Learning Beekeeping

McCartney Taylor is the name and I plan to change the world. Or at least a small part of it. I’m targeting about 30 square km of North Central Tanzania. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

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I’m an engineer by training. Electrical undergrad, masters in Petroleum Engineering. However, I didn’t practice long as an engineer, I went into business for myself pretty early.  I run companies of Geo-spatial databases for Oil and Gas exploration, another for GIS training, and others. Austin, Texas is my home, full of music and playful nuttiness. A place easy to forget the rest of the world.

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Every year or two I go on expeditions. My main hobby is meteorite recovery, known as meteoritics. I’ve got another website about that called outofabluesky.com.

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It was on an expedition in east Africa in 2006 that I got the bug for beekeeping. In a remote village near a meteorite fall zone, I was staying in a hut with a villager and I was asking about the sideways logs in the trees. The villager looked at me and said “You don’t know? That’s a beehive!” as if I was the dumbest SOB on the planet.  I reflected on that for a while and was amused that given all my technical prowess and advantages I inherit from being an American in an upper class social tier, I hadn’t a clue what that long thing was in the tree. That was their tech on their turf, and it kept them in honey.  That particular piece of tech was merely a log hive, one that must be destroyed to get to the honey.

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So I thought, “Hey, if I could teach these guys better beekeeping skills, I bet I could improve the quality of life for the entire region.”  And so began my downward spiral into the depths of the belly of bee-lore. From my research, I discovered that the Top Bar Hive was the hive for the poorest of the villages, and that Langs would be good for the better villages. A $80 hive has no place in a region where the average income is $220/year, where I was. But a $5 hive, hey, we got something there.

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This is end of my beekeeping beginnings. It is not the beginnings of my end. I’ll keep you posted, and I’ll get videos of the village the next time I go.

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