Researcher taps honey from stingless bee

• Young scientist aims to domesticate the insect that produces extremely sweet honey

Had he used his academic qualifications to look for a job, Joseph Macharia would have ended up in some rural secondary school teaching biology and agriculture.

He graduated in 2001 with a degree in agriculture from Egerton University, but an internship at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) would open wide doors for him to become the youngest bee researcher in the country.

As he worked at ICIPE’s commercial insects project, where honey bees were under research, Macharia met farmers in Kakamega forest who wanted to know more about stingless bees (Apidae Meliponinae), which apparently made sweeter honey than ordinary bees.

“I knew nothing about stingless bees and had just heard about them,” says Macharia. “I realised further research on bees would be difficult if I was not well-equipped with information on the stingless bees.”

After a rigorous scientific study, he conceived the idea of domesticating the stingless bee in 2004, an art he calls meliponiculture.

The stingless bee produces its honey in tree cavities, hollows or underground where it builds a honey pot. Macharia’s first step was to design a special hive for the bee targeting farmers in Kakamega forest.

This bee is a major agent of pollination for macadamia, strawberry, coffee, pawpaw, water melon and pumpkins.

Unlike ordinary honey harvesting, stingless bee honey is harvested in a very destructive manner, where a whole natural tree could be cut down to reach the cavity containing the honey.

“I saw a potential to commercialise the honey and a chance to help conserve the forest,” says the researcher, now in his early thirties. Some local names of the bee are njuki ya njore (Kikuyu), ngilu (Kamba) and inasasa among the Luhya.

Winning awards

In 2005, Macharia moved his research arsenal to Kakamega forest. He worked with locals on the management of the bee on their farms, and how to harvest honey hygienically and still conserve the rain forest.

Three years into it, he won the Mirriam Rothschield Conservation Award, a joint initiative by UK’s University of Cambridge and the Earth and Biosphere Institute of the University of Leeds.

Last year, he emerged tops in the Young Professionals and Women in Science Competition award in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A month ago, he again travelled abroad to be honoured, this time to receive the Belgian Development Cooperation Award In Brussels, Belgium.

The Belgian prize has a 5,000 euro prize money and was awarded courtesy of his Master’s degree thesis at the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology.

It was titled Status and the Potential of Stingless Bees (ApidaeMeliponinae) for Forest Conservation and Income generation: A case Study of Kakamega Forest.