We harvested honey for the first time from our month-old apiary on Saturday and to mark the occasion, a nasty little buzzer left its stinger in my arm, and she probably died in the process – serves her right, ha-ha! But that’s getting ahead of the story. How I came to be involved in the apiary business is one of those in-God’s-own-time stories. I first met Mrs. Maxima Ines (our consultant who did her dissertation on beekeeping in Israel) at a trade fair in Vigan in 2006. I took interest in her produce immediately. Since then, I’d planned to visit her apiary to learn more about beekeeping but never quite found the time; neither did I know how to locate her place as I had lost her business card. Then one Saturday, Feb. 23, I think, we (some relatives and I) went to Mino’s in Badoc, a home-based canteen that we frequent and that serves Italian snacks cooked by Manong Mino, an Italian who is married to a lady from Badoc. Unfortunately, they were getting repairs done on the canteen, so we had to leave without getting our fill of the usual pasta dishes and pizza. On our way home, I broached the idea of looking for Bona’s Garden in Sinait, that’s Mrs. Ines’ apiary and, after asking around, we found the place – after two years of planning to do so on my part, and all because Mino’s place was closed on that fateful Saturday and we had time to kill. Now, don’t you just see God’s hand in all that?

We bought some bee products from Mrs. Ines that day – honey cider vinegar, honey, bee pollen, propolis wine – and also looked at her colonies and had a crash course on the site about beekeeping. We expressed our interest in having our own apiary but she said we needed to undergo a seminar on the process, and that we would have to go to MMSU (where she is a professor) for it. A few hours after we left, however, she called to tell us she’s willing to come give us the seminar since she saw how enthusiastic and interested we were. She gave us the lecture on the Monday after our visit and got our colonies a week after. Now, our apiary is a little over a month old and what started as four colonies are about to become eight.

Interest in beekeeping is growing in these parts of the country. Mrs. Ines relates that she gets requests for seminars from people from as far away as Abra and Cagayan. And why not? Beekeeping is one of the most environment-friendly activities. Through pollination,

they prevent the extinction of wildplants. Bees are highly valued by farmers for their role as pollinators, helping plants be more productive. Some beekeepers even lease their bees to pollinate farms. Indeed, experts acknowledge the importance of bees in the food chain and the economy: without these buzzers, harvests would decline and prices of commodities would soar. One recent report even describes the potential impact of the declining bee population worldwide as “worse than global warming.” Fortunately, research is underway to look into the problem and find some solutions and, through, our small-scale apiary, we hope to contribute to the effort.

Filed under: April 2008, Beekeeping 101, Environment | You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.