience. Everyone wears their best clothes and it is usually quite an occasion.












We had our first, albeit short, meeting with the Forudef team - being a Sunday we were on limited time. We needed to catch up with beekeeping in Buea as we helped one of the Forudef team last year and wanted to check on their progress, and we also had to set some time aside to prepare for our trip north to Akwaya district.

We shared news with the teams in Beau and heard about the work that Forudef had been doing over the past year. One of our major concerns from last year was the nutrition and health of the people living in the rainforest, which is one of the reasons that Gillean had agreed to accompany us this year.

Last year we had travelled with two Canadians, Mischa and Matt Taylor, who were staying 6 months in the region and had decided to focus on nutrition and diet when working with Forudef. They had set up a great program in Buea, which Forudef were now continuing. They had aimed to teach people about basic nutrition and ways to maximise this through cooking and farming techniques, because in the rural areas the diet is often very limited to what is readily available, and even then many cooking techniques lead to a loss of nutrition, Matt and Mischa have a fuller tale of this on their blog.

One of the techniques that they had been focusing for maximising the nutrition from the food had been the attempt to retain the water used in cooking to make sauces rather than throwing it away and loosing the goodness. Although it’s a simple thing, ideas like this can make a huge difference when diets are so limited.

We met a school in Akwaya last year that had wanted to do something similar, and so we sent seeds and tools to help them start a similar program to this one. The school is also somewhere we are hoping to have to the time to visit later in the trip.

Along the same lines, last year we took a trip to Ote village and noticed that the stock of chickens was very poor (they were incredibly scrawny and small!). We had talked about buying a cockerel and some hens to take to them when we visit next week, in the hope of increasing the diversity of chicken stock and improving the gene pool in the village. This idea was welcomed by Moses and he is on the case, looking for the biggest strongest hens he can find!

I know that all these programs aren’t about beekeeping, but from spending time in these villages it has become clear that the help they need is much broader than what one program can provide, regardless of whether it’s beekeeping or food initiatives. The villages have also been very generous when hosting us so we want to give something back in return, and these things seem like simple, long-term provisions that we and others (including the local people) can build on in the coming years. 


We spent so long in the office catching up on all that had been going on, and planning the work that we would do this year that we left the office too late to find food at the restaurant in the hotel. We walked down to the roadside stands to buy barbecued fish with hot sauce and sat to eat it on a rickety bench next to immaculately swept roadside - so delicious(!) - and then headed to bed.

the markets are colourful and you have to bargain but each stall holder only has a few goods to sell

ground pulses and grains are a staple

The next day we busied ourselves getting supplies for the journey north while we waited for German bee worker Leon Biermann, who was working with GIZ. He was to accompany us to the rainforest and was currently climbing Mt. Cameroon up to Buea. We were hoping to be ready when he arrived, but as we would be away for about five days we needed to collect provisions. We set out to get tinned tuna and corned beef (Brian’s ideas) but instead came back with dried fish, beans and chillies.  We could not take fresh foods as they will not keep.

dried fish is one of the cheapest sources of protein. It also keeps  without refridgeration 

Thank goodness for Moses daughter Ruth! She’ll be accompanying us on the trip to her ancestral area, which is just as well because her ideas on supplies, camping and travel in this part of the world seem very different to ours. Although collectively we have camped and travelled in many places, our experiences are mostly informed by wet weekends in Wales! This, she informs us, will not do! Moses wanted to arrange stoves and transport large bottles of gas with us, but we decided that cooking on fire like everyone else was fine – besides, it’s a lot cheaper and easier!



We met a nice guy called Ezra Gentleman who is a Canadian working with The Humanity Exchange from Canada. Ezra has a Masters in Development Economics, and is working on microcredit in the Buea area.  He was hoping to come with us to the rainforest but leaves in just over a week and so is short of time (everything can take a little longer than expected out here!).

Once we had all the supplies, we just had to wait for Leon to finish his hearty climb and we would be ready to head north and into the rainforest.

There hasn’t been much talk of actual beekeeping yet(!) but that’s coming in the next post, I promise!

Arrival: Money changing and Mayhem

I thought that this being my second year with bees abroad in Cameroon, I would be prepared for the heat and humidity of Douala, but at 28oc, humidity higher than a sauna, and the chaos and noise that is Douala airport, it still hits you. But there is nothing so exiting as landing in Africa. We had to push our way through the crush to retrieve our bags and slowly edge out of the terminal, all the time hanging on to our luggage to stop one of the many young men swooping in to ‘help us’ carry our baggage for a fee.

It had been a long flight from Birmingham with a stopover in Paris but it felt good to be off the plane. Stepping out of the terminus the humidity was worse than inside, and whilst fending off more attempts to help us find anything from a cab to accommodation, we spotted our college from Bees Abroad Brian Durk, who had flown in from Accra the previous day. With him was Moses, a Cameroonian and the head of Forudef, the NGO we would be working with throughout the trip.

Forudef are an NGO working on rural development, so our beekeeping fits in with that. Moses and his family come from the Akwaya district in SW Cameroon, and although they moved away from the region some time ago, he set up the organisation to help the people living there, especially those in the rainforest where many suffer from great poverty. Their aims are not dissimilar to that of Bees Abroad in Cameroon, so the partnership has been a good one so far.

In our party this year is Gillean Johnson, a GP from the UK with whom I shared the flight, myself as an ecologist with experience of business development, and Brian Durk, an experienced beekeeper, founder member of Bees abroad, and head of the Cameroon project.

Before we could leave the airport, we had to go through the long process of money changing with three Cameroonians. One was in colourful traditional clothes and the other two in striking European fashion - one sporting the famous red Man United shirt and carrying a very flashy Samsung phone, which he offered to sell me for a good price when he noticed me admiring it.  

We swapped our British Pounds for Cameroon Francs, notably crisper and more pristine than any we will see for the rest of the trip. The transaction took place in a huddled corner of the car park of the airport, and the whole thing was a very serious undertaking. Moses looked on carefully and interjected to double check all the counting - very kindly looking out for us because the whole thing was about as far as you could get from the orderly bureau de change in Marks and Spencer.

Interestingly the only time that whole morning that we were not being bombarded with offers of help from the baggage touts and sellers that surround the airport was when we were changing money. For some reason at this point, we were given a wide birth

Once done we could load up our borrowed pickup and with Brian sitting on our bags in the back we set off. Moses clearly had no intention of hanging around - he swung the car out into the waiting line of traffic, barged through, and we were off through the streets of Douala ready to start our work in Cameroon!