Honey hunting raising environmental concerns

Some of the villagers prefer looking for honey in the wild rather than keeping the bees to make the honey and by-products they badly need.

This is an old practice where villagers comb the Mountain slopes in search of wild bee hives, harvests them for food and sale in local markets.

This has raised environmental concerns as quite often these honey hunters ignite wild fires that further cause more destruction to the bio-diversity.

According to some experienced bee farmers, this unsustainable practice is damaging to the bee population that is very useful in pollinating crops because many of the bees are lost.

The activity they say is not sustainable and is also very uneconomical given the little quantities of honey harvested through this chance oriented activity.

According to one of the experienced bee farmers, Lyonga Mbake Samuel of the Bonakanda-Bova Bee Farmers CIG, that recently organized a two day bee training workshop at the associations head office in Bonakanda, it is not only environmental concerns at the moment given the creation of the Mount Cameroon National Park.

He said given the present wild life laws some of the honey hunters risk getting prison terms and paying fines for encroaching into the Mt Cameroon National Park reserve.

“The law states that if you encroach and do illegal hunting of wild life you can go to jail and pay a fine. If we don’t start training people so that they can desist from hunting honey, many of our children will end up in prison”, Lyonga Mbake told TFV after the training workshop last 9th March 2014.

According to the experienced bee farmer, the participants who are trainers will subsequently organize their own workshops in their areas.

The farmers were trained in modern techniques of sustainable and commercial beekeeping methods to produce high quality tropical honey and by-products for the increasing demand of these products.

It is only through these trainings that the environmental hazards of honey hunters will be avoided, the bee farmer told TFV.

Speaking to TFV, some of the participants acknowledged that the two day training interspersed by practical bee keeping aspects like constructing hives, bee catchers and harvesting honey will help them a long way to succeed in bee keeping.

Emphasis according to the organisers was also laid on marketing bee farming products because this will encourage the farmers after they make money from their activity.

It’s important to note that the honey bees are needed as they maintain part of the natural cycle of bio-diversity through their pollinating services in our tropical plants, food and cash crops.