Bees

The rain continues to fall here in The Gambia. Time and again we think its finished but this last week in particular has proved otherwise. Pretty much everyday this week we have had a major downpour. One particularly bad storm last week knocked out some key power grid components and put us in the dark for a little longer than normal. We still don’t have power at the college after a week. These storms at the end of the season have a lot more wind, thunder, and lightning and tend to cause quite a bit more damage. When roofs are either grass, palm leaves, or corrugate a strong wind can cause a lot of damage. This morning I noticed the roof of the mosque at the college was peeled back like a sardine can sometime in the last week. Even our sign at the beekeepers, which is made of square tube and sheet metal, was flattened in the night.

I know its been some time since I last wrote. Looking back the last your heard was about the trip to Mali. Seems like that was months and months ago. The day after we got back form out trip Ramadan started, so we were all fasting from then up until last week. If you want more info on the Ramadan and fasting activities go back and check out some of the posts from last year from mid September to mid October. This time around it was easier for the most part. I guess knowing what to expect made it go smoother. Of course the fasting was a challenge I thought I would try out for a few years while I’m here in the Gambia and I’m glad to say that two years is enough and after successfully going a month without water or food from sunrise to sunset for two years in a row I can say the challenge has been met and I know what those people are going though. Check that one off my list. It has certainly been an interesting experience and I get a lot of respect from Gambians for taking park in the fast. It is difficult to explain to them that I’m not a Muslim and am simply fasting to see what the physical aspects are like. Fasting and praying during the month of Ramadan are deeply religious acts for Muslims so it hard for Gambians to separate the two and often they don’t understand when I say that I don’t pray. Usually it leads to a discussion in which I try to explain that there are many different religions in the world not just Christianity and Islam and furthermore there are many people that don’t subscribe to a religion at all. This whole thing usually ends in stalemate but its none the less interesting.

At the end of Ramadan is Koriteh which in The Gambia is celebrated by getting all dressed up in new clothes if you can afford them and going out to see all your friends and walking around the town or village. It also involves some tasty food and a few days off of work. We partook in all of the above and it turned out to be a pretty relaxing couple of days.

During the holiday and over the last week or so we have been doing a lot of beekeeping. Were trying to get ready for the new honey season which should get rocking in about two months but the bees will be building up their hives between now and then. We decided to clear the apiary during the day one day last week. As I have often said on this blog, African beekeeping is always done at night due to the extremely pissed off nature of African honey bees. Well we thought they wouldn’t be too mad since we were just clearing around the hives and not actually opening them up but we were wrong. After about 20 minuets in the apiary the bees were so viciously attacking me that it felt like a windy day from all the airflow generated around my head by the swarm of bees. It took us about an hour and a long walk through the woods to get the bees off of us so we could finally get out of our suits.

One interesting aspect we have been working on is trying to fix a hive condition called cross combing. This is where bees build their combs in such a way that it makes it difficult or impossible to harvest the honey. We spend an hour or more on just one hive the other night experimenting with a way to cut the comb out and reattach it so that the bees will begin to build their comb as we would like them to. We will get to see if our work pays off in the next few weeks when we go back and see what that colony is up to.

Were also working on a way to capture wild colonies so that we can take colonies in or on buildings and in the bush and get them to colonize a hive box we provide for them. This is a pretty big challenge because you have to trick the bees in to leaving their nice cozy home and setting up shop in a brand new spot. It looks like it will take a lot of time and monitoring and I’m not sure it’s necessarily practical in our situation.

I got stung right in the nose the other night. You can imagine how that looked after a little while. That bee must have been waiting for just the right moment when my nose touched my veil and nailed me. I think my immediate comment was something along the lines of “@#$#*@&! right in the nose @#$@$#@$”. I guess that’s another one for the storybooks.

That’s it for now. More again sooner or later. Hope everybody is doing well!