“A bee’s sting is sweet, it’s the poverty that stinks,” says 60-year-old Mavis Matayaunga, with a chuckle that exposes smoke-contaminated teeth as she points to this reporter a stone to sit on in a bush near her homestead in Mudzimu village, about 300 kilometres north west of the capital Harare.
By Problem Masau
For the past three years, her flirtation with colonies of bees has injected cash into her coffers, in the process enabling her to send grandchildren to school.
It is a luxury to send children to school in this impoverished village, where most people survive on less US$1 per day.
Matayaunga is walking previously uncharted territory for women in Zimbabwe, as beekeeping was largely seen as a preserve for men.
“Times have changed, we are doing it better than most men,” she says with conviction.
Apart from her love for bees, Matayaunga holds dear her smartphone, which has seen years pass by.
“Good honey does not come from the bees, but this phone,” she says.
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She is among the 200 members of Mudzimu Beekeeping Association in Hurungwe District and part of more than 5 000 beekeepers countrywide, who are into full-time beekeeping aided by a smartphone application called Bee Sensing, provided to them by a non-governmental organisation, Agriculture for Sustainable Development (ASD).
The phone app helps farmers to monitor temperature and humidity of beehives and also contributes to seeing if the bees are active.
“Sometimes I don’t have to visit the colonies. I just monitor from home. This system monitors bees’ health for me and shortens the time of checking,” she says, showing this reporter the application on her cracked smartphone which was also provided by ASD.
“It also provides me with checking lists and to do memo so as to make the better quality of beekeeping.”
The farmers are taking advantage of Zimbabwe’s mobile penetration rate, which stands at 99,4% and Internet access at 48,1%.
ASD trained the community in beekeeping and forestry management in March 2012. The NGO then gave the community 10 beehives, protective garments such as overalls, gloves, and gumboots, 1 000 bottles for packaging honey, sieves, brushes and wire used for suspending the beehives as a starter pack.
ASD director Levison Muchemwa says the application was a handy tool that had changed the lives of farmers.
“The application was developed with rural farmers in mind, and it has helped farmers to plan and monitor their beehives, this has also improved their yields,” he says.
However, Muchemwa says their efforts to avail the application to more farmers is being hampered by the lack of electricity in most rural areas in Zimbabwe.
“Mudzimu village is lucky because there is a shopping centre which is electrified. Farmers go there to charge their phones, but in most parts of the country, the villagers are far away from the source of electricity,” he says.
According to Sustainable African Energy Consortium, only three million households, about 44%, are electrified in Zimbabwe.
Matayaunga is also a registered Eco-farmer, an application developed and designed by telecommunication giant Econet Wireless specifically for people who are into farming business to provide them with advisory services via bulk SMSes that includes weather conditions, market prices for their produce and alerting them of any weather hazards.
Out poverty – in good health
Hurungwe is one of the poorest districts in Zimbabwe, with 90% of the households surviving on less than US$1 per day.
According to the United Nation Children’s Fund, more than 65% of girls are married off at a tender age due to poverty.
However, the standard of life has improved in Mudzimu village because of the beekeeping project.
Village headman Amos Chibaro says people in the area have no access to gainful employment in the area except agriculture, which makes it difficult for households to earn extra income.
“The money realised from the sale of the honey harvested from this project has improved livelihoods. Farmers can purchase fertiliser and boost their crop yields,” he says.
The Agricultural, Technical and Extension Services (Agritex) officer Media Mukarakatirwa says they were happy that farmers understand technology and the concept of integration in their enterprises.
“We are here to teach farmers to benefit from these lessons and projects,” she says, adding that farmers package their honey into 500g bottles which are sold for $3 each.
She says the farmers produce 30 bottles of unprocessed honey per day, and it costs less than $1,50 to produce a single bottle.
“We are now teaching the bee–keepers to factor in the costs of production because this is now business,” she says.
Standards Association of Zimbabwe agents began to test farmers’ honey according to proper health and safety regulations.
A medical doctor at a local clinic Mlungisi Ndebele says the health of the villagers improved
“For one, honey has long been considered healthier than sugar as a sweetener, and also exhibits some medicinal qualities. For some time now, local honey has been rumoured to stave off allergies by acting similarly to a vaccine,” he says
“Bees collect pollen from common local allergens, which then show up in the honey they create in small amounts. Consuming this honey then boosts the body’s immune system, so that following exposure to these allergens prompts a much less severe reaction.”
Environmental conservancy
Hurungwe District is a tobacco farming area and for years indigenous trees were under siege. Severe climates, factory pollutions, and greedy tobacco processors are all blamed for the dramatic decline of bees species in Zimbabwe.
Arnold Guzha, who chairs the Mudzimu Bee Keeping Group, says the bee-keeping business is bringing double benefits to the community.
“As well as earning money from selling our honey, we have also started taking more care of our forests because this is where the bees live and build their natural hives.” he says.
“We have not used our forests wisely until now.
“Now, instead of cutting down trees, we are keeping them. If we had started our honey activities a few years ago, we would have known to make wiser use of this natural resource.”
Zimbabwe’s forests are vanishing at an alarming level, but according to the regulatory body Environmental Management Agency, 2% of forests replanting exercise is credited to bee farming.
For Matayaunga and other Zimbabwe bee farmers, technology has provided a plus in their quest to be food secure.
“Without this technology, we would be nothing. We would be producing honey which the Standards Association of Zimbabwe would not allow supplying the market. With technology, indeed the sting of a bee is sweet,” she said as I conclude my two-hour interview with her.
