Training for beekeepers

Bees are a fundamental part of ecosystems. They play a major role in maintaining biodiversity, ensuring the survival of many plants, ensuring forest regeneration, sustainability and adaptation to climate change and improving the quantity and quality of agricultural production systems. In fact, close to 75 percent of the world’s crops producing fruits and seeds for human consumption depend, at least in part, on pollinators for sustained production, yield and quality. Beekeeping, also called apiculture, refers to all activities concerned with the practical management of social bee species. Beekeeping is different from honey-hunting, which involves “plundering wild nests of honeybees to obtain crops of honey and beeswax”. For thousands of years, we have known that honey can be obtained much more easily and conveniently if bees are encouraged to nest inside a man-made hive (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO], 2009). Depending on the type of hive and the species and subspecies of bee, it is also possible to manage the colony to some extent. In many rural areas of the world, beekeeping is a widespread activity, with thousands of small-scale beekeepers depending on bees for their livelihoods. Social bees can provide humans with valuable hive products (honey, wax, propolis, pollen, royal jelly, queen bees and swarms) and services (pollination, apitherapy, apitourism and environmental monitoring) and play other important economic, cultural and social roles. Several species (and subspecies) of bee are kept across the world: in Europe, America and West Asia, Western honeybees are standard (Apis mellifera), while in East and South Asia, beekeepers keep the indigenous Eastern or Asiatic honeybee (Apis cerana). In the tropics, other species of social bee such as stingless bees (Melipona) are kept, mainly for honey production. Meanwhile, bumblebees (Bombus) are kept for their pollination services all over the world. Other species are kept in some areas (e.g. Apis dorsata and Apis laboriosa in Nepal and India, and Apis florea and Apis andreniformis in Southwest Asia).These guidelines aim to make beekeeping more sustainable by providing useful information and suggestions for proper management of bees around the world, which can then be applied to project development and implementation.