Entrepreneur Shane Duthie is hoping to reverse the decline of bee populations in South Africa, with not just the sustainable removal of hives from urban areas to places of safety, but educational awareness about the critical role bees play in our lives.



Bees play a largely hidden crucial role in society as we know it and our continued way of life is inextricably linked to theirs.



Research suggests bee populations worldwide are on the decline due to a range of factors, many manmade and avoidable with due care.



Shane Duthie is hoping to help South Africa change that, with not just the sustainable removal of hives from urban areas to places of safety, but educational awareness as to the critical role bees play in our lives.



He has started Bee Kulture, a Johannesburg-based company that he hopes to expand around the country in the coming years, bringing a fresh outlook to the market with the ethical treatment of bees in mind.



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“There has been a steady decline in bee populations due to manmade factors such as lack of space, pesticides and pollution, but also climate change. We want to bring more awareness around this,” Duthie tells FORBES AFRICA, adding he was inspired to start his company after seeing the age profile of many currently in the industry, who bring an “old-school” view to the job.



“We belong to the Southerns Beekeeping Association in Johannesburg and I found myself the only person under 50 there. That is also reflected in the industry. I wanted to bring a new brand to the market with a new, environmentally-friendly outlook.



“We started 18 months ago and have grown rapidly to now have 38 hives. The majority of them have been re-hived from domestic homes or businesses, which is the main part of what we do. This has been done in a safe and sustainable way.



“This was initially for domestic clients, but we now do work for corporates as well. What differentiates us is that we save the hive, taking care to ensure we move the brood (eggs) and the wax with the bees. Some other companies just rip out the hive and destroy it.



“We have partnered with pest-removal companies, which allows them to advertise the fact they do the removals in a sustainable way, but we also deal with Bidvest, Sanitech, Rentokil to name a few. We had a hive at a power station that we removed for Eskom recently.”



Duthie says what is also unique about his offering is that Bee Kulture allows companies to sponsor hives, which they can then offset against their ‘green’ initiatives.



“When I was in the United Kingdom, there was a concept of corporates being able to sponsor trees that were being planted to offset their carbon emissions.



“We have something similar, where corporates can sponsor bee apiaries. They pay for the maintenance, and in return, we fully brand the site for them and they can use it in PR and advertising to show their commitment to the environment and their sustainability goals.



“I believe we are the first company in South Africa to offer this.” But on a much more serious note, Duthie says they are also trying to partner with farmers to put apiaries on their land in what is a win-win situation for both.



“That will assist farmers with pollination. Especially the macadamia farms. It can increase their yield by up to 30 percent, just by having some bees on site to cross-pollinate and work for the farmer. We have just begun this process and are not there yet, but I see this as an important pillar going forward.”



Bee Kulture also produce their own honey brand, which Duthie says is “pure” and different from what you would traditionally find on the shelves at supermarkets.



And then there is the education side, with schools visits and community days where Duthie explains why finding workable solutions for the relocation of hives, rather than destroying them, is in everybody’s best interests.



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“We do a lot of talks at schools. We don’t charge for these, we just do it for the awareness part of it so people can understand how crucial bees are to our local environment. We want to get more people, especially youngsters, to recognize why it is so important to save them.



“For instance, 80 percent of the world’s leading 107 crop types are pollinated by bees. They are an absolute necessity to our food sources. There is a lot of interest. We had a session at a school last month and the Q&amp;A alone from learners was about 45 minutes long. “You could see they were very engaged with the subject and that is very encouraging.”



Duthie says the rapid growth of the business in promising, and the next phase would be to create a model that would allow franchises to be set up in other areas of the country. “WewouldliketosetupafranchiseinCapeTown and elsewhere in the future, and use our existing client-base, many of whom have a national profile, to service those areas.



“We could also potentially take the concept overseas. I still have roots in Manchester from when I was there and that is something I would like to explore in the future.”



By Nick Said

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To Be or Not to Bee: The African Entrepreneur Creating A Buzz

Seeing a bee in the city often results in panicked humans running away out of fear of being stung. But the bees are likely less interested in humans than they are in the wildflowers they’re circling around, which are likely a safe and pesticide-free place for the bees to feed. Contrary to what we might assume, researchers have found that urban bees tend to live healthier lives than rural ones — they reproduce more, have more food stores, encounter fewer parasites and live longer.



Pesticides are a tricky topic — while they are great for the crops they are meant to protect, they harm the bees that agriculture relies on. Their use sparked debate at the Forbes 2019 AgTech Summit, where beekeepers discussed the impact of these chemicals for bees, and the potential research still needed to understand their effects, and how technology, urban settings and regulation will affect the future of pollinators. Here’s everything they said — and you need to know — about how pesticides affect bees.



What are pesticides, and how do they affect bees?



Farmers have traditionally used pesticides to control pests like weeds, insects, mold and mildew and animals like rats and mice, according to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. But they weren’t supposed to affect bees, who are critical to our food system — their pollination impacts every third bite of our food, according to the Pesticide Action Network, a nonprofit that challenges pesticide use in farming.



The most harmful chemicals to bees are known as neonicotinoid pesticides. Scientists have found that bees can be poisoned by flying through a field sprayed with the chemicals, but usually bees find harm through drinking contaminated pollen, nectar and water over time, according to PAN. Exposure to these pesticides can detrimental harm to bees over time, weakening their immune systems, shortening their adult life cycle and increasing their disorientation, and could be a cause for Colony Collapse Disorder. While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency banned 12 types of neonicotinoids in May — from companies Syngenta, Valent and Bayer — there are still 47 more types on the market. 



Can technology help with pesticides use?



There’s lots of startups looking into technology to change pesticides use and how we define them, especially in Europe, said Dr. Fiona Edwards Murphy, co-founder and CEO of ApisProtect. Her company, based in Ireland, utilizes machine learning to gather data about bee hive health. But Carly Stein, founder of Beekeeper’s Naturals, said that to completely rely on these new solutions for pesticides wouldn’t necessarily be the right solution. “To think there is going to be a pesticide outlet that’s not going to be damaging in some way, shape or form is just a little bit naive,” Stein says.



If anything, removing pesticides all together could mean growers would have to resort back to older methods of pest control that could potentially be more harmful to the bees, says Stein, who was listed on Forbes’ 2019 30 Under 30. Instead, there should be further research into how pesticides interact with other chemicals, and the subsequent effect on bees. Her company — whose mission is to reinvent the medicine cabinet with bee-based products —outsources its production to regions with no pesticides use like Canada, and conducts third-party pesticides testing on all its raw materials to produce its organic products.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5d1b91214c687b00085b95bc/960x0.jpg?fit=scale" alt="pollination panel agtech"/><figcaption>From left to right: Moderator Chloe Sorvino, Timothy “Paule” Jackson, Dr. Fiona Edwards Murphy, Carly Stein and Ellie Symes speak about pollination at the 2019 Forbes AgTech Summit.MATT KANG FOR FORBES</figcaption></figure>



How can urban beekeeping help?



But there are locations that are more sustainable for beekeeping, though, and they might not be where you predict. Timothy “Paule” Jackson’s nonprofit, Detroit Hives, builds urban bee farms in abandoned lots in Detroit, Michigan. By planting wildflowers, it provides bees a safe place to feed with little to no pesticides, Jackson said. “We have so many bees where wildflowers are sprouting, and we&#8217;re not spraying any chemicals on these wildflowers that they are actually boosting the native bee population,” Jackson says.



Stein mentioned that urban bees are often healthier than wild bees because of urban bee farms like Detroit Hives. While she loves meeting urban beekeepers, the issue is that there aren’t enough of them to sustain commercial production in the U.S., she says.



How can growers help beekeepers?



While there may be no immediate solution to pesticides, what’s needed is a stronger line of communication between beekeepers and growers, said Ellie Symes, CEO Of The Bee Corp and winner of the THRIVE Sustainability Award. She’s noted that her company has actually started working closer with growers, helping bridge the gap of education between the two groups of agricultural workers. It’s helpful for at least beekeepers to know what crops are being sprayed with pesticides and when, she says.



“We are starting to see the different players working together, the chemical companies getting involved and being interested and that&#8217;s what matters,” Symes says. “We&#8217;ll figure this issue out, but everyone&#8217;s gotta be involved.”



=Haley Kim; Forbes Staff

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Everything You Need To Know About The Future Of Pesticides And Bees

The African Honey Bee project came to me by a chance donation of $10,000. “For the bees,” she said. After looking into this project, the best description seems to be that 18th century phrase: it&#8217;s the bee’s knees.
There are a lot of the little honey makers, so the bees’ knees seems more appropriate to this, a project that has moved 1,200 rural families into making money as marginal farmers.
Moving the apostrophe on ‘bees’ is a small change to make. As is giving a beehive to a poor rural home.
Yet the impact is immense on the lives of the 1,200 affected families. And on the community. And on the environment. And on the likes of Sappi and Mondi who have vast forests, tree plantations that risk being burned down by ignorant bee-hunters.
Wonderful honey is produced by this project, the real stuff, unadulterated, unfiltered, unheated, unpasteurized, unmixed with sugar or irradiation. Gravity extracted.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/entreprenuers/2017/02/01/stings-make-elephants-fly/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Stings That Make Elephants Fly</a>
I learned a few things very quickly on my visit to bee farmers near Richard’s Bay in a village I’d never heard of, called Sokhulu.
One, most honey in South Africa’s supermarkets is adulterated, most of it imported from China.
Two, honey is ‘green’ until the bees cap the cell with wax. Chinese farmers use green honey as it weighs more because it still has a high moisture content. This is not good. Chemicals are added to stop it fermenting.
Three, why do bees go woozy in smoke? It is because bees think their hive is at risk so they quickly gorge on the honey, making them clumsy and drowsy and disinclined to sting or defend. Greedy little buggers, really.
Four, we have two kinds of bees in South Africa. Black bees, which belong in the Cape and need to be eliminated if moved north by ignorant beekeepers, and the summer rainfall one. The African bee and  Cape bee. Both are considered aggressive compared to European varieties.
The way this project works is based on six three-day ‘workshops’ given to locals, who are recruited by pamphlet and word-of-mouth.
The first workshop acts as a self-selection process. Those who come learn to make a protective veil and gloves from old clothes and kitchen curtaining, plus a smoker from a tin and a ‘hive tool’ (a sharpened metal thing to open the hive). If they don’t attempt to make those things, they don’t progress. Simple. Successful ones get to make their first hive from a flat-pack (materials necessary to make a hive). Those who come expecting a handout leave, and go looking for pots of gold at the end of rainbows made up of political promises.
So those who have ultimately selected themselves, go on to Level Two – and learn to catch bees, manage bees and manage their apiary sites. After completing a test they move to level three.
Level Three is about harvesting. They must get 100% for the test because it is about food safety and hygiene issues. Level Four is about a business plan (everyone sees how a sandwich business can turn R40 into R80 in a day). Level Four also teaches them to make a mobile chicken pen and garden towers. Five is about record keeping and the final Level Six focuses on advanced beehive management. After the Level 6 test, they get a certificate.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/sometime-in-africa/2017/07/14/gliding-grace-flies-without-flap/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Gliding Grace That Flies Without A Flap</a>
The change is people’s lives is dramatic. From lethargy to being productive, from dependency to self-sufficiency, from a complete lack of money to an income of sorts, honey, food from the tower gardens, eggs from the chickens, and a sense of purpose.
One farmer told me he had sold 60kg of honey this past season (January to June) at R45 ($3.50) a kilogram. The African Honey Bee people buy all the honey, although farmers can sell it elsewhere if they wish. They generally lack the sophistication to market their own honey. Some two tons of honey was produced in the Sokhulu area over four months this year, 600kg in February 2017, 800kg in March, 1,100kg in April and 600kg in May.
Tower gardens are really sacks with soil in them, a bucket of stones in the middle, grey water from washing is used and after planting seeds, towers overflow with cabbages, squash, onions, tomatoes.
Bees love plantations. Trees produce an enormous number of flowers packed densely together, so even our sterile gum forests have many wild bee colonies.
Income from honey, chickens and veggies provides the necessary cashflow that allows small-scale timber growers to postpone harvesting trees from four to eight years, enabling them to quadruple their returns.
‘It’s the bee’s knees’ comes from the 18th century and meant something very small and insignificant. Its meaning changed in the 1920s to mean an outstanding person or thing.
This African Honey Bee project is indeed the latter. &#8211; Written by Peter Sullivan

It’s The Bees’ Knees, Honey

Eleven villagers sit under the shade of a marula tree, in the heat of midday, deep in the KwaZulu-Natal bush in a village called Gazini. They have been up since 4AM to tell their stories in search of a small solution to a large problem.
A week before, a herd of elephants trampled through the vegetable patch. Villagers woke to see an elephant in their backyard peering through their door. The backlash has been violent and bloody &#8211; earlier this year, villagers killed an elephant and stripped it to the bone.
Gazini is a scatter of farms two kilometers from the South African border with Mozambique; electricity or cell phone reception is unheard of. The villagers here live hand-to-mouth deep in the bush.
The villagers complain the elephants emerge from the bush in the dead of night, to strike terror into their homes. The reason the elephants roam is because their home in the bush is getting smaller by the year.
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Listening patiently to the villagers are two entrepreneurs, Mmabatho and Desmond Morudi, in white overalls, who believe their business can help the villagers sleep easy.
“The thing that made [the threat] clear to me was when we did a trip along the border fence. There you can see exactly where the fence has been broken and where the elephants cross over. We could see the broken poles snapped in half like twigs,” says Desmond.
The entrepreneurs believe that building 200 beehives, in a two-kilometer barrier will not only fend off the elephants but also make money. The villagers could be forgiven for being sceptical.
“I don’t think they are convinced, it’s still a test to see if it

really, really works to deter the elephants,” says Mmabatho.
“It’s [understandable] why they would believe such a large creature wouldn’t be scared of something so small,” says Desmond.
The Morudis have been working around this village since October. They start work early; the bees get aggressive as the day wears on. The hives hang on wooden poles, 10 meters apart, linked by barbed wire. If touched by an elephant, the hives swing and stir up the bees.
“So far we’ve put up a fence with 40 hives. Two hundred will be the final amount. The challenge is 200 hives is quite a stretch, it means they have to run through other villages of people who don’t even know that the project is going on. There is also the issue of leaving space for cars driving past as well as border patrols. You don’t want to cut the elephants off totally. You just want to cordon off the sensitive areas and leave behind a path.”
The buzzing beehive fence is the brainchild of Lucy King in Kenya, Head of the Human-Elephant Co-Existence Program for Save the Elephants, where she realized that elephants are scared of African honey bees and will avoid beehives at all costs. The bees sting the elephants’ soft skin, eyes, face, trunk and mouth.
The fences have an 80% success rate. They are made from local materials and are cheap, costing $150 to $500 per 100 meters, says King from her headquarters Nairobi.
The beehive fences have been so successful with human-elephant conflict (HEC), 13 countries have adopted similar projects, one of them being the Morudi’s growing business, The Village Market.
“We’ve obsessed over [King’s] manual and her work in Kenya… At the same time we were trying to find villages that we could work with. We had the skills, we had the knowledge, we needed the natural vegetation,” says Mmabatho.
In the shade of the marula tree, they have taken King’s research one step further. They want to use beehive fences as part of a R2.5-million ($180,000) dream to harvest, bottle and deliver wild, high-quality honey to suburban shopping aisles.
“In general our jars sell for R55 per 375g. Then we have Mmabatho’s baby, the raw high quality, for R75 per 375g. We aim to develop a luxury brand, bringing more orders to a premium market. We work on 35kgs per hive per harvest, which is once every three months,” says Desmond.
This means, by January, 11 bee keepers of Gazini could have yielded R49,000 ($3,500).
It’s been a long journey to this odd business for Desmond and Mmabatho. They come from modest homes in Kimberly and Pretoria.
“Our desire was to develop communities we grew up in, providing help for people and business opportunities.”
The idea was born in the home of Mmabatho’s grandfather in Winterveld, a rural town 68 kilometers northwest of Pretoria, in 2012.
“Bees would get into our ceiling and produce so much honey that the ceiling would cave in. Like every other family, we would try and smoke them out and kill them. But they would always come back,” says Mmabatho.
Instead her grandfather took the family on a beekeeping course and Mmabatho was hooked. She started her own company called Iliju Bee Farm.
Her work with Iliju Bee Farm led to Mmabatho shaking hands with ministers and members of the top 100 entrepreneurs of Europe. She also dined with Richard Branson. In 2013, Mmabatho was selected as one of the brightest young minds in South Africa, and again as one of the emerging changemakers by Spark International.
Things got even busier and Mmabatho’s husband, Desmond, left the comfort of corporate accounting to help manage the business. But success proved to be a devil in disguise. The business grew too quickly and couldn’t cope. They took on a bee expert who left a year and a half later and Iliju collapsed.
Then they started The Village Market at the end of 2014.
“As we learned more about bees, and their plight, that’s when it all came together. Lucy King’s study came after we had established Winterveld. Nora Taiga, of the Peace Foundation, now Elephant, Rhinos &amp; People (ERP), paid Mmabatho a subsistence salary of R10,000, then introduced us to the people of Gazini,” says Desmond.
“At the beginning of the year the crossings were getting quite significant. Previously it had just been bulls, but then we started seeing breeding herds coming through,” says Nonceba Lushaba, KZN Coordinator of ERP.
“From the elephant’s point of view they have realized that there are easy pickings here. It’s kind of like a naughty child who goes to pick sweets.”
In Gazini, finding the bees is half the battle. Once the hives are built, the beekeepers take the hives to their homes in Gazini and attempt to colonize them.
Bees are fussy dwellers; they need water, plenty of flowering plants, protective vegetation and far from direct sunlight. Once the bees have moved in, the keepers close the entrances at night and then transport the colony to the beehive fence. Work starts before dawn. In their bee suits they walk with the hives on their heads to this farm. It is so remote you need a 4&#215;4 to navigate a maze of bush trails to find it.
“Another important issue is researching bee diseases. Bee health is important if we want to conserve them. Research needs to keep track of these growing issues.”
Threats, like the varroa mite that attacks bees in the hive and contributes in part to colony collapse, are global concerns. This is why the couple have teamed up with the University of Pretoria (Tuks) Zoology and Entomology department’s Bee Group that will add valuable research to elephant behavior, bee repopulation and disease control.
Even though US and Europe honey bee colonies were under threat from Colony Collapse Disorder for almost ten years, the African honey bee  was safe from the impact of industrialized apiculture. This according to research by Robin Crew,  professor of Entomology and leader of the Social Insects Research Group in the University of Pretoria’s Department of Zoology and Entomology.
In Crew’s book “A World Without Bees”, the fact that Africa has the largest number of wild honey bee swarms in the world has contributed to wider genetic diversity and therefore populations are not as severely affected by diseases.
The beepocolypse, as it was called, could even be resolved with recolonization with the African honey bee because of its resilience.
Their Gazini project has even caught the eye of the African Union which granted $15,000 to the bee research at Tuks.
“It’s not just the sake of doing research for the sake of research, but using it to solve community problems. To help developed communities,” says Desmond.
On the morning of inspection, Mmabatho finds suspicious larvae in one of the hives. It turns out to be waxworm. These pests eat cocoons, pollen, the shed skins of bees, and chew through beeswax.
“We need the bees to focus all their energy on making the honey. As soon as invaders enter the hive they expend all their energy getting it out, which of course affects production,” says Desmond.
The couple believe that deforestation, pesticides and insecticides also affect the bees. They instead plant strong smelling plants and herbs, like spring onions, to discourage pests and also plant flowering vegetables like tomatoes to encourage pollination.
“We are trying to encourage our farmers to use organic methods so they don’t affect the bee populations. That is why, in addition to this, we sell veggies to markets,” says Mmabatho.
Once the honey is ready it its transported 600 kilometers to their bottling plant at the Riversands Incubation Hub that opened in September in Fourways, north of Johannesburg.
“The problem we have with honey in South Africa is a lot of it is imported. Because of important laws we need to irradiate it. You will see in the shops it will say it’s ionized by radiation in order to increase shelf life. The impact of that is that it takes away the good qualities from the honey.”
“There is also a lack of variation of honey in the market. We introduce some product differentiation;  infusing honey with lemon or cinnamon.”
Raw honey is murky and beige in color, a completely different experience from what you see in the shops.
“People are used to seeing this brown liquid here on the shelves that’s what they associate with honey. They don’t appreciate the real raw product will crystallize,” says Mmabatho.
Honey also can be used in health and beauty products and is a natural anti-inflammatory. Scrubs, moisturizers and masks can all be made from the by-product of the comb.
This is one business that is helping a tiny village sleep at night and got a couple of bright African entrepreneurs buzzing.

Tag: Bees

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

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It’s The Bees’ Knees, Honey

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