There’s a three-day workshop currently underway to produce high quality Queens, but it’s not exactly the Queens that are involved in beauty contests.
The Agriculture Ministry, the Embassy of Argentina, and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) started the capacity building workshop for several local beekeepers in Queen Bee Rearing.
Representative for the IICA, Diana Francis, said the training is timely, given the decreasing bee population.
“The bees are dwindling in numbers with the climate change, biodiversity and habitat loss, and therefore, you know when everybody faces hunger, you know what happens. So the beekeepers have been working very hard to keep their bees alive and therefore it’s our responsibility to help them to ensure that. And it’s not just the beekeepers, it’s the foresters, the agriculture people, everybody. So we’re trying to build back the herds or the hives by rearing the Queens, and we can have more bees.”
Argentina’s Ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago, Gustavo Martínez Pandiani, said his country has experience in this field and has brought two experts, Dr. Elian Tourn and Dr. Cecelia Pellegrini, to ensure there are solutions to the problems faced by local beekeepers and farmers.
“With a strong scientific and academic background, they are specialists. But they are farmers, they are beekeepers. So that’s the idea to work with the community, to identify the real problems, and to try to find realistic solutions to it.”
Former President of the T&T Bee Keeping Association and active Bee Keeper, Marlon Cowie-Clarke, hailed the three-day conference.
“It allows us as beekeepers to actually create new Queens, which allows us to create new hives. The Queen is basically the centre of the hive as well and she is responsible for the strength, the size of the hive, and the productivity of the hive. Without her beekeeping won’t be possible.”
The Ambassador said participants will receive 15 standing operating procedures and best practices for managing a Queen rearing operation.
“In beekeeping, you have a lot of lessons to be learned you know, bees are very smart, they are very strong, they’re organised, they’re ruled by a female which is a very important issue and we need to, you know, understand that the beekeeper problem you cannot solve it isolated.”
The workshop is taking place at the El Reposo Demonstration Station in Sangre Grande.