African Engineers: Honey for All
Engineers in a acquiring state normally obtain on their own at the foundation of an inverted pyramid of grassroots industrial action: upgrading mechanical workshops to develop equipment for rural industries that offer inputs for agriculture and/or submit-harvest processing. In Kumasi, Ghana, for instance, the Technology Consultancy Centre (TCC) of the Kwame Nkrumah College of Science and Technological know-how (KNUST) introduced the manufacture of carpenters observed benches and taught neighborhood carpenters to produce Kenyan major-bar beehives to assistance an extensive beekeeping industry. In Kumasi in the 1970s only one workshop generated saw benches, probably a dozen or so carpenters developed beehives but the beekeepers came to quantity hundreds with some particular person apiaries employing hundreds of beehives.
When in 1975 TCC engineers studied the dropped-wax bronze-casting industry of kurofofrom in the vicinity of Kumasi, the artisans, makers of the well-known Ashanti gold weights, complained of shortage of beeswax. It was soon found that the only locally-created honey and beeswax in Ghana came from honey hunters who utilised fireplace to drive wild bees from their nests and just take their honey. The honey was of bad high quality, frequently tasting of smoke and contaminated by the brood: young bees in the egg and pupa phases of progress. It was realised that a beekeeping industry could supply the local sector with improved top quality honey, beeswax and other bee solutions.
SIS Engineering Ltd, a client of the TCC was producing carpenters’ noticed benches for woodworking enterprises producing weaving looms for a different rural field task. These exact same carpenters could, no question, produce beehives if ideal ideas were supplied, so a research started for a beehive developed to accommodate the African honey bee. In 1977 it was uncovered that a job in Kenya funded by the Canadian Worldwide Advancement Company (CIDA) experienced produced the Kenyan Top-Bar Hive (KTBH) and drawings of the hive had been received from the Ministry of Agriculture in Nairobi. Early in 1978 3 of these hives were generated in the Department of Setting up Technological innovation workshop on the KNUST campus.
Two of the new beehives were equipped to an APPLE venture at Atebubu in Brong-Ahafo Area which aimed to teach wild honey hunters as beekeepers. The 3rd was put in in the university’s botanical backyard garden in which it was quickly colonised by regional bees. However, the college experienced no skilled beekeepers and it was not right up until 1979 that it was attainable to send out two persons from Kumasi to Kenya for training. On their return, some severe beekeeping started out and the on-campus apiary was steadily expanded.
By January 1981 the TCC was assured ample to start off a instruction programme and a To start with National Workshop on Beekeeping was held on the KNUST campus. It was attended by 53 persons, 20 ended up US Peace Corps volunteers, who had been pretty major in promoting the new rural field, and 33 were Ghanaians and a handful of overseas residents from all components of the region. A quantity of these pioneers grew to become large-scale beekeepers who aided and encouraged numerous of their pals and neighbours to begin their individual apiaries.
Of all the jobs of the TCC begun in the initial two a long time of its existence, it is probable that beekeeping touched the lives of most men and women and spread economic, social and overall health positive aspects most widely all through the nation. Some beekeepers, like Kwesi Addai in Sunyani created up apiaries of 300 hives and created honey saved in 200 litre oil drums. Once-a-year product sales amounted to hundreds of thousands of cedis and traders from Cote d’Ivoire crossed the border to invest in substantially of the produce. Many smaller farmers put in a few beehives on their modest plots and girls searching for to boost the diet plan of their smaller kids ended up inspired by specific programmes to build single hive apiaries to deliver honey for residence use and for sale.
As for the shed wax bronze casters, beeswax experienced in no way been so low cost or so plentiful. Massive stocks of beeswax crafted up at the larger commercial apiaries and the TCC was faced with demands to discover export marketplaces for this merchandise. Beekeepers were being also trying to get markets for other bee solutions this kind of as royal jelly, pollen and bee venom, all of which can be used as medicines or dietary supplements.
Beekeeping touched the life of countless numbers of people. It was the type of challenge in which intercontinental enhancement agencies delight, bringing added benefits to the poorest persons in the most deprived rural spots. Nonetheless it could not have flourished but for the compact team of carpenters who created the beehives, and the carpenters could not have coped with the big demand for beehives without the equipment made by a solitary engineering workshop situated in the great city of Kumasi. The worldwide growth companies are hesitant to support jobs in what they contemplate to be the wealthier urban spots, but without the need of these tasks supported by institutions like the TCC the mass-effect rural assignments would not be achievable, except if sustained permanently from outdoors. For domestically self-sustained financial growth in building nations around the world a powerful city-primarily based engineering market is vital.
