How bee keeping sweetened teacher’s journey to success
Mrs Miriam Chebaari grew up battling tonsillitis. Sometimes, her condition was so bad that her tongue would swell and fill her mouth, affecting her speech. Her father, then a bee farmer, would make her drink honey mixed with warm water. Then she would feel better. That is how her love for honey started.
After a stint in teaching profession, she quit and started researching on bee keeping. She even enrolled at Baraka Agricultural College to boost her bee-keeping skills and knowledge. Afterwards, she started Tharaka Honey Bee Products, a company that specialises in production of a variety of bee products.
Humble beginning
It was a humble beginning in 2006. “I still remember my humble beginning like it was yesterday. My husband gave me Sh10,000 and that’s all I needed to start my bee-keeping business,” recalls Ms Chebaari.
With the Sh10,000, she bought the first 100 jars of 500 grams of honey from suppliers in Tharaka Nithi. A year later, she turned a truck into a mobile shop. She even set up a processing plant at the Nakuru showground where she packed and labelled the honey she bought from her suppliers. But her business nearly plunged during the 2007 post-election violence when the factory was turned into a haven for residents who were displaced.
She fled to Nairobi’s Kahawa Sukari estate where she converted her garage into a honey processing plant.
It was tough, she says.
“Tharaka Honey was doing so well in Nakuru. When we were displaced, I had to convert my garage into a factory and my living room where I packed the honey,” says Ms Chebaari.
She never gave up. Today, Ms Chebaari has grown her venture to include 300 hives in Ruiru, in Tharaka Nithi and in West Pokot. She has also contracted over 100 farmers in these places who supply Tharaka Honey Bee Products with pure honey.
And she has also gone big in value addition. At Tharaka Honey Bee Products, Ms Chebaari also harvests and sells medicinal propolis, a black sticky substance that bees use to seal all openings in a hive.
The bee keeper is also investing in machines that will see her harvest bee venom, pollen and royal jelly. Nutritious royal jelly is the substance that worker bees use to feed the queen bee. All these products, according to Ms Chebaari are very nutritious. Others, like bee wax is used in the beauty industry to make lipstick, shoe polish and candles.
“From every kilogram of honey harvested, a farmer can be sure to harvest two kilos of pollen which is even more nutritious. But not many farmers know this,” she says.
Though she is doing great in bee keeping business, her biggest passion is research in bee-keeping which she started to address quality and quantity gaps in Kenyan bee-keeping.
“I used to receive poor quality honey and some of it would crystalise within a week. That is a clear sign that other substances have been added to it,” she says.
She would then approach Lenana Beekeeping, a government honey agency where she reported the observation. Sensing her passion in bee-keeping, the agency invited her together with a few other farmers to an expo on beekeeping value chain in Zambia in 2010. Her enthusiasm was also noted in the expo where she was made one of the judges on bee products that were being showcased.
In Zambia, Ms Chebaari was also selected to market African honey in a one-week conference that was held in the UK in 2011.
That marked her endless trips in Africa and abroad in her quest to gather information on bee-keeping.
Kenya’s unexploited honey market
According to Ms Chebaari, Kenya still performs poorly in bee-keeping on the global scale and Africa.
“Kenya has a big market for honey but we don’t have enough farmers to satisfy it. This shortage is the reason many farmers add water and other substances to the little honey they produce,” says Ms Chebaari.
According to Ms Chebaari, close to 90 per cent of honey sold in Kenya comes from other countries, mostly Tanzania, adding that less than 1, 000 farmers practice serious bee-keepers in Kenya. Additionally, the price of Kenyan honey is highly exaggerated. While Kenyan honey goes for Sh400 per kilo, that from Tanzania is sold at Sh250, making Kenyans prefer Tanzanian honey.
Kenyan bee keepers, she says, face other challenges. According to Ms Chebaari Tanzanian government provides for protected and highly guarded forests where different farming groups are allocated their apiaries.
“We have so many forests here that are lying idle and which could be converted into apiaries for protected bee-keeping,” says Chebaari.
The self-taught bee researcher has embarked on creating awareness on bee-keeping in Kenya. She is recruiting bee-keepers countrywide who will be charged Sh2, 000 registration and be supplied with bee-hives to collect honey. At one of her processing plants in Ruai, honey from bee-keepers is received and weighed to determine the quantity. She buys honey at Sh300 per kilo from farmers.
Ms Chebaari has also invested in a honey refractometer that she uses to measure the moisture content in the honey she buys from other farms.
According to Chebaari, the ideal moisture content of honey should be 13-21 per cent of the honey. Any amount above this indicates poor quality, she says. Moisture content is the amount of water in honey.
“If the moisture content is above the recommended level, it shows that the honey is either not ripe or that other substances have been added to it,” says Chebaari. Bees harvest raw nectar which is allowed to develop into mature honey in the hive. At the hive, the bees continually add important enzymes from their saliva to the nectar that allows the honey to form naturally.
“If harvested without forming completely using the enzymes secreted with bee saliva, the honey is usually unripe and can ferment easily,” she explains.
She adds: “The lower the moisture content, the better the honey.”
Chebaari has also invested in a simple lab where she checks honey for other possible contaminations. Clean honey is then warmed to make it light for sieving. Sieving is done to remove bees that fall into the honey when it is harvested. Honey is warmed indirectly, that is, over water to ensure that its quality isn’t tempered with.
Warm honey is then sieved and collected in a holding tank from where it is bottled and labelled, ready for sale.
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