More Musings about Beekeeping and Coffee

The “coffee culture” is something that has always interested me—but it’s not only because I thoroughly enjoy my daily cups of coffee. This fascination is also not about the coffee culture of the cafés with their espresso machines. It’s the coffee culture at its base level in the mountains where coffee is grown and with the farmers who produce it. Add bees into the mix and it’s even more intriguing.

This is a continuation of my previous blog post, Musings about Beekeeping and Coffee. This is a little trip through photos to the coffee farm where I have an apiary of bees in top bar hives.

Ripening cherries on a coffee plant. Ideally only the red cherries should be picked to assure a quality coffee. The cherries cannot be stripped off the branch because of the damage it causes to the formation of the next cycle of buds and flowers. Each cherry needs to be twisted off the branch individually, making the harvesting very labor intensive. 

 

Workers measuring their day’s pickings. After beginning early in the morning, the pickers end their day in the early afternoon when they bring their sack (or sacks!) of cherries back to the “beneficio,” the building where the coffee is pulped and washed. The picking season is the time of plenty for the people of the mountains because of the extra income earned from harvesting the cherries.

Next step—the pulping. During this process the coffee cherries go through a mill which strips off the outside red skin and inside white pulp to separate it from the bean in the center. They fall into the pulping mill through a shoot from the area above where the workers measure their day’s pickings. Just a little pressure from your fingers can separate the bean from the skin and pulp of a ripe cherry.

The coffee beans are left to soak in cement basins for at least a day after the removal of the red outside skin. This process helps in washing off a slimy inside covering (mucilage) that the beans have. After this washing the beans are dried. Eventually an inside hull must be removed to get to the green bean in the center that is roasted.

Coffee beans drying on a cement patio in the valley below the farm. Coffee dries much better in the valley because of the hot, dry weather it has during the harvest season (you can actually find cactus growing there!). The beans are continually raked and turned over to ensure uniform drying.

The trail through the coffee to the apiary. The bee yard is located at the edge of the farm, by the tall trees in the background of the photo. The walk to the hives is about 150 meters from where we park the truck by the coffee processing building. Everything is downhill on the way back to the truck, making it a bit easier to lug out the buckets of honey.

On the hill up above the bee yard. The big trees in back of the hives are the liquidambar trees whose sap the bees collect to form propolis. People use this resin for medicinal purposes. Inside the tree line the land drops off about ten meters to the stream that flows through here. The large leafed plants in the foreground are bananas, used as temporary shade for the coffee plants until more permanent shade trees grow big enough.

 

The rugged terrain is one of the disadvantages of the coffee farm. It is basically all up and down making the hauling of swarm traps filled with bees a bit of a chore at times. Here Marcos, the owner of the farm and my associate with the apiary, has a couple empty trap hives that we were taking to hang in trees.

The view of the valley from the coffee farm. There are approximately 600 meters of difference between the valley floor and the farm, which is situated at about 1200 meters above sea level. The difference in temperatures makes the visits pleasant during the hot dry season. During the wet season, however, there can be nonstop drizzle when cold fronts come through this part of Central America.

The road up the mountain to the coffee farm. Although the farm is only about eight kilometers in a straight line from town, it takes about 40 minutes to drive there because of the round-about route one must take and the back-and-forth curves of the road. The going is also slow due to the steepness of the road and the ruts and rocks one needs to deal with. During prolonged heavy rains during the wet season, the road can actually be impassable until it has time to dry out for a couple days.

Entering one of the top bar hives to check on the bees and their efforts in producing honey. Unlike my top bar hives in the valley below, these will fill their boxes from one end to the other. Each box has about 35 bars of which half could be honey. The coffee zones tend to be one of the best honey production areas in Honduras.

Trap hives are hung in trees around the farm to catch swarms, from feral hives in the area but also from some of the top bar hives that may swarm. The trap hives have the same dimensions as the permanent hives to make transfer of the combs easy. I don’t like to do splits because of the defensiveness of the Africanized bees. Catching swarms is easy and I have lots of success doing so.

Marcos filling a bucket with honey comb. Top bar hives use a simple cut and crush system for harvesting and extracting the honey. The honey combs are cut off the bars and dropped into a bucket. They are later crushed and the honey is allowed to drip out. I use a simple filter I made from a five-gallon bucket. No honey extractor is used. Some of the nicer combs are kept intact to be sold as cut-comb honey.

Honey comb!

My wife Sofia helping to check the top bar hives and holding a comb filled with capped brood. My boxes are 12 inches deep, making each comb about the equivalent of a deep Langstroth frame.

 

Marcos and I with the bee hives on the coffee farm. All the bees are Africanized but you get away without putting up your veil until you are ready to actually open up the hive. Then full protective equipment is required.

---Tom

Version in Spanish (versión en Español) in my companion blog "Reflexiones Sobre Apicultura." More Musings about Beekeeping and Coffee

Musings about Beekeeping and Coffee

What exactly is the elixir of the gods—is it coffee or honey? It’s actually a toss-up for me. There is something heavenly about both.

But they go hand in hand when I think about beekeeping. My preferred area for hives in Honduras is in the coffee zones. By far my hives have produced much more honey on the coffee farms in the mountains compared with the valley below them. These areas maintain much more abundant vegetation and a variety of vegetation that lends itself to the production of honey

Ripening berries on a coffee plant.

I’ve often mused that if I could do things over in life, I would first study agriculture instead of print journalism (or better yet, maybe it should be in addition to journalism). And after my experiences with living in Honduras, I would become a coffee farmer (and of course still be a beekeeper). 

Agriculture, in one form or another, always played a part in my life. I grew up in rural Wisconsin in the heart of dairy farm/cheese factory country. Everything around my childhood home was hay fields, corn fields and dairy cows. My parents didn’t have a farm but I would work on my uncle’s during the summers making hay. Another uncle actually owned a small cheese factory. What my family did have was my mom’s huge garden and a bunch of rabbits. Raspberry patches and apple trees were scattered around the property. In the spring we would tap the maple trees and make syrup.

When I joined Peace Corps in 1991 I changed rural Wisconsin for rural Honduras. The cows turned into bees for me. Honduras has lots of corn (love those tortillas) but the hay fields became rice, beans and…coffee.

In general there is something noble about the farming profession. There is a pride one has gets from being able to produce from the earth. But there is a sort of a mystic added for me when thinking about growing coffee. There’s a difference when the farming involves something as delicious as coffee. Maybe it’s also the uniqueness of it compared with the corn and cows of my childhood—it’s something totally different.

It is hard work, no doubt about that. It’s not mechanized. It’s manual labor. Beekeeping is the same. But with both of them it is the pride you feel when the harvest comes in and you can see the fruits of all your efforts. You soon forget about all the sweat and stings. Having those sacks of coffee and bottles of honey makes it worth the pain and effort.

 Workers with their day’s coffee pickings. The sacks of cherries are measured with a container that is approximately four gallons. An experienced picker can make as much as three times a day’s wage for doing normal labor on a coffee farm, such as pruning or fertilizing.

Coffee and Beekeeping

Instead of saying “coffee and beekeeping,” I should probably say “coffee with beekeeping.” Having hives in a coffee zone is usually a good idea for the beekeeper. It is an excellent area for honey production. Having hives on a coffee farm is an even better idea for the coffee farmer—because of the pollination benefits and for diversification reasons.  A quick internet search will confirm this.

All the scientific studies I read indicate that pollination is beneficial to coffee production. Coffee organizations, such as the Instituto Hondureno de Café (IHCAFE), also realize this and have promoted beekeeping with the coffee producers of Honduras. Although coffee doesn’t directly require the pollination of its flowers, the presence of the bees can help to increase the production by anywhere from 5 percent to 25 percent, depending on what scientific study you read. Whatever the increase, all are important to a small farmer’s billfold. 

The pollination can also help create a more uniform seed formation and increased the size of bean. Both can assure a more quality coffee and potentially increase the farmers’ earnings.

Top bar hives in my apiary on a coffee farm in the mountains above the town where I live in Honduras. Marcos, the owner of the coffee plantation and my associate with the apiary, has mentioned that he has noted an increase in production since we started the bees.

There has also been a push for the diversification of coffee farms. The price of coffee fluctuates greatly for most producers. The years with low prices unfortunately seem to be much more common than the years with good prices. The coffee production also tends to fluctuate, alternating between a high production one year and a lower production the next. The farmers don’t always have the high prices coincide with their high production.

Honey can give them a needed extra income without taking time away from the coffee. Honey tends to be more stable with the yearly production fluctuating much less. The prices don’t go down in Honduras--if nothing else they increase. The production can also be bottled and sold little by little over a period of months, maximizing the earnings from it and assuring that a steady income is entering into the family’s budget weekly. Due to the nature of coffee, it is usually sold all at once. This means that the money is often spent all at once also. Coffee is good for buying the big things a family may need, such as a new roof or even a truck. Honey is good for the small things, like weekly groceries or new shoes for the children. 

Honey harvest on the coffee farm. Due to the abundance of flowering vegetation, the bees can easily fill their boxes from one end to the other with combs. Half of this can be honey.

My coffee-farm beekeeping

My most productive apiaries have always been located in a coffee zone. I have my main yard right now in association with a Honduran friend, Marcos, the owner of the coffee plantation where it is located.

We started the apiary about ten years ago. The first twelve hives were filled with swarms from feral colonies in the area of the farm. We actually got honey from some of them that year—enough to cover the initial start-up costs of the apiary. The swarms we caught in October and November grew enough to give us a small harvest before the rains came at the end of May.

Here I’m hanging a trap hive in a guama tree (Inga sp.) that is used as shade for the coffee. Swarms looking for a new nesting site enter the box, giving the beekeeper a free hive. I have a lot of success using trap hives—this is basically how I start all my new hives. Below the tree branches are the tops of coffee plants.

The apiary is set up to hold about 40 hives—more than enough for this area. It is on one of the few relatively flat areas on the farm, near a steam that forms one of its borders. Tall liquidambar trees along the stream make too much shade for the coffee to grow well there. For the bees, however, it is more than adequate. This is one of the positive aspects of beekeeping. The apiary can be set up on marginal land, leaving the good land for crops. 

Most of the hives are in a single line just outside the tree line. There are some inside the trees but they don’t tend to do as well. The trees seem to trap the humidity during the rainy season and the shade keeps this area from drying out well.

My top bar hives are over four feet long, with between 30 and 35 bars. The bees in the valley never completely fill their boxes. In the mountains they can have them full of combs from one end to the other. You can remove the end bar and have a full comb of honey right there.

We have to be a bit careful when we decide to harvest or check the hives. The bees are Africanized so they can get very defensive. There can be no workers in the area of the hives. It’s better if they are working on the other side of the farm. There is one guy, however, who always needs to say something to Marcos. He comes as far as the edge of the coffee where he crouches down and yells something to Marcos—and picks up a couple stings.

The flowers begin around Christmas with the tatascan (Perymenium grande), a native tree that becomes covered with yellow flowers. It blooms for almost a month with flowers coming and going. Another native tree that is very useful for honey production is what the local farmers call zapotillo. 

One interesting tree in the high coffee zones is liquidambar (Liquidambar styraciflua), not so much because of the flowers (although bees do visit them) but for the propolis made from its sap. The people use the tree’s sap for medicinal purposes, such as for stomach and skin problems. The propolis from these hives has a very distinct smell because of the liquidambar resin the bees collect. There is the possibility of a niche market for this propolis.

Then finally there are the trees the farmers themselves plant. An excellent nectar source is the guama (Ingas sp.), which is planted as shade for the coffee. There are also a number of fruit trees that Marcos and other coffee farmers plant, such as oranges, lemons and guayaba.

 Meliferous trees found in coffee zones: Tatascan (Perymenium grande), upper left; coffee, upper right; guama (Ingas sp.), lower left; and guayaba (genus Psidium), lower right.

One of the last flowers during the honey production season is the coffee itself. One of my favorite times to visit the coffee farm is when the plants are blooming. It reminds me a bit of winter since the flowers make it appear that it has snowed on the plants. And if you stand still and listen the whole farm sounds like a hive. The buzzing of the bees comes at you from all sides. Whatever honey the bees make from the coffee usually stays with them for the dearth period.

Coffee plants flowering.

----Tom

Version in Spanish (versión en Español) in my companion blog "Reflexiones Sobre Apicultura."

http://reflexionessobreapicultura.blogspot.com/2015/05/reflexiones-sobre-la-apicultura-y-cafe.html