Beeeezzaa & Honey

Hello everybody! I hope you are all well and miss you all terribly. These last two weeks I've been in IST training and its been a ball. The subjects of this training were beekeeping, fruit tree nurseries, tree grafting and gardening. I really enjoyed the beekeeping as you will see.

Me making a native bee hive out of grass. Its like making a basket:)

The Bees

As I said beekeeping was completely thrilling. I only got stung once but it wasn't when I was invading the hive stealing the bees loot, it was a random act of nature that occurred while walking through a Cashew orchard. The suits are fun! I took a few moments to pretend I was an astronaut and a member of a bio hazard control unit, characters the suit satisfied.

The practice hive and gear.

I was part of a group of 4 and we each had a job. One is a cutter (cutter of the comb), a light source, a bucket manager and a smoker. I was the smoker. Once we maneuvered are way into our oversized bee suits we walked through a Cashew orchard to there the hives where. And like a thief in the night (@ night bees are calmer) we smoked them, grabbed their gold and looked over the intricate workings of the colony, all this while beeing swarmed by female workers. The workers are the gathers and protectors of the hive and they let us know by swarming us, buzzing in our ears and covering us with their "gettem scent".

My bee task force!

Our honey!!!!
We got a heaping bucket of honey and the next day we learned how to extract the honey, process the bees wax, make bees wax hand & foot cream and marketing of it all.

Yummy yummy honey in my tummy;)

Extracting honey for the comb.

Ok don't freak but I ate 5 bees that had drowned in honey. Very sweet and a little crunchy. Its a common thing to do after harvest, honest.

I'm going to try to set up some hives at the National Park in the hopes that it will be a source of income for the park, which it needs. Slowly Slowly as they say. After the bee charming we moved onto trees and grafting. I'm learning some really cool skills that I've always been interested in, I just hope I can put them to use someday.
Citrus Nursery
So now that the training is over I have to say good bye to my wonderful peeps and friend here, head back to site and start some REAL work. I may not be able to write next month because I need to stay at site and invest some much needed time. But I plan I writing lots of letters. So keep your eyes on your mailboxes.

The pic below shows a local Gambian paper and one of headline is "Peace Corps Volunteers Not CIA Agents", funny;).
I miss you all and thinking of you:)

Hugs