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African Honey Bee

An African Honey Bee Beekeeper.
Trade name	African Honey Bee, Kruger Park (Pty)Ltd
Industry	Beekeeping
Founded	Centurion, South Africa (August 10, 2007 (2007-08-10))
Founder	Guy Stubbs
Headquarters	Centurion , South Africa
Website	www.africanhoneybee.co.za

African Honey Bee is a social-franchise beekeeping micro-business incubator established in 2007 by Guy Stubbs, a Christian Social Entrepreneur who has been involved in social development for more than 25 years and has developed specialist expertise in developmental beekeeping. Guy started beekeeping in 1981. He is also an internationally award-winning photographer with a long track record in social development, agricultural and environmental issues. Andrew Weeks and Kobus Visser have contributed towards the success of the project.

Vision

African Honey Bee has a vision of alleviating poverty through sustainable beekeeping, by enabling rural families to profitably benefit from the natural resources available to them.

Mission

African Honey Bee’s mission is to catalyse, support and sustain thousands of viable micro beekeeping businesses spread across southern Africa, by developing a network of interlinked beekeeping incubator farms that provide a platform for the beekeepers to access training, mentorship, low cost logistics, equipment and consumables, appropriate technology and access to market.

Concept

Globally and more specifically in Europe, Japan and the United States of America, consumers and governments are demanding high quality and healthy food. Honey is one such food product. With the spread of pollution it is becoming more and more difficult to provide these markets with adequate quantities of honey that is raw, pure and free of pollutants.

Retailers in South Africa are demanding locally produced (pure and ethically traded honey) for their private labels, but are struggling to find reliable suppliers. A recent history of government rebated cheap imported honey, created barriers of entry to honey producers, because the costs of honey production in South Africa were higher than the cost of importing it. Exchange rate devaluations have changed the situation, offering beekeepers an opportunity to compete with the imported honeys. South African consumers are also becoming more and more aware of the fact that all imported honey into SA is radurised by law, making it far less healthy than locally produced pure honey.

African rural communities often live in areas adjacent to unpolluted prime honey producing vegetation, (capable of producing organic honey) that they do not benefit from, nor realise the potential. In identifying this opportunity, African Honey Bee has been established as a social enterprise to roll out a biblical based social-franchise beekeeping micro-business incubator model that provides:

• partner beekeepers with access to fair markets, affordable technology and training; and
• the consumer with access to fairly priced, premium quality pure honey.

African Honey Bee has been exploring ways to empower potential and existing honey producers and then link them to the honey consumers, enabling all to benefit from the relationship. First a stable platform based on a “hub-and-spoke” principle is established. Profitable incubation farms are set up to produce viable volumes of honey, enabling critical mass and thereby providing partner beekeepers access to appropriate technology, infrastructure, training, quality control, logistical support and access to markets.

The incubation farms not only provide a stable platform for market off-takers that require relationships with “big farmer” type operations, but also an environment for partnering with, and incubating beekeepers.

Beekeepers that partner with African Honey Bee are provided with:

• Training, mentoring and support;
• Low cost infrastructure, equipment, consumables and logistics; and
• Off-take agreements/partnerships with large retailers.

They are incentivised to be loyal to African Honey Bee because they receive these services, as well as competitive prices for their products.

African Honey Bee is able to guarantee its product quality to the consumer, because as a prerequisite for the partnership it has with its beekeepers, it requires the beekeepers to:

1. manage their bees according to the Afri-hive™ system - a specific method of organic beekeeping that it has developed,
2. use African Honey Bee’s Nektar™ management and traceability technology,
3. be compliant with African Honey Bee quality standards and
4. be managed and mentored by an African Honey Bee senior beekeeper.

Prospective beekeepers from rural areas with beekeeping potential, who are generally between the ages of 18 – 26, are recruited to participate in the African Honey Bee incubation programme. They spend 18 months in an incubation programme during which time they are officially employed by the incubator as salaried working interns. During their incubation, the interns complete an African Honey Bee developed, SAQA accredited NQF level 1 Learnership in beekeeping. They gain practical experience by working under guidance of senior beekeepers on an African Honey Bee commercial bee farm. During the incubation programme the interns are also assisted to start their own beekeeping business on a small scale, with the view of increasing it once they complete the incubation process. At the end of their incubation, the beekeepers automatically become shareholders in African Honey Bee Kruger Park (Pty) Ltd, the main operating entity of the group, through a stakeholder Trust. Highly competent beekeepers also stand to be qualified as African Honey Bee senior beekeepers to supervise beekeeping activities according to African Honey Bee quality standards.

A beekeeper development Trust (that owns 10% of the equity in African Honey Bee Kruger Park Pty Ltd) raises grant funding to provide support to partner beekeepers in the form of mentorship, training, logistics, access to low cost equipment and consumables.

African Honey Bee’s Bushbuckridge incubator has been operating since April 2013, and is expected to function at full capacity (2 500 hives) by July 2015. African Honey Bee plans to start additional commercially viable beekeeping business incubators in:

• (December 2014),
• (December 2015) and
• (December 2016).

There is also potential for replicating the model elsewhere in southern Africa and the developing world.

Honey harvested from the incubation farms and procured from partner beekeepers, is transported to a central processing plant where it is strained, bottled, labelled, packaged and dispatched for distribution. African Honey Bee is implementing a complete traceability system under its Nektar™ management and traceability technology. This will eventually allow consumers to trace their batch of honey back to the beekeeper that produced it and see on Google Earth where it comes from.

African Honey Bee’s short term marketing emphasis focuses on local markets such as delis, boutique stores and independent retailers. Ultimately, African Honey Bee intends to develop partnerships with local and international retailers, with which it can promote its honey products through telling the good news story.

Social-franchise structure - incentivising loyalty

As can be seen in the diagram above, African Honey Bee Kruger Park (Pty) Ltd shareholder structure is: 30% Stakeholder Trust, 30% African Honey Bee Holdings, 10% African Beekeeper Development Trust and 30% is reserved for investors. The Group is structured this way to incentivise loyalty.

African Honey Bee’s beekeepers that complete the 18-month incubation become equity shareholders in African Honey Bee Kruger Park (Pty) Ltd through the African Honey Bee Stakeholder Trust. They will earn a 30% dividend from the profits generated by the incubator they are affiliated with. The 50 beekeepers linked to the Bushbuckridge incubator, for example, might earn R300 000 in dividends from the profits of an average year, i.e. R6 000 per beekeeper. This R500 per month would be earnings over and above the income generated through the sale of their own honey.

The African Beekeeper Trust (development trust) will be registered as a NPO and PBO, providing African Honey Bee with a vehicle to raise grant funding for, and manage beekeeper development.

50% of African Honey Bee Holdings or alternatively 30% of African Honey Bee Kruger Park have been reserved for impact investment.

Production

A method of beekeeping for African conditions

Log hives, Langstroth hives and Topbar hives have all been used for beekeeping in Africa. Although Log hives and Topbar hives are often cheaper to manufacture, the Langstroth hive has generally produced higher yields and is less intrusive to the bees than the other hives and has therefore been more popular amongst commercial beekeepers.

Langstroth removable frames, reinforced with wire and wax foundation, enable beekeepers to spin honey out of combs and then reuse combs that the bees refill with honey. Strangely these frames are still designed according to European honeybee sizes and therefore provide another purpose for the wax foundation i.e. to force the African bees to unnaturally build comb to the broader sizes.

Beekeepers move their bees from flowering crop to flowering crop sometimes up to 6 moves per year to produce maximum volumes of honey. This method of beekeeping was cost effective up until the early 90’s but has subsequently become less profitable due to various economic factors such as increased fuel and electricity prices.

African Honey Bee has identified a number of bottlenecks or constraints making it difficult for African beekeepers to achieve their primary goal i.e. to make money. The underlying premise of theory of constraints is that organizations can be measured and controlled by variations on three measures: throughput, operational expense, and inventory. Throughput is the rate at which the system generates money through sales. Inventory is all the money that the system has invested in purchasing things which it intends to sell. Operational expense is all the money the system spends in order to turn inventory into throughput. A constraint is anything that prevents the system from achieving its goal.

African Honey Bee focused on three types of constraints, namely a) Equipment: The way equipment that is currently used limits the ability of the system to produce more saleable goods. b) People: lack of skilled people limits the system. Mental models held by people can cause behaviour that becomes a constraint and c) Procedures: Written or unwritten policies can prevent the system from making more.

African Honey Bee realised that by using European sized Langstroth frames and constantly moving bees from flow to flow resulted in a series of constraints which prevented beekeepers from attaining satisfactory profits from their honey production. Firstly the equipment required for the actual beekeeping as well as the equipment for extraction was very costly, complicated to construct and complex to use.

The infrastructure necessary for extraction and comb preservation was expensive to set up and to operate. The logistics of transporting comb to extraction facilities, moving hives from flow to flow and transporting empty combs back to hives proved to not only be expensive but also wasteful, to increase pollution of the honey and spread disease.

The Afri-Hive – a best of both worlds African solution

By combining the Langstoth and Topbar hive systems into a unique Afri-Hive beekeeping system and focussing on permanent apiary sites, African Honey Bee has managed to increase throughput and thereby increase profit margins. The system uses Langstoth shallow supers with Langstroth shallow sized frames that are based on African honeybee sizes. The frames are plastic moulded with a starter strip as in Topbar hives. The concept could be described as “a Langstroth sized Topbar hive with frames.”

An Afri-hive™ consists of 3 wooden, waxoll protected, rabbet jointed, shallow supers, 33 Afri-frames™, 2 boards, a floor spacer and a plastic inner cover. Wax foundation, wire and complicated joinery are all eliminated in the Afri-frame™. The frame costs less than half the price of traditional Langstroth wooden and plastic frames, has no maintenance or upkeep costs and will last for many years if kept out of the sun. Eleven frames fit in a shallow Langstroth super. Beeswax is simply rubbed onto the starter strip and bee ladder and the bees build comb perfectly along the starter strip.

Six to ten Afri-hives are kept in a permanent apiary site on a lockable, caged Afri-stand. Branches are placed between hives to prevent drifting. All equipment is kept permanently on the stand eliminating the necessity to transport equipment backwards and forwards from the permanent apiary sites.

Bee food is transported to hives and honey is harvested at apiaries and transported back to hubs by bicycle or other cost effective transport. When honey is harvested, the combed honey is simply cut from the frames and placed and sealed into sterile buckets. This prevents pollution which is often associated with open combs being transported on trucks absorbing fumes and dust. Once the honey and comb has been removed from a frame, the frame is returned to the hive it came from, preventing the spread of disease and waste.

Food safety and quality control

Quality planning, quality control, quality assurance and quality improvement are the four pillars of food safety and quality philosophy at African Honey Bee. ‘Food quality’ is defined by African Honey Bee to be the good characteristics of food acceptable to consumers. With honey this includes external factors such as appearance (volume, clarity, colour, viscosity, and consistency), texture, and flavour; factors such as legislated grade standards and internal (chemical, physical, microbial).

African Honey Bee plans to follow Regulation 962 of the South African Department of Health, in order to be awarded Certificates of Acceptability. In conjunction with this government gazetted standard African Honey Bee follows the SAN10049 and ISO T/S 22002-1 standards. African Honey Bee’s quality goal is to become compliant with the new Global Markets Capacity Building Programme (GFSI) and thereafter move over to the FSSC programme once the company has been up and running for a few years.

In addition to production and processing quality management, African Honey Bee is developing a quality management system for regulating and improving partner beekeeper quality procedures.

Collecting data, transparency and traceability

Beekeepers collect data from their hives on a regular basis using the Nektar™ (Nectar Knowledge Technology and Resources) traceability and management system. This innovation could be described as an “entrepreneurial value chain link,” driven by growing consumer demand and producer access to technology.

Nektar™ includes: a) Hive-stand placement software, b) QR code batch creator, c) Android data collecting forms and d) web-based database and translation tools. Information is accessed as graphs, charts, Google Earth maps and management reports.

The data is sent through to a central data base where it can be viewed and used by management for traceability, management and mentorship applications. When beekeepers harvest their honey, they also use the application to record which hive each batch of honey comes from.

Once honey has been harvested at the apiary site into sterile, sealable buckets, it is transported to the closest central collection centre where it is weighed, tested and recorded by both the beekeeper and the African Honey Bee coordinator.

The honey’s moisture content is tested to safeguard longevity. If the moisture content is below 17% in the comb, the honey has no limit to its shelf life and if stored correctly in a sealed sterile honey bucket, can be stored indefinitely.

Beekeepers

Third party honey producers – partner beekeepers

Beekeepers producing honey according to African Honey Bee standards are invited to partner with African Honey Bee as suppliers of honey. These could be small scale producers, with for example only ten hives, or beekeepers with larger, beekeeping farms. Beekeeping methods and apiaries are evaluated for quality acceptability. Partner beekeepers are invited to training workshops and African Honey Bee mentors assist the beekeepers with technical issues.

Coordinators are selected from groups of beekeepers operating in close geographic proximity to manage quality and coordinate harvesting and collection. African Honey Bee provides logistical support, access to beekeeping equipment and consumables (such as bee food) at bulk purchase costs and may facilitate soft loans for beekeeping expenses through its financial partners.

Beekeepers from previous beekeeping projects, are applying to African Honey Bee to sign up as partners. A group of beekeepers - originally established by the Bee Foundation - in Vhembe, Limpopo Province, recently signed up as beekeeper partners. When African Honey Bee inspected their apiaries, it was found that the method of beekeeping practiced by these beekeepers met African Honey Bee’s quality requirements.

As an example, John Mudau has been selected from the group as a coordinator. John provides sealed and sterilised buckets to the beekeepers and overseas harvesting to ensure quality requirements are adhered to. As a result the quality of the honey being harvested by these beekeepers is of an exceptionally high standard. Further support shall be rolled out to these beekeepers in future; also with an aim of assisting them to increase the size of their beekeeping businesses.

Training, mentoring and providing extension support to partner beekeepers

African Honey Bee actively raises grants (to date through its NPO partner Lima Rural Foundation, but later) through the newly established Beekeeper Development Trust, for funds to offer training, mentoring and providing extension support to partner beekeepers.

One of African Honey Bee’s goals for 2014 is to develop a milestone-based training programme. Training will be broken up into progressive modules which beekeepers need to successfully complete before continuing to the next level e.g.

• Module 1. How to make a catch box and catch bees
• Module 2. How to transfer bees into hives
• Module 3. How to manage hives with bees Part 1.

Once a beekeeper has demonstrated that she has constructed her own catch box and has either caught some bees, or at least attempted to do so, can she move onto Module 2. Training is presented both as workshops and practically via mentorship. Certificates of attendance will be issued to participants, although emphasis is placed on demonstrable performance i.e. the beekeepers’ ability to catch and manage their own bees and harvest honey according to African Honey Bee standards. Senior beekeepers will continuously evaluate and assist the beekeepers to improve their production.

It is envisaged that African Honey Bee will provide permanent mentors for groups of beekeepers residing in close proximity. The mentors will provide ongoing extension support, training, mentorship, access to low cost equipment and consumables and logistical support.

Incubating beekeepers

Prospective beekeepers from rural areas with beekeeping potential, who are generally between the ages of 18 – 26, are recruited to participate in the African Honey Bee incubation programme. They spend 18 months in an incubation programme during which time they are officially employed by the incubator as salaried working interns. During their incubation, the interns complete an African Honey Bee developed, SAQA accredited NQF level 1 Learnership in beekeeping. They gain practical experience by working under guidance of senior beekeepers on an African Honey Bee commercial bee farm. During the incubation programme the interns are also assisted to start their own beekeeping business on a small scale, with the view of increasing it once they complete the incubation process. At the end of their incubation, the beekeepers automatically become shareholders in African Honey Bee Kruger Park (Pty) Ltd, the main operating entity of the group, through a stakeholder Trust. Highly competent beekeepers also stand to be qualified as African Honey Bee senior beekeepers to supervise beekeeping activities according to African Honey Bee quality standards.