Why Chile does not take advantage of its potential for sustainable beekeeping

27/10/2015

Beekeeping is in crisis product of man who has dramatically reduced the environments conducive to bees. An analysis indicates that we must address the problem with a vision of the use of botanical resources, with a specialization of beekeeping, which could be divided into three areas: a) A complementary one with agriculture: specialized in crop pollination for the production of high quality fruits, seeds and vegetables; b) another livestock beekeeping: sowing or planting scheduled honey species to feed the bees by extending the season and improving the quality and quantity of products, and c) a mixed conservationist, using currently discarded natural resources, which is developed in areas currently covered by vegetation melífera, or, a symbiotic integration between b) and c), with intensive transhumance.

Chile is exempt from many diseases and pests that limit industrial beekeeping in most countries. In parallel, it has large reserves of endemic flora producing high quality honeys that are absolutely underutilized or abandoned. I refer to the SNAPE from the central zone to Chiloé, with which the national hives inventory could be quadrupled and transform the country into one of the largest exporters of bee products in the world.

One of the objectives of SNASPE is the conservation of the national natural heritage. Within this is the management and sustainability of biodiversity, which is related to incorporating management techniques that improve the regeneration of the native forest through non-aggressive or competitive elements with the flora and fauna of the ecosystem.

The State should assume a role with zero cost, opening the SNASPE to a rational beekeeping controlled and supported with a business training approach, with policies of organizational development, research and development, export promotion, which can easily raise the apicultural GDP of the current US $ 10 millions to more than US $ 100 millions.

For its part, national beekeeping is technically quite precarious, but perfectly complementary with the SNASPE. Historically, beekeepers have "humanized" the management of bees, controlling health with chemicals, feeding with substitutes. The result is the decline of bees and the decline in quality and safety of their products. Beekeepers need to be "bee-trained": analyze the historical evolution of bees, their wild behavior, their strengths and weaknesses, and then innovate in the direction of their natural parameters.

The main axiom for the perpetuity of bees is the bee / flower dichotomy producing nectar and pollen. While it exists they will be indestructible. Moral: we must ensure these environments focusing on beekeeping as a livestock activity, sowing and planting for honey bees, hopefully with double or triple purpose to increase profitability. For example, quillay / honey / saponin, robinia / poles, Chilean hazelnut / hazelnut and the resulting biomass.

Another axiom is "unity is strength", a populous hive in a favorable botanical environment is indestructible.

Technological innovation has advanced, but unfortunately, beekeepers, in general, lack business criteria, so we do not innovate due to economic incapacity, lack of disclosure, ignorance.Currently, there are techniques at no cost that improve beekeeping and profitability, and that I believe that more than 90% of beekeepers is unknown.

Source: Campo Magazine