AMY Weeks and Jim Kelly, two Louisiana beekeepers spent two weeks of the past month helping several Amerindian groups and others to rebuild the beekeeping industry in Guyana.

“When the Africanised bees moved in 1975, a lot of beekeepers quit, so now there is a generational knowledge gap,” Ms. Weeks said.
The two United States (U.S.) based resource persons said their counterparts here found that they could rear Africanised bees and produce honey to sell. But there was one problem: this type of bee tends to leave the hive.
Weeks reported that the insects have a tendency to abscond  in the wet season and feeding them sugar water during that time tempts them to stay.
The local keepers had adopted a different strategy by utilising another type of bee but there remained the high cost of producing and selling honey in an extremely poor country, where the average monthly income is around US$250, she stated.
Weeks said the ‘farmer to farmer’ programme they were introducing to villages teaches how to increase the number of hives and lower costs.
Kelly said: “They had 10 beehives and when we left they had 16. They were buying brood boxes to raise bees and paying US$27 apiece. We showed them how they can make their own boxes for less than US$3.”
The Louisiana beekeepers also showed the Guyanese a more modern way to remove the honey from the comb by arranging to provide an extractor which spins the frames from the hive and collects the raw substance.
Weeks and Kelly said their trip was not all work because they got the chance to meet a lot of the people and visit some of the natural attractions in Guyana.