Niki Moore
They are known as the Bee-Team: a group of about 60 rural youngsters who make a living from selling the fragrant honey from the wild bees that nest in the eucalyptus plantations in Zululand.
The teenagers stand by the side of the road, selling wild honey in a variety of containers, including trays, tin cups, bottles, even banana leaves. Sometimes the honey is still dripping from the comb, or has fragments of bee attached.
The orderly rows of eucalyptus that take up much of Zululand are a vast and profitable forestry industry for a company like Mondi and the bees like them, too.
Wild bees make enormous hives in old rotting trunks left after the trees have been harvested.
For decades youngsters have robbed the wild hives. They make fires at the base of the trees to smoke out, burn and kill the bees. Then they take the honey and run. But they don’t have the time, the energy or the means to put out the fires that often develop into raging forest fires.
Forestry companies like Mondi have always regarded forest fires as an occupational hazard. But they realised that 65% of their Zululand fires were started by the honey gatherers and were entirely preventable.
In the past Mondi dealt with the problem in an ad-hoc fashion. Forest rangers would identify the hives and try to persuade the hive-robbers to make sure the fires were put out.
But in the early Nineties Mondi Forests began to restructure their operations and farming out much of the work to private contractors. The old-fashioned forestry ranger became a relic and fires sparked by the honey thieves became a major headache.
During that period the regional manager of Mondi Forests Zululand oversaw the creation of elected community liaison committees in the Nyalazi region a vast stretch of holdings that spread along the western edge of Lake St Lucia.
“These committees used to meet with our officials regularly,” says regional manager Doggy Kewley.
“They would ask us for help with certain things like drinking water for their school or firewood from the plantations or access to grazing for their cattle. In return we would ask them to be careful about making fires, or to report vandals. We were trying to set up a channel of communication with our neighbours.”
In 1997 Mondi Zululand went to their community liaison forums with a problem: young men were robbing the bee hives in the plantation, trespassing, starting fires, killing the bees and causing damage.
One of the members of the committee was also the head of the local community policing forum and he suggested a solution. “I said we should use this as an opportunity to create employment and bring in some income,” says Luke Mkwanazi.
“If we organised the honey gatherers, we could control them and make sure their honey-gathering was responsible and sustainable.”
So a year later, Mkwanazi found himself with yet another job description: honey-thief-in-chief.
Mondi agreed to pay him a salary during the honey-gathering months of May to July. He would receive a map with coordinates, a list of likely honey hunters, a storeroom full of bee-smokers and a business plan for a honey cooperative.
His Bee-Team would report the location of a hive to him and he would mark it on the map. When it was judged to be dripping with honey, he would assign a team and supply them with bee-smokers.
As part of the project Mondi has banned all fires in the reserve. Mkwanazi keeps track of the bee-smoking machines and records the number of hives (about 1 000 a year) and the weekly production of honey.
“There are some young men who don’t even use the smokers,” says Mkwanazi with a smile.
“They like to think they are brave. We call them the bare-armed bandits.”
Once the honey has been liberated from the bees, the smoke machines are returned to the store-room and Mkwanazi and his teams decide which hives are going to be raided next. The young men now have a steady and planned supply of the amber nectar to sell by the side of the road.
The results of this sweet and simple little experiment have been beyond Mondi’s wildest dreams.
“In 1997 65% of all forest fires in the Nyalazi area were started by the honey gatherers,” says Kewley. “By 2000 this percentage was down to zero. The annual number of fires in plantations fell from 165 to 42 during the same period.”
The honey hunters are equally jubilant. “We have experienced no problems at all,” says Mkwanazi. “The people are very happy with the way things are going they are benefiting.”
The project has been so successful that the leaders are beginning to think like business tycoons: “We are investigating the possibility of formalising this into a proper bee-keeping industry,” says Kewley, “by constructing hives among the trees and getting the community to ‘farm’ with bees.
“We have a small business development division that is seriously investigating setting up bee-keeping businesses with the local people. It has big potential.”
“It just goes to show that it makes sense to work with your neighbours that communication succeeds.”