Beekeeping in Jamaica with Zuberi: The Irie Lyfe Story
- treecitytraveler
- Dec 20, 2020
- 9 min read
The first part of the beekeeping world I am going to cover is Jamaica. This lovely island can be honey bee paradise - fruit trees flower throughout the year and there is no winter season. This leads to a lot of opportunities, but there are many challenges as well. I have been living in Jamaica for a while now so it only makes sense that this is where I am going to start the Traveling Beekeeper blog. I called up my friend Zuberi to ask if he was available to talk about what its like beekeeping in Jamaica and we agreed to meet up the next Friday.
I met up with Zuberi at around 11:45 at the intersection where his road meets up with the main road. It was a sunny day with only a few clouds in the sky – the perfect day for a hive inspection. His family was there setting up their roadside shop where they sell their products to people that pass by. I greeted Zuberi and N’zinga and we stood underneath the ackee tree where we talked beekeeping while their daughter, Akilah, finished setting up the shop. Akilah is quite a talented jewelry maker.
Irie Lyfe, the name of their business, was on a sign above the table that had all of their products tastefully spread out. They make and sell body yogurt, DEET-free mosquito repellent, and honey (pure ital honey and also infused honey). The Irie Lyfe motto is, “Ital goodness for an Irie Lyfe.” If you are not familiar with Rastafarian culture, ital refers to organically grown vegetarian food, usually cooked without salt. Everything that they sell in their store is all natural and, except the jewelry, can be eaten. (Read more about Irie Lyfe here)
In Jamaica, ginger and scotch bonnet can be found in almost everything. It is a key ingredient in Jamaican cuisine - from the fruit drinks heavily flavored with ginger to the jerk chicken served with scotch bonnet pepper sauce - and now it can be found infused in some honey. Irie Lyfe sells ginger infused and scotch bonnet pepper infused honey. Both make for a sweet and spicy flavor, but beware - the scotch bonnet pepper is extremely hot! To give you an idea of the prices in Jamaica, Irie Lyfe sells 750ml of honey for $2,500-3,000 Jamaican Dollar ($19-23 USD). They sell the 250ml of infused honey for $1,900 JMD ($15 USD).
I learned that the Ackee tree (Blighia sapida) is one of the honey bees favorite trees in Jamaica and it usually flowers year-round. The fruit it produces is actually the national fruit of Jamaica and when cooked with saltfish and other vegetables and spices, it becomes ackee and saltfish - the national dish of Jamaica. This is all thanks to the pollination of honey bees and other pollinators. What is nice about the ackee tree is that they seem to flower at different times around the area, so when one tree is finished flowering, the one down the road will just be starting to flower. This means the bees can forage from the tree all year and better yet, I get to eat ackee and saltfish all year!
I asked the two of them how they started making products. They told me that they took a course on how to make body butter. They started to make products for their own personal use and gave products as gifts to friends. Their friends liked it and from there they started to take the products to different events to sell them.
“We call it body yogurt,” Zuberi says, “we say the butter is not good for us so we call it yogurt.”
Since then they have expanded from body yogurt to create a natural, DEET-free mosquito repellent lotion.
“The thing about our product is you can eat this stuff,” says Zuberi.
He often will take out the product and demonstrate that it can be eaten by dipping his finger in it and then eating it. “If you can’t eat this stuff, you shouldn’t be putting it on your skin.”
They live the natural lifestyle and they extend a lot of the philosophies to their beekeeping. For instance, they don’t feed their bees any sugar. In Jamaica, registered beekeepers can buy cane sugar to supplement their bees for next to nothing. The sugar at the processing facilities that are deemed not able to sell (such as the sugar that touches the floor) can be used by beekeepers. Even though they are surrounded by sugar cane fields and can purchase sugar at a cheap price, they don’t do it. When harvesting honey, they make sure to leave enough for the bees to survive through the dearth season (historically June-August). They will collect the nectar that isn’t ready to harvest and any of the honey that isn’t fit for sale (for instance if it gets dirt in it during the harvest) and use that to give back to the bees.
Not supplementing the honey bees with additional sugar isn’t a big deal in Jamaica because there is an abundance of flowering plants that the bees love. There are always wild weeds growing everywhere such as Spanish Needle (Bidens alba) and tropical whiteweed (Ageratum conyzoides).
N’zinga tells me, “When you see the wild weed, that is an indicator the honey is coming.”
I have never seen so many fruit trees in my life until I came to Jamaica. There is ackee, the oh-so-delicious mango (Mangifera indica. Fun fact: there 17 different kinds of mango in Jamaica!), coconut (Cocos nucifera), and guinep (Melicoccus bijugatus) just to name a few of my favorite fruit trees. In Jamaica, its not starving bees you have to worry about (although sometimes it does happen) it’s the pest that you have to worry about.
In temperate beekeeping, the honey bees shut down for the winter but so do the other pest (except for the damn varroa mite). This helps keep pests more or less in check. In Jamaica, however, the pests are working year-round to look for opportunities to attack the hive. The Small Hive Beetle (Aethina tumida), the Greater Wax Moth (Galleria mellonella), the Lesser Wax Moth (Achroia grisella), and a variety of different ants are just a few pests commonly seen.
The lack of a winter and the amount of rain Jamaica gets leads to all kinds of problems for the honey bees and the beekeeper. These problems can be expensive to the beekeeper.
Ask any beekeeper and they will tell you that the initial cost of equipment can be an expensive investment to start beekeeping. Often times, it is a barrier for beginners to start beekeeping. This is the same in Jamaica. A box (deep super) with ten frames is $4,000 JMD ($30.70 USD). Because of the humid conditions in Jamaica, beekeepers are constantly replacing their wooden hives.
I asked Zuberi what the life expectancy of a super is. He laughs and replies, “Its funny you ask that, me hear this lady say ten years, but it's not ten years. I don’t even think its five. Its about three years at the very, very most. And that’s under some ideal conditions. Yea termite is a big issue.”
The ideal box in Jamaica is made out of cedar wood because it rots less and keeps away certain kinds of insects.
Zuberi tells me that a type of red ants, however, is his biggest problem right now. The red ants will conduct insect warfare on the honey bees, attacking the hive and killing the workers and queen. Then they will steal all of the food within the hive. Zuberi lost 7 hives last year just to the red ants.
“Overnight you could lose your entire apiary,” he says.
The only thing he knows will keep the red ants away is to have a clean apiary. He also started to put the legs of the hive stand into a container with grease, hoping that the red ants won’t be able to walk across. (Picture is at the end of the blog.)
As a natural beekeeper, he is very creative with the way he treats for pests. He also tells me that Guinea Hen Weed (Petiveria alliacea) is useful for treating the hive from hive beetles and French Thyme (Plectranthus amboinicus) is useful for treating the varroa mites.
At about this time, we notice that there are clouds coming in from the south. We figure we better make a move or the rain is going to catch us. And it was looking like such a beautiful day this morning, but that's Jamaica.
Zuberi and I started to walk up the dirt road to get to his apiary. He brought behind him his horse, Cinnamon, and following behind her was her four-month-old foal, Calypso. We walked for about ten minutes when it started to rain, so Zuberi tied up the horses real quick and we ducked into a water treatment building.
With the rain falling, I decided to ask him more about how he got into beekeeping.
“Me and my son was going to the beach, and we passed by this woman’s house and we saw a couch outside. There was bees flying out of the couch.
So me knock on the gate and say, ‘Hey, there’s bees in your couch!’
She say, ‘Yea I know. I’ve been trying to get them out.’
She called some people, and the people aren’t coming.
So me say, ‘Ok, we're gonna go to the beach, when we come back, if there’s still bees there, I’m gonna take them.’
So we go to the beach and we come back. And the bees come out of her couch and landed on a lime tree. And the lime tree is right within arm’s reach. So me phone some friends of mine and we brought a nuc box and we just caught it. It was easy.”
When the rain stopped, we decided to walk again. A little further up the road, Zuberi ties his horses in a pasture for them to graze and we filled up our water bottles from the spring. Then we begin the climb up the hill. We talk as we are walking but I am so out of shape that I begin to lose my breath as we are walking and talking, and soon I am listening more than I am talking. We walk uphill for about 30 minutes and then we arrive. The first thing I see through the trees was about 15 bee hives.
We turn off the main road onto the property and it opens up into a yard. There is a small structure made of bamboo with tarp over it. There is an abandoned house behind that structure. To the right there is an additional five hives that are used for the training's.
In the house there was a prototype of a new hive that Zuberi was working on. It looked like the cross between a Langstroth and a top bar hive. It essentially was a horizontal hive body with Langstroth frames. The cover of the hive was broken into three sections, so that the beekeeper can examine 1/3 of the hive and keep the other 2/3 covered during the inspection. Unfortunately, two of the top covers were starting to get eaten by termites, which is all too common in Jamaican beekeeping. Ill check back in with Zuberi later and see if he is using the long hive. (Picture at the end of the blog).
At this point in the day it was cloudy and very humid due to the rain. We decided to go through with the hive inspection. Zuberi collected some shredded coconut, called coconut kaya, and some dry banana leaf. He lit a piece of paper to get the coconut kaya burning and then topped it off with the dried banana leaves to get a cool, white smoke.
We went to the training hives to take a look. He picked one at random to open it up. Zuberi prefers not to smoke the entrance of the hive before he opens the lid. When he opened the top cover he gave it a few puffs. Instantly I could tell that the bees were angry because they jumped aggressively at his hive tool. He pulled out one of the frames to show me the brood pattern. At the same time he is working in the hive, I am standing about 10 feet behind him - observing and taking the occasional picture.
He only had one veil with him, so I wasn't wearing one, which usually isn’t a problem because I am very comfortable around bees. I noticed this one honey bee aggressively buzzing around my head and I decided to take a few steps back. As I was beginning to walk away Zuberi tells me that he got stung. Without communicating, we both decide to end the hive inspection. Sometimes you have to listen to the bees and today they were telling us they didn’t want to be bothered.
We put out the smoker and packed everything up. Even though the hive inspection lasted a few minutes, I still learned a whole lot from him about Jamaican beekeeping. Before we left the top of the mountain, he walked me to a spot that had a view of the whole valley. The view alone was worth walking up to the top. It was a good day.
Follow this blog for an update on my next beekeeping adventure.
Fun Fact: Zuberi says the best beekeeping investment he made was purchasing a two-frame honey extractor as well as a mobile harvesting tent.
This story was originally written on 6 January 2020
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