Beekeeping .. A passion for the profession is not enough to recreate it

Damascus-Sana

“The beekeeper, if he is not in love with the profession, cannot be creative in it.” A sentence in which the beekeeper Fathi Jumah described his love for this work that he started twenty years ago, expressing his pride in the Syrian honey, which over the years has gained wide fame at home and abroad for its high nutritional features and values.

The beekeeper Jumah attached to this profession, making him demand during his speech to SANA the necessity of organizing and promoting this sector, opening the door for loans to beekeepers, having a special registry for breeders to market their products in their name and not in the name of traders, and securing feed allowances from the extension units in addition to limiting the use of toxic pesticides and activating private civil societies With beekeeping and working on the production of queen bees from Syria in particular, it covers the local need to ensure the recovery of this sector and re-export it.

The bees live inside the hive at a temperature ranging between 35 and 37 degrees Celsius and there are types of it “hybrid or my country” and the life span of a worker bee ranges in summer between 40 and 50 days, while in winter it reaches three months, and the bee produces approximately 4 per ten grams of honey throughout its life. Kamel produces between 10 and 15 kilos per year, according to Juma, who manages 50 beehives, including the old and the new.

According to Jumaa, beekeeping requires basic tools for breeders, including clothing, gloves, a smoker, shoes, and some tools related to the mechanism of transporting cells, pointing out that the bee sector suffered great damage during the years of the terrorist war on Syria, which led to a decline in the work of breeders and the produced quantities of honey as the hives were transferred from one pasture to another. They are safe and in huge quantities. However, after the war, the migration of the hives has become very difficult. However, beekeepers are now making great efforts to rebuild the bee sector to its previous state and to invest in new beehives.

The beehive consists of a box, a base, an inner cover and an external cover, and tires on which wax is placed, which are fixed on wires in preparation for obtaining parcels of bees, according to Jumah, who says: “Beekeeping is my passion and it is a very hard profession, knowing that it is profitable, but the beekeeper is not safe from its losses.”

Regarding the obstacles that led to the decline in productivity and the departure of some breeders from breeding, Jumaa explained that the difficulties are concentrated in the high prices of basic production inputs, especially wood and wax, in addition to the difficulty of migrating pastures and the lack of a production center for vaccinated and tested queens in addition to the weather factors "heat waves and lack of rain" that It affected the flowering processes in the pastures, the lack of a fund to compensate for the losses of breeding, and the use of some unlicensed toxic pesticides that lead to the decimation of many colonies of bees, which constitutes a great loss.

The number of beehives at present, according to the director of the Arab Beekeepers Union in Syria, Engineer Fattouh Jumaa, is 300 thousand hives, with a production of between 700 and 1000 tons, while the number of families working in beekeeping is 10 thousand, while it was previously 20 thousand families, indicating that the spread of honey production centers in The provinces vary from season to season.

On honey production, Eng. Jumah said that in 2010, Syria specifically produced 3,200 tons of honey, of which 1,500 tons were consumed in the local market and 700 were stored, while 1,000 tons were exported, while production decreased during the war years to 500 tons, indicating that during the past two years the bee sector began to recover. And it was restored to its vitality after many educators quit work.

Eng. Jumaa stressed the Union’s endeavor to restore the bee sector and modernize production patterns, so that the Syrian honey trade and beehive products return to its previous era.

 Bushra Barhoum