BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, CMC – Barbados may have to explore importing bees to expand the apiculture industry.
This is according to Senior Agricultural Officer Bret Taylor, who spoke during Friday’s Estimates debates in the Lower House.
He said that due to the aggressiveness of local bees, there might be a need to “bring in foreign bees.”
“We may need to bring in queens that are not as aggressive and that are high producers here into Barbados, and that would be a factor as to how we go about it [increasing the bee population],” he said.
Another key to expanding the industry, he said, is getting more people involved.
According to Taylor, Barbados currently has approximately 738 hives being managed by 81 active beekeepers.
“Only a few of those 81 beekeepers do it full time. There is one beekeeper who probably has about 200 hives himself, so the rest of the hives are spread across the 80 or so beekeepers that we have on the island,” he pointed out.
Taylor said that while the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security has trained approximately 366 persons over the past four years in beekeeping, most need to use what they learned.
He said 45 trainees received complete beekeeping kits, but only 14 were active.
“So there has been a slow uptake in apiculture. There have been challenges to persons who have done it. During that time, we had Hurricane Elsa, we had the ash fall, we had even periods of drought, and then last year, we had periods with lots of rain. Some of these factors affect the rearing of bees and production of honey,” Taylor explained.
Minister of Agriculture and Food Security Indar Weir agreed the island might have “to source bees for us to get to the scale that we need to get to.”
Meanwhile, Chief Agricultural Officer Keeley Holder said that while Barbados is now developing the industry, other Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries have been working to grow their apiculture sector.
She said Guyana’s honey is now on supermarket shelves in Barbados, while Grenada has won gold at the World Honey Show.
Holder said the Ministry has been working with the Apiculture Association of Barbados, which has identified bee forages.
“But to start to push forward the apiculture industry, we need to be able to classify which of those are better for pollen, which is better for nectar, because then that informs the farmers who are getting into beekeeping, those who have land, which types of forages to plant so that they can then increase the amount of forage that is available for the bees.
“Additionally, as Taylor indicated, there has been some indication that the bees we have here are not the European bee, which also has implications. The European honey bee tends to have a hive of 50 000 to 60 000 bees. Bees that are more Africanized would tend to be about 10 000 to 12 000 in a hive,” she said.
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