Blog by | Robert Mtisi
Posted: 14 January 2025
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At Working for Bees, the belief is that an efficient and effective system for selling honey and other bee products is required within the beekeeping sector to encourage people to produce it.
Once honey is produced it must find its way to the market but it has been very difficult for beekeepers to penetrate the honey market due to several constraints including:
- lack of information
- long distance to markets
- failure to meet legislative criteria
- poor road standard and network
- poor transport
- low price of honey
- lack of honey collection centres
- poor group coordination and credit facility offered to beekeepers by honey buyers.
To address this issue, we opened a honey shop located near Nyazura in Makoni district of Manicaland province of Zimbabwe. Working for Bees buys raw honey at market price and produces value added products to sell in the shop to raise money to pay for more honey coming from womens beekeeping groups and communities within the catchment area.
Products found in the shop include honey in different jar sizes, honey wine, honey coated ginger biscuits, honey coated roasted nuts, honey coated ginger, honey coated biltong, bees wax, body cream, candles, shoe polish, floor polish and bee hives.
Our strategy is to employ staff who can help customers to know the products they are buying and to help customers to understand the importance of bees and how one can start beekeeping. To achieve this, the shop staff are female beekeepers who have been trained in all aspects of beekeeping. During weekends and holidays, we have extra staff in to help with information dissemination through one-on-one engagements with customers and visitors coming as individuals or families. We also have posters that share information about our products and work posted inside and outside the shop. There are also some booklets at the shop that people can borrow and read outside the shop to get more information about bees.
Outside the farm shop we have a Kenyan Top Bar hive hung in a tree showing the best way to hang a beehive in the forest. Our team is always ready to assist with any technical information that might be required. Fifty metres behind the shop where the miombo forest starts we have apiaries with colonised hives. The area between the shop and the forest is deliberately used for melliferous crop farming, that includes beans, sunflower, cow peas, pumpkins, maize and corn. This design answers a lot of questions from visitors who would want to know crops that are bee friendly.
As a way of showing that we are lovers of trees we have in front of the shop some acacia species, Kenyan croton, Vernonia amygdalina, Terminalia mantaly, Piliostigma thonningii, Julbernardia globiflora and Brachystegia spiciformis, citrus species, and 13 (Rauvolfia caffra) trees planted for shade on site.
We always receive encouraging feedback from our clients. This has been shared amongst our team members and has helped in reinforcing good performance.
Robert Mtisi is founder of Working for Bees, who promote beekeeping and conservation in Zimbabwe.
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