Top five highlights of 2024
Blog by Jane Barnes
Posted: 17 December 2024
It has been a busy and productive year at Bees for Development and we have selected five of our favourite highlights of the year to share with you.
After spending the summer training teachers, we launched six new Buzz Clubs in schools around Donkorkrom, Ghana. Florence Sefakor of Bees for Development Ghana took on the role of Buzz Club Coordinator and is supporting the staff in establishing their clubs. This whole project would not have been possible without the generous donations from our supporters as part of our Buzz Club campaign in September.
For our Green Match campaign in April, we fundraised to support our partners Working for Bees in Zimbabwe to launch a new women’s beekeeping group and establish a tree nursery. The group is now up and running and has an apiary on some donated land. They have also set up a tree nursery and have collected and sown seeds and planted the saplings, focussing especially on bee-friendly trees.
Bees for Development has been developing a traceability and quality assurance system and in 2024 we launched it with our partners at Bees for Development Ethiopia. The system assists beekeepers in proving the provenance of their unique products, ensuring honey quality, and giving buyers the confidence to know that should an issue arise, it can be traced back to its source and not cause a whole harvest to go to waste.
We were delighted to win a silver gilt award at the Chelsea Flower Show in May and our new CEO Megan Denver met Her Majesty The Queen as part of the show. With planting inspired by our work in both the UK and internationally, our stand celebrated all insect pollinators, especially the honey bee, and its vital role in improving the lives of people in the poorest nations. We displayed bee hives from around the world and showed how amazingly beekeeping can address all 17 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals including poverty alleviation, nutrition, social inclusion and biodiversity conservation.
Our Programme Manager – Will, worked in beekeeping development in Malawi before he joined us at Bees for Development, and brought a wealth of knowledge and enthusiasm for the country, its people and its bees! This year, he set up two new projects in Malawi, offering practical beekeeping training to students at Mzuzu University and setting up the inaugural National Honey Show in Malawi which was a great success, taking place on 7–8 November.
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