African Honey Bee (organization)

African Honey Bee is a social-franchise beekeeping micro-business incubator established in 2007. Its purpose is to alleviate poverty through sustainable beekeeping, by enabling rural families to benefit from the unpolluted prime honey producing vegetation around them.
History
African Honey Bee was set up by Guy Stubbs, a Christian Social Entrepreneur, who has expertise in developmental beekeeping. Andrew Weeks and Kobus Visser also contributed to the project.
African Honey Bee supports viable micro-beekeeping businesses in southern Africa by developing a network of interlinked beekeeping incubator farms and consumables, appropriate technology, and access to markets. The organization also promotes the benefits of locally-produced honey to consumers.
Beekeepers that partner with African Honey Bee are provided with training, mentoring and support, low-cost infrastructure, equipment, consumables and logistics, and off-take agreements/partnerships with large retailers.
African Honey Bee requires its beekeepers to manage their bees according to its Afri-hive organic beekeeping system, its Nektar management and traceability technology, and its quality standards. Its beekeepers are also managed and mentored by an African Honey Bee senior beekeeper.
Prospective beekeepers from rural areas are generally between the ages of 18 - 26 and spend 18 months in an incubation program. During this time, they are officially employed by the incubator as salaried working interns. During their incubation, the interns complete an African Honey Bee developed program in beekeeping. They work under the guidance of senior beekeepers on an African Honey Bee commercial bee farm. The interns are also assisted to start their own beekeeping business on a small scale, with the view of increasing it once they complete the incubation process. At the end of their incubation, the beekeepers automatically become shareholders in African Honey Bee Kruger Park (Pty) Ltd, the main operating entity of the group, through a stakeholder Trust.
A beekeeper development Trust (that owns 10% of the equity in African Honey Bee Kruger Park Pty Ltd) raises grant funding to provide support to partner beekeepers in the form of mentorship, training, logistics, access to low cost equipment and consumables.
African Honey Bee's first incubator, Bushbuckridge, began operations in April 2013.
Honey harvested from the incubation farms and procured from partner beekeepers is then transported to a central processing plant where it is strained, bottled, labelled, packaged, and dispatched for distribution. African Honey Bee's Nektar management and traceability technology will allow consumers to trace their batch of honey back to the beekeeper that produced it and see on Google Earth where it comes from.
The African Beekeeper Trust (development trust) has been registered as an NPO and PBO, providing African Honey Bee with a vehicle to raise grant funding for, and manage beekeeper development.

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