Developing country engineers often find themselves at the bottom of an inverted pyramid of grassroots industrial activity: upgrading machine shops to produce machines for rural industries that supply inputs for agriculture and/or post-harvest processing. In Kumasi, Ghana, for example, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) Technology Consulting Center (TCC) introduced the manufacture of carpenters’ saw benches and trained local carpenters to produce top-bar hives from Kenya to support extensive beekeeping. industries In Kumasi in the 1970s only one workshop produced saw benches, perhaps a dozen or more carpenters produced beehives, but beekeepers numbered in the hundreds and some individual apiaries employed hundreds of hives.
When TCC engineers surveyed the kurofo investment bronze casting industry near Kumasi in 1975, the artisans, makers of the famous Ashanti gold weights, complained about a shortage of beeswax. It was soon discovered that the only locally produced honey and beeswax in Ghana came from honey hunters who used fire to drive wild bees out of their nests and take their honey. The honey was of poor quality, often smoky-tasting and contaminated by the brood: young bees in the egg and pupal stages of growth. It was realized that a beekeeping industry could supply the local market with better quality honey, beeswax and other bee products.
SIS Engineering Ltd, a TCC customer, was producing carpenter’s saw benches for carpentry companies making looms for another rural industry project. No doubt these same carpenters could produce hives if the proper plans were provided, so the search was on for a hive designed to house the African honey bee. In 1977 it was discovered that a project in Kenya funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) had developed the Kenya Top Bar Hive (KTBH) and drawings of the hive were obtained from the Ministry of Agriculture in Nairobi. At the beginning of 1978, three of these hives were produced in the workshop of the Department of Construction Technology on the KNUST campus.
Two of the new hives were supplied to an APPLE project in Atebubu, in the Brong-Ahafo region, which aimed to train wild honey hunters as beekeepers. The third settled in the botanical garden of the university where it was soon colonized by local bees. Unfortunately, the university did not have any trained beekeepers and it was not until 1979 that it became possible to send two people from Kumasi to Kenya for training. Upon his return, some serious beekeeping work began and the campus apiary was constantly expanded.
In January 1981, the TCC was confident enough to start a training program and the First National Workshop on Beekeeping was held on the KNUST campus. There were 53 people in attendance, 20 were US Peace Corps volunteers who were serious about promoting the new rural industry, and 33 were Ghanaians and some foreign residents from all parts of the country. Several of these pioneers became full-scale beekeepers who helped and encouraged many of their friends and neighbors to start their own apiaries.
Of all the TCC projects started in the first two decades of its existence, beekeeping likely touched the lives of the most people and spread the economic, social and health benefits most widely across the country. Some beekeepers, like Kwesi Addai in Sunyani, built apiaries of 300 hives and produced honey stored in 200-litre oil drums. Annual sales were in the millions of cedis, and traders from the Ivory Coast crossed the border to buy much of the product. Many small farmers set up a few hives on their modest plots, and special programs encouraged women seeking to improve the diet of their young children to establish single-hive hives to produce honey for home use and for sale.
As for lost-wax bronze casters, beeswax has never been so cheap or so plentiful. Large stocks of beeswax built up in the largest commercial apiaries and the TCC faced lawsuits to find export markets for this product. Beekeepers were also looking for markets for other bee products such as royal jelly, pollen, and bee venom, all of which can be used as medicines or dietary supplements.
Beekeeping touched the lives of thousands of people. It was the kind of project that international development agencies revel in, bringing benefits to the poorest people in the most deprived rural areas. However, it could not have flourished but for the small group of carpenters who made the hives, and the carpenters could not have kept up with the great demand for hives without the machines made by a single engineering shop located in the big city. from Kumasi. International development agencies are reluctant to support projects in what they consider to be wealthier urban areas, but without these projects backed by institutions like the TCC, mass-effect rural projects would not be possible, unless they are permanently supported from abroad. For self-sustained local economic development in developing countries, a strong urban-based engineering industry is essential.