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.

The Road to Mamfe

We have travelled north from Buea to Kumba by tarmac road with innumerable potholes in a crowded minibus with all our belongings strapped to the roof. All the drivers in the area have been on strike in protest to the government for failing to maintain the road, and so we waited some time to make the journey. 

Some sections of the route have become so bad that drivers refuse to take the main road, instead heading off towards nigeria and the through the top of the Korup and Ekok national parks. This meant driving on small tracks through areas of rainforest which were absolutely textbook examples of layered canopy, any (ex) geography teacher’s idea of heaven! And we were able to drool over the landscape uninterrupted for miles. 

The road underneath was patchy and uneven, sometimes disappearing in mud and craters so deep, and water filled, that they seemed impassable. The wet season wasn’t to start for another month; we had experienced heavy downpours uncharacteristically early, but we were assured that the mud got much worse than this and so we pressed on. We made relatively rapid, and dust free, progress (an advantage of the rain i suppose) but hurtling over wooden plank bridges in crammed full minibuses at 60mph can get a little hairy!

It was a little sad to see trucks heading along the road laden with several mighty trees, easily 3 or 400 years old, when the only signs of tree planting was new rubber and palm oil trees; hardly aforestation though tactically agroforestry i suppose.

En route we tried to pick up a cassava grinder to take to the Ote, the village we were heading to in the rainforest, but the only one we could find just sprayed ground cassava across the whole workshop and covered all the mechanics, and us, with the white pulp...everyone was completely in hysterics and it was certainly an ice breaker between the locals and the us but it just didn’t seem practical to take!  The owner assured us that with some adjustments it would be perfect, but it wouldn’t be ready till next week. 

At Kumba we swapped our cramped bus for a car and headed for the un-surfaced road north to Mamfe.  All our luggage was stuffed into and on top of the boot of a battered old car with a UK number plate.  On the top of the luggage below the lid was the cassava frying pan to hold everything in tightly.  Already at Kumba and out of the mountains surrounding Buea we could feel the temperature and humidity rising, back up to about 30 deg.





The arrival at Mamfe was very welcome; we checked into the same hotel as last year, the Data, which commands a promontory overlooking the river, which snakes way below sleepily towards Nigeria. It has a lovely shady restaurant and some seating under grass roofed shelters in the garden surrounded by lovely flowering trees full of birds, and a very proud cockerel that struts around. It is the place all the Chinese engineers and contractors, who are building the road west east from Nigeria as part of the Trans African highway, go to eat so can get very busy. Although the heat is about 30 deg now it feels less, there is shade, a working fridge and some cold drinks (you would be surprised how often the two are not linked in Cameroon) although tonight there is no power in town so there is no light or water. 

We were able to relax from the long journey and shower from a bucket with a half water bottle cut to make a cup. We met a worker we did a bee keeping course with last year who will be joining our ever expanding party to the rainforest. It was a really warm reunion and we spent much of the evening catching up on news over dinner which we bought him; we insisted on paying and when he saw the bill he was astonished although there were 4 of us it came to around 20,000 CFA (about £25.00) which was over half the man’s monthly salary.

Everyone was tired from the journey so we all had an early night.

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!

An Early Rise...

An early start this morning to be at the airport to fly out to Cameroon.
Was somewhat stressful getting packed and had the usual last ditch dash to the shops last night to get all the things i had forgotten up to now, but that's all done and the backpack is filled and am standing in Birmingham airport waiting for the flight.
looking foreword to touching down in Douala and getting started, will write more when there is something to talk about.