UNESCO - United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
UNESCO - United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
05/16/2023 | News release | Distributed by Public on 05/16/2023 23:52
The Women for Bees network is growing
This year's theme for World Bee Day is 'bee engaged in pollinator-friendly agricultural production'. It is estimated that as much as 40% of the 20,000 bee species around the world may be threatened, including by the expansion of industrial agriculture and the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
The beekeepers participating in the Women for Bees programme are committed to conserving local biodiversity and the environment beyond their own bee population. Many of these women are also farmers who manage the land. It is, thus, important to them to improve their agricultural practices. They are striving to maintain a balance between beekeeping, cultivation and grazing, while enhancing pollination around their crops, such as by planting native melliferous flora that act like a magnet to bees.
Not all of the women in the network are professional beekeepers. Some have only recently embraced the profession and others hope to turn their part-time beekeeping into their main livelihood. Other women, such as in France and Rwanda, are teachers who intend to transmit their beekeeping passion to their pupils.
Different environments, a common passion
The 57 beekeepers in the Women for Bees network come from a range of countries that include Bulgaria, Cambodia, France, the Russian Federation, Rwanda and Slovenia. More women from China and Ethiopia are expected to join the network soon.
The programme organizes regular face-to-face and online meetings where beekeepers can exchange their experiences, knowledge and practices. There are both similarities and differences in beekeeping practices from one country to another and the beekeepers live in very different environments, so their needs are not always the same - but they can always learn from one another. This is the case of women in the Great Altay Biosphere Reserve (Russian Federation) and the Gishwati-Mukura Landscape Biosphere Reserve (Rwanda), for instance. Whereas the former has a short beekeeping season on account of its cool climate, the latter boasts a tropical agricultural matrix with several honey harvesting seasons each year. However, beekeepers in both biosphere reserves practice beekeeping with local ecotypes of the western honeybee (Apis mellifera).
Beekeeping in Slovenia
In Slovenia, beekeeping is a way of life for the many people who harvest bee products for food and traditional medicinal cures and who use their knowledge and skills to care for their honeybees and the environment.
There are about 11,000 beekeepers in Slovenia organised into over 200 local beekeeping societies, 15 regional societies and the national Slovenian Beekeepers' Association. Together they manage about 200,000 bee colonies of the only subspecies kept in Slovenia, the Carniolan bee (Apis mellifera carnica). With the controlled breeding of queen bees they ensure the preservation of its valued characteristics: gentleness, yield, excellent orientation and resistance to weather conditions.
Bees are kept mostly in wooden apiaries near beekeepers' homes. Communities express a loving and respectful attitude towards bees, and the related knowledge, skills and practices are shaped by centuries of tradition and transmitted from generation to generation. Some beekeepers are involved in obtaining bee products, others focus on breeding queens, apitourism and apitherapy. They work with different craftsmen, making equipment and tools, hives and apiaries, protective and festive clothing. Artisans such as makers of honey bread and painters of hive panels are also connected with beekeeping and bee products. The community is united in a love for bees and for nature, and in mutual solidarity.
Beekeeping can offer additional income. Modern aspects of beekeeping include urban beekeeping, the exploration of therapeutic effects of bees and the development of healing activities (apitherapy), and apitourism. These are marked by a high awareness about people's connection to nature and respect for bees. This is one reason why beekeeping in Slovenia figures on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. For example, in the Kozjansko and Obsotelje Biosphere Reserve and elsewehere in Slovenia, there is a boom in "bee houses" where patients can rest within refitted hives to hear and see the bees as they come in and out; this has a direct impact on human wellbeing as a form of meditation to minimize stress.
In Slovenia, bees are kept mainly in wooden AŽ hives on wheels that can be moved to other locations.
© Amadeja Knez
Providing training in organic beekeeping and apitherapy in Europe
The Women for Bees network provides women with complementary training based on their needs, in addition to providing them with material for their work and new beehives.
Since last year, UNESCO has trained 11 women from biosphere reserves situated within the EuroMAB network. Four beekeepers from the Kozjansko and Obsotelje Biosphere Reserve (Slovenia) and the Central Balkan Biosphere Reserve (Bulgaria) have attended a one-week training course in the south of France on European requirements and regulations for organic beekeeping, with a view to converting their own apiaries into organic ones.
This face-to-face practical training complemented a more theoretical course organized online earlier in 2022 that had also included beekeepers from the Great Altay Biosphere Reserve (Russian Federation).
UNESCO has complemented this training with an online course in apitherapy for 11 women beekeepers. Apitherapy is a set of holistic practices for healthcare that uses different bee products, such as pollen, venom, royal jelly or propolis. This holistic approach considers human health to be interlinked with the health of bees and the environment. Practitioners like Patricija Škorc (pictured) consider that bees which are in an optimal state of wellbeing will produce bee products of a high quality that will have the best potential for use in apitherapy.
Patricija Škorc is a beekeeper from Kozjansko and Obsotelje Biosphere Reserve (Slovenia). A trained apitherapist, she joined the UNESCO course to learn additional techniques. With support from the Women for Bees programme, Patricija is placing more hives, while restoring flowering meadows and a traditional orchard by continually planting pollinator-friendly plants and trees.
© Amadeja Knez
Dorothée Singer from the Moselle Sud Biosphere Reserve (France) has used her training to diversify beyond cereal-growing and horse- and sheep-grazing to beekeeping. Since receiving beehives from the programme, she has planted more than 1,500 trees, 12 hectares of organic sunflower and 1.5 hectares of melliferous meadow during a prolonged drought to create food for both her own bees and wild pollinators. Three of her honeys have won prizes at a local agricultural salon.
© Dorothée Singer
Since the women trained in Europe were hardly beginners, the training they received has, above all, provided them with a space in which to exchange practices between biosphere reserves, thereby strengthening this support network.
Some of the trainees had also participated in the EuroMAB Conference in September 2022 in the Salzburger Lungau and Kärntner Nockberge Biosphere Reserve (Austria).
This year, the Women for Bees programme is supporting the trainees from Bulgaria, the Russian Federation and Slovenia further by providing them with adapted beehives and local bee swarms.
Scaling up modern approaches to beekeeping in Rwanda
Throughout 2023, UNESCO is training 33 women from the Gishwati-Mukura Landscape Biosphere Reserve (Rwanda) to scale up their modern approaches to beekeeping. Most of the women participating in this project are also farmers. They are keen not only to increase honey production through their respective cooperatives to augment their income earned independently from their husbands, but also to acquire a real support helpdesk through the network of female beekeepers.
UNESCO is supporting the beekeepers' cooperatives in the biosphere reserve by building three apiaries consisting of 30 beehives each for each of their three cooperatives. UNESCO will then provide ongoing technical support.
This project is being implemented jointly with the Rwanda National Commission for UNESCO and with support of the Rwandan Centre of Excellence in Biodiversity and Natural Resource Management, which functions under the auspices of UNESCO.