8/15

Today I went to a bee fair. It was a five hour long car ride each way, and we left really early in the morning. At the fair, Agape got a lot of people intrerested in starting top bar beekeeping by giving mini presentation using the demonstration hive that Enoch, Kofi, Amanda, Deja and I had helped prepare thte night before. From Agape's presentations I learned a lot about top bar beekeeping:

• Top bar beekeeping is more affodable compared to langstroth beekeeping because while a three story high langstroth hive costs $15000 to build, a five foot long top bar bee hive only costs $2000. Thus you can make roughly 7 top bar hives with the amount of money to make one langstroth hive.
• Top bar  beekeeping is more women friendly as it does not require heavy lifting that the langstroth beekeeping requires.
• More wax is collected from top bar hives than langstroth hives.
• A top bar hive tends to produce less amount of honey compared to a langstroth hive, but even if you can only collect 80% the amount of honey that you would collect from langstroth hive, you can build 7 times the amount of hives so overall, it leads to greater honey production.
• No foundation is necessary for top bar hives. Thus bees can produce more natural combes with the right sized cells, which leads to healthier bees who are more immune to diseases.

Overall, I learned that people in Jamaica are very friendly and nice. For a small fair, we were able to get a lot of poeple interested in top bar beekeeping. I also got to see other beautiful parts of Jamaica during the ten hour car ride.