With Covid-19 the usual fundraising can not take place in CA Week, the challenge this year is to complete the Northern Burundi Bee project, started by Harry Owens in 2019. The plan is to get a centre of excellence set up in the North of the country to ensure that the training Donate received can be carried out and supported locally.

Donate (photo with Harry Owens) is a coffee farmer, part of a CA cooperative and was invited with 10 other women from her village to attend the one day training with 100 other beekeepers over 2 days in the north. She said: “I’ve come 90 minutes by bus to get here today. I am very interested in today’s teaching about how to increase our colony and make more colonies in other hives – I want to put that into practice in my hives. With this knowledge I’d like to increase up to 10 hives from my 3 hives I currently have. We didn’t know about checking the hives before. If we’d have known about checking the queen maybe 2 of the colonies wouldn’t have left. That’s why I’m really grateful and hopeful for the future.”

Speaking about PPE; “I would like to do the beekeeping myself but as I don’t have any protective clothing we all hire an experienced beekeeper to come and harvest the honey for us. The sewing workshop was so good! Even though I’m not a tailor I can still sew by hand. It was really beneficial to me. I’d like to do more training and get a sewing machine of my own one day!”