Zambia's woodlands resonate with two kinds of buzz. First is the hum from the millions of bees gathering nectar from the surrounding dry forests. Second is the buzz of excitement among local villagers who see honey production as a potential source of livelihood.
Zambia’s woodlands cover millions of hectares, with a significant portion forming part of the larger Miombo Woodland covering much of central and eastern Africa. They provide an excellent habitat for bees, which in most seasons deliver a surplus of honey.
The first Zambian written records of bee-hives date back to 1854, when David Livingstone described the log hives used by the Southern Lunda people on the upper Zambezi in North-Western Province.
According to Guni Mickles–Kokwe, a natural resource scientist from the Zambia Alliance for People and Environment, “Trade in beeswax started in the late 1890s when Zambians traveled by foot through Angola to the Atlantic coast. A hundred years later and the long-distance trade in honey and bees-wax still provides an important source of livelihood for many people in rural Zambia. Today organically certified, golden honey and beeswax find their way from rural homesteads into lucrative markets throughout the world.”
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CIFOR has identified a number of constraints holding back Zambia’s beekeeping industry:
- Conflict over land access between honey producers and loggers, with the latter seeming to have more rights than the beekeepers
- Limited resource base due to existing laws that define honey and beeswax as minor forest products and restrict beekeeping to forests outside national forests
- Lack of monitoring and regulation of beekeepers by the Forestry Department due to financial and human resource constraints
- Absence of accurate industry data in such areas as production levels, output and marketed volume
- Inadequate support for organic certification, which is central to achieving premium export prices, a better and healthier product and better forest management
- Uncoordinated industry regulation by different government agencies who oversee various aspects of honey production (e.g. beekeeping as a commercial activity, bees as live animals, honey as a food item etc.).
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In North-Western Province some 10,000 beekeepers own about 500,000 hives and produce about 1,000 metric tonnes of honey and at least 100 tonnes of beeswax per year. About half is honey exported while 80-100 tonnes is sold on local markets, with the remainder used to brew a local beer called mbote.
Because most honey and beeswax is exported, it has become an important source of foreign exchange for Zambia. Exports – mostly to Europe – remained stable throughout the 1990s, but started increasing rapidly after 2000 as new companies entered the business.
“Honey and beeswax have become an important source of livelihood for thousands of people in Zambia. About one third of the beekeepers’ annual cash income comes from honey and beeswax trade,” said Mickles–Kokwe’s colleague, CIFOR scientist Crispen Marunda.
Marunda and Mickels-Kokwe’s research has found the linkages between beekeeping and forest management in Zambia to be quite strong. Because honey and wax are so important to the beekeepers’ daily struggle against poverty, they are very aware of the need to prevent forest fires. And the presence of so many bees has increased woodland productivity due to increased rates of pollination among flowering trees, enhanced plant regeneration rates and helped maintain high levels of diversity.
On the other side of the coin, the mortality among some tree species has increased due to beekeepers’ harvesting their fibrous bark to make beehives.
While the current level of honey and wax production is improving, Mickels-Kokwe and Marunda believe there is still a lot more that can be done to ensure production reaches its fullest potential. The two scientists believe a number of factors are constraining the industry (see box).
“The most pressing need at the moment is to reform the beekeeping policy. If the right measures are implemented, honey production could increase from 1,000 to 15,000 metric tonnes a year,” Marunda said.
Hopefully such reforms won’t be far off. In response to a request by Zambia’s Forestry Department, CIFOR is helping Zambia develop a beekeeping policy. In 2004, the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida) funded CIFOR to review Zambia’s beekeeping industry and run workshops to identify constraints among key beekeeping stakeholders. The report and the workshops have both provided recommendations that will form a base for further policy discussion. They have also contributed significantly to a policy draft now being prepared by the Forestry Department with assistance from CIFOR.