Growing public interest on beekeeping through training at BSU
Seven females and 10 males comprise the latest batch of beekeeping trainees at the Cordillera Regional Apiculture Center (CRAC) of the Benguet State University on April 26 to 28.
To Keneth Laruan, the director of the center and staff, we acknowledge your valuable contributions in boosting the confidence, morale, and welfare of beginners through your free training program that dates back 2019. Together, we could harness your grantees grow to become productive and responsible.
As industry seniors, we welcome our new colleagues, thank BSU CRAC for extending free trainings and enjoin intercessions to stop honeybee vandalism.
We appeal for help to assuage our doubting countrymen by dissemination of factual data – science-based research outputs – to prevent decimation of the insects dubbed most efficient pollinators.
With social acceptability, practitioners could expand operations without fear of getting the ire of doubtful community folks, of thievery or destruction of hives, or being subject of complaints for propagating vectors of pests and a myriad more ridiculous reasons.
Awful experiences in other introduced plant and animal species generated fears that bees could be risks not only on human health, but also to indigenous plants and animals.
On the other hand, bees are progenitors of nature since pollination effects ideal development of seeds, the next generation of plants, and fruits, towards food sufficiency. And as beekeepers get passionate in caring for vegetation, as pasture of their wards, honey supply increase and honey hunting caused forest fires are reduced.
Honey hunting could result to decimation of bees because the young are not spared in honey gathering. Worse, forests are burned due to unsuppressed smokers left by hunters evading stings of returning field bees or deliberately torched by people with apiphobia.
In her award winning article in the Science Centre Singapore Youth Writing Prize at the 2019 Asian Scientist Writing competition, the then 16-year-old student at Academia de Sophia International, Baguio City, Aimeirene Izabel Ines, wrote: “While bees might be terrifying to some people, we should all be worried about a world without them.”
“I used to be terrified of bees. Now, I’m terrified when I don’t hear them any longer. Bees have been named the single most useful insect on the planet. Saving the bees means caring for them. The only way they can be cared for is if people are aware of the adverse effects that the extinction of bees could present,” she wrote.
Again, we all obviously got a part to play and by doing our part towards satiating the world’s honey demand, in the longer term, we do something to save the bees to save Mother Earth. — ALVIN AYUGAT, Bauko, Mountain Province