Barbados Apiculture Association calls for suitable areas of land for bee-keeping

A call has been made for areas of land to be identified which are suitable for bee-keeping purposes, so more local youth can get involved in apiculture.

Damien Hinds, President of the Barbados Apiculture Association and National Programme Officer with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) made the call recently, as he spoke with The Barbados Advocate during a break from IICA’s recently held Future Farmers Forum for school children, which was held at the Baobab Tower in Warrens, St. Michael.

“We need to identify areas where people can adequately house apiaries (a place where a collection of beehives are kept). It is not a situation where all environments are best for bee-keeping, so it is perhaps a good idea to look at some of these parts of Barbados that are most suitable for bee-keeping and allocate land for young people in these particular areas,” Hinds commented.

“Outside of that, the Ministry of Agriculture actually has a pretty good incentive programme, where you can get several rebates off the equipment and so on, but I think like most peers in agriculture, one of the concerns is access to land and with bee-keeping, whilst bees themselves forage over a wide area, their apiary may not necessarily be more than a quarter acre or half acre, at the very most. So we are not looking for tracks of land, but again, land in suitable locations. And I think that is something that perhaps we can put our heads together to try to identify, in terms of those areas,” the President of the Barbados Apiculture Association stated.

He meanwhile registered his delight about the number of young people showing interest, in becoming a part of the Apiculture Association.

“One of the things that we are very pleased about, is that we have a lot of young entrants into the Association over the last year, even more so for the last six months, as we have been getting the message across about bee-keeping and how we can transition into bee-keeping, in a short period of time. So the interest is there amongst the young people,” Hinds maintained.