Honey Bees. Vital Pollinators. Beekeeper Inspirations

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Today is inspiration Monday and today's episode features inspirations

from three, your positive imprint, sustainable beekeepers, Melanie

Margarita Kirby, Mmabatho Portia Morudi, and Andy Friedrichs.

At the end of the episode, I will provide the episode numbers and a bit of

information on these amazing beekeepers.

These honeybee beekeepers share their experiences with honeybees

and their knowledge with beekeeping, a menagerie of inspiration.

Bees are one of the most important animals,

uh, the insects in the world.

Honey

bees globally are declining for various reasons.

They are one of the major contributing pollinators of our flowers and

of course of the crops we love, such as apples, peaches, broccoli,

squash, pumpkins, papaya, berries, nuts, and just so much more.

Mmabatho Portia Porudi: Bees are not the problem.

They are the solution.

Melanie Margarita Kirby: They really have become the backbone of American

agriculture, and so they say one out of every three bites you take is

dependent on honeybee pollination.

How do we create an

Mmabatho Portia Porudi: earth that future generations would love to live in?

What you find is that they practice what we call honey hunting as

opposed to sustainable beekeeping.

So honey hunting means people would go into the forest and then

burn a large chunk of the forest just to get one hive destroying

the whole colony in the process.

Deforestation is also a big thing because you must remember we use

the wood for your charcoals, so that also destroys the environment.

We want to save the bees, but now how do we say don't chop down the trees

without offering another alternative?

Bee farming for us was a alternative and then saying, we'll create a market for

this honey so that you have an income.

I believe our model, it can create a sustainable earth for people to

to live in, becoming custodians of their natural resources.

An example with the village at the border of Mozambique, um, in South Africa where

they struggle with crop raiding elephants based on a study by Dr. Lucy King in

Kenya, where they had proved that bees are natural deterrence to to elephants.

We communicated with the tribal council, they set out a group of individuals

from the village that we could train.

We built this beeline fence.

At the time, the fence was about 400 meters, so about 40 hives,

and that successfully kept the elephants out of the village.

The produce from them, it's about creating more income streams for the communities

beekeeper.

Andy Friedrichs of Norway, the beehives he is responsible for are

located deep in the mystic forest surrounding the Kleivstua Hotell

I always want to have my own bees.

And in Norway they use the, the normal Norwegian style, the Norwegian

hives where you have to interrupt the bees and and disturb them.

And every time you have to take honey, you just have to

promote them to get aggressive.

When they take out the trays, like the honey to scrape it out then you have,

uh, you got the bees, um, everywhere.

With my time limit.

How can I make sure the bees are in good hands?

I found the, the honey flow from Australia.

I just kind of contacted them.

See has this ever been tested in Norway?

And kind of, no.

I was one of the first in almost Europe who started with this project.

After one year, I finally succeeded to get the bees inside the hives together

with the, the Norwegian Bee Clubs.

And after one and a half months we started to could harvest the honey.

The bees have to decide when and where they have to change the queen.

So I had the same queen for almost two and a half years.

Then I saw it was a new one.

I don't disturb them.

I can see how they work.

I only have two hives.

It's mostly just to show people that we have to, to look at the environment we

have to take care of, of things around us.

We have a lot of bushes with berries like raspberries especially,

and we have a lot of flowers.

We make sure they are alive all the times when we have the season for the

bees to be a good environ for the bees.

It's an animal who's dying out.

But all the poison people are doing.

Norway, everybody's fighting now for the, the bees should

have better, better environment.

It's not allowed to be hives close to the roads anymore.

I'm not a hundred percent educated beekeeper, but I still wanted my own

bees and to have these bees I want to make sure they, they are healthy.

You had this idea of not producing a whole bunch of

honey for the hotel, but about education and environmental advocacy.

Melanie Margarita Kirby: I wanted to enlist in the Peace Corps and to be of

service to the world at large, and got stationed in Paraguay in South America.

My assignment was beekeeping.

We had to build everything from scratch.

They didn't have power tools, nonetheless, credit cards to buy things.

We, um, made our own beehive boxes.

They would start with one hive, maybe get up to two or three and harvest the honey.

And we started a little farmer's market.

And with the money that these women earned, they were then able to buy

their children's shoes, notebooks, pens, and, you know, pay for school

because they didn't have public school.

I have my own small farm.

I have anywhere between 200 to 300 hives, and there are operators who have.

10,000, even 80,000 colonies of beehives, and I see it as my contribution to

supporting not only local pollination needs, but to supporting biodiversity.

I am very mindful of the other 4,000 different kinds of

solitary bees that we have on the

continent.

So I try not to oversaturate any area.

If we get too many hives in one area and it then out competes all these other

species that also need pollen and nectar.

And some of those other pollinator species are what we call specialists.

So if honeybees are generalists, meaning that they, they eat a

variety of things, some of the other pollinators that are specialists

only rely on one particular flower.

And so if that flower is already, you know, pollinated and the

nectar's already sucked up, then they don't get the food they need.

And so that really impacts that broader web of biodiversity.

You add on pesticides, loss of habitat, compromised agricultural practices on

this one critter that's been exploited.

There's different ways of beekeeping, and I think as people figure out

what their full own philosophy is, what their community has and

what their community can support, then they can determine, you know.

If that's a good fit for them or not.

Mmabatho Portia Porudi: We've got so much work that we need to do and it starts

with us making a decision to say we are going to work in harmony with nature,

take care of the nature, because without us, we can't live.

The bees, for me, is a good example.

I can just see how many extra flowers we have, have gotten

after we started the hives.

So don't take the bees for granted.

Conscientious beekeeping, sustainable beekeeping.

If we want these

Melanie Margarita Kirby: various organisms to sustain themselves and to

survive, then what is it that we need to do or should be doing in order to

allow for that to happen and especially for it to happen naturally and really

support, um, a quality of life that's

that's positive

for all these organisms.

Thank you again to Chris Nole for permission to use his music.

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Thank you so much for your support and for listening to your positive imprint.

So try to change your perspective in order to understand the reality of others.

Melanie Margarita Kirby of United States is an internationally renowned

honeybee apologist who breeds Queen Bees ZiaQueenBees.com Melanie provides

brilliant information regarding honeybees.

Episodes 130 and 131.

Mmabatho Portia Morudi, of South Africa runs The Village Market, South Africa.

LocalVillag.Africa.

Learn how she saves elephants, honeybees, and their habitats.

Episode 210.

Andy Friedrichs does his beekeeping in Norway at Kleivstua Hotell.

Social Media, K-L-E-I-V-S-T-U-A.

Learn more about Andy Friedrichs from the Mystic Forests of Norway, where he

shares education about how you can start raising honeybees in your backyard.

Episode 116.

And until next time, enjoy listening to over 200 episodes of your positive

imprint, your positive imprint.

What's your P.I.?