– the man who propelled bee-keeping in Guyana

By Ravena Gildharie
LINDEN STEWART became fascinated with bees at age seven, but it was a book he pulled out of the garbage bin years later that widened his knowledge and enabled him to spearhead numerous apiculture initiatives in Guyana.

Stewart was born on November 22, 1961 in Ituni. He lived briefly in Potaro before settling in Georgetown at age 4. He grew up with his grandmother and later with his father, a gold miner and certified animated designer. He has 13 siblings. Stewart never married but has two daughters and four grandchildren. He now resides in Adelaide Street, Charlestown, and is the Vice President of the Guyana Apiculture Society.
He first encountered bees during a school visit to the Botanical Gardens’ honey house and later at age 14, began capturing bees with boyhood friend Christopher Menezes. The two would light bags tied to a bamboo pole to smoke out the hives; sometimes they had to drop it and run as the bees erupted.

The late Ensley DeSouza, whom Stewart dubbed “the godfather of bee-keeping in Guyana,” afterward taught the boys how to extract and rear bees to produce honey.
After school, Stewart pursued a two-year course in book binding and being a librarian, which gradually pulled him away from bees. Subsequently, he joined the Guyana Prison Service as a Prison Officer, a job that took his attention completely away from bee-keeping as he had to work on shifts and was relocated several times. After four years, he resigned in 1984 due to family commitments.
“After I resigned I went to work on a fishing trawler, and on my third trip, the trawler sank…It wasn’t a pleasant experience as we spent two days floating at sea before we got rescued,” Stewart indicated. He later worked as a security inspector and a mini bus conductor.

Bee-keeping as livelihood
“One day I sat down and said to myself ‘you are doing so many things and not seeing a future or something secure in all of it, so what it is that I can do.’ I remembered I was doing bee-keeping and decided to go back to it,” Stewart noted.
DeSouza helped Stewart to set up hives at his home in West Ruimveldt. One day some schoolboys agitated the bees. Stewart and other persons, animals and poultry were stung badly causing him to relocate his hives to the Soesdyke-Linden Highway, where they remain.
In 1993, Stewart went to visit a friend who was migrating but when he arrived at the residence, the friend had already left.

“I met the father who I asked if my friend had left any books or anything that I could read. He said he had already thrown the items in the garbage and if I wanted, I could check and see if there was anything I was interested in. I went to the garbage and while going through I stumbled on a book called ‘Home Honey Production’ and that book had all the basic principles of bee-rearing and that was my first personal honey book,” Stewart outlined.
The book, which he still has, taught him too how to produce a wide range of products from honey and bees’ wax. He used the book when he started lecturing and training.
During 1995, he got small business funding to acquire more honey boxes, smokers and protective gear. He and Aubrey Roberts eventually formed Kingdom Apiary, specialising in bee-rearing and extraction, honey production, bee’s wax soap and candles making and training.

While travelling to his apiary one day, Stewart observed abandoned hives on the Army’s farm and began attending to those bees. The Army later asked Stewart to train their personnel and he subsequently participated in many exhibitions and workshops.
He also lectured voluntarily for eight years to CXC students at the North Georgetown Secondary School.

In 2001, then Prime Minister Samuel Hinds recruited Stewart to teach bee-keeping to Upper Mazaruni residents. Initially, the villagers weren’t interested, but students at the Waramadong Secondary School and Dormitory took on the venture. With equipment and training, they produced honey and sold it to the community. The residents then asked Stewart to return and train them in bee-keeping, honey-production, honey-toasted cassava bread, honey-roasted peanuts and bees’ wax hair food among others.

Representing Guyana
During the project, he met the Ministry of Agriculture’s Apiculturalist from whom Stewart began absorbing bee-keeping theories.
In 2002, the Ministry’s Permanent Secretary gave Stewart an invitation from Jamaica to participate in the third Caribbean Bee-keeping Congress. The Ministry was unable to send a representative. Stewart was advised to use the opportunity but with his own sponsorship. It was three weeks before the event and Stewart approached several agencies for help.
For two weeks Stewart was unsuccessful until an official at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs agreed to only purchase Stewart’s ticket to Jamaica.

“I landed in Jamaica with 41 US dollars in my pocket; didn’t know where I was going; didn’t know who was picking me up, didn’t know where I would stay or what to do,” Steward recalled. The Jamaican government eventually covered Stewart’s participation in the week-long event.
It was his first exposure outside Guyana and to a congress, and Stewart felt embarrassed when he turned up without a registration fee. Nevertheless, he participated and delivered a presentation. Guyana even secured nominees to host the following congress, held biennially, but was unable to finance the event.

For the fourth congress, the late Satyadeow Sawh, who then assumed the portfolio as Agriculture Minister, asked Stewart to represent Guyana. He ensured Stewart’s full sponsorship and assured support for Guyana to host another congress should the country be nominated again.
Guyana was nominated to host in 2008 but Sawh was killed in 2006. The congress was held in tribute to the late Minister.
Since then, Stewart represented Guyana at various regional and international bee-keeping events. In 2010, he participated in the sixth congress in Grenada and the following year in the first bee-keeping college in St. George’s. Stewart and three other apiculturalists attended that event and though they had no plans to participate in the Caribbean Honey Show, the Guyanese secured first, second and third wins in several categories with samples they took to distribute.

Guyana took first place prizes in the 2014 show staged in the United States Virgin Islands where Stewart again represented his country well.
Overtime, Stewart trained bee keepers in all ten administrative regions. He spearheaded apiculture projects at Aliki, Port Kaituma and Mabaruma and along the coast through the Guyana Mangrove Restoration Project and in several Waini communities under the Low Carbon Development Strategy.

Further, Stewart got experts from England to conduct diagnostic tests and research in Guyana during 2011 while in 2013, he again led U.S. volunteers to do more advanced analytical testing of the country’s bee-keeping industry.
Lately, Stewart integrated drones in his bee-keeping activities mainly to locate and identify hives before extraction.