African Honey Bee (organization)
An African Honey Bee Beekeeper
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| African Honey Bee, Kruger Park (Pty)Ltd | |
| Industry | Beekeeping |
| Founded | Centurion, South Africa (August 10, 2007) |
| Founder | Guy Stubbs |
| Headquarters | Centurion, South Africa |
| Website | www.africanhoneybee.co.za |
African Honey Bee is a social-franchise beekeeping micro-business incubator established in 2007. Its purpose is to alleviate poverty through sustainable beekeeping, by enabling rural families to benefit from the unpolluted prime honey producing vegetation around them.
African Honey Bee was set up by Guy Stubbs, a Christian Social Entrepreneur , who has expertise in developmental beekeeping. Andrew Weeks and Kobus Visser contributed towards the success of the project.
African Honey Bee supports viable micro beekeeping businesses in southern Africa, by developing a network of interlinked beekeeping incubator farms that provide access to training, mentorship, low cost logistics, equipment and consumables, appropriate technology and access to market. The organization also promotes the benefits of locally produced honey to South African honey consumers, and provides marketing opportunities.
Beekeepers that partner with African Honey Bee are provided with training, mentoring and support; low cost infrastructure, equipment, consumables and logistics; and off-take agreements/partnerships with large retailers.
African Honey Bee is able to guarantee its product quality to the consumer, because it requires the beekeepers to manage their bees according to its Afri-hive organic beekeeping system, its Nektar management and traceability technology, and its quality standards, as well as being managed and mentored by an African Honey Bee senior beekeeper.
Prospective beekeepers from rural areas, generally between the ages of 18 – 26, spend 18 months in an incubation programme, during which time they are officially employed by the incubator as salaried working interns. During their incubation, the interns complete an African Honey Bee developed program in beekeeping. They work under guidance of senior beekeepers on an African Honey Bee commercial bee farm. The interns are also assisted to start their own beekeeping business on a small scale, with the view of increasing it once they complete the incubation process. At the end of their incubation, the beekeepers automatically become shareholders in African Honey Bee Kruger Park (Pty) Ltd, the main operating entity of the group, through a stakeholder Trust.
A beekeeper development Trust (that owns 10% of the equity in African Honey Bee Kruger Park Pty Ltd) raises grant funding to provide support to partner beekeepers in the form of mentorship, training, logistics, access to low cost equipment and consumables.
African Honey Bee’s first incubator, Bushbuckridge, began operations in April 2013.
Honey harvested from the incubation farms and procured from partner beekeepers, is transported to a central processing plant where it is strained, bottled, labelled, packaged and dispatched for distribution. African Honey Bee's Nektar management and traceability technology will allow consumers to trace their batch of honey back to the beekeeper that produced it and see on Google Earth where it comes from.
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Wikipedia