Season 1 Episode 7: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Cameroon to Canada - Patrick's Bee Journey

In this episode of About Bees, we are joined by Patrick Tefouet Tonlio, who was an agriculture community organizer and teacher in the African nation of Cameroon. Patrick now lives in Calgary where he keeps honey bees and has been working on farm and bee projects with the Calgary Catholic Immigration Society’s Land of Dreams (https://ccisab.ca/land-of-dreams/).

During his last year of high school, Patrick learned to work with bees from his grandfather when Patrick moved from the capital city to live in his grandfather’s village. Honey bees in Cameroon are extremely defensive, so most traditional beekeeping consists of making small bamboo hives, coating the boxes with propolis and wax as a lure, then putting the empty hives in trees about 3 metres (ten feet) above ground level. After wild bees occupy the boxes and after the nectar season, honey is harvested.

Cameroon has commercial beekeepers, including the Fabasso family, friends of Patrick, who operate 15,000 hives. Mr. Fabasso has designed a hive, also made of bamboo, similar to Langstroth hives. The Fabasso honey crop is squeezed by a press invented by the Fabasso family (https://teca.apps.fao.org/en/technologies/10140/). Pressing the honey yields a high-quality honey that doesn’t need to be extracted and is never heated during processing.

Beekeepers may harvest about 20 kilograms (45 pounds) of honey each year from traditional hives. But the ethnic group sometimes known as Pygmy people (Baka) harvest directly from wild hives. To reduce stings, they use a special secret herb, rubbed on their skin. The herb? It’s a secret. Let's go!

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