Caption: Thomas inspecting beehives on a local farm.
By SANDHYA NARAYAN
FRIEND is organizing APIARY FARMER CONFERENCE on November 14th at the FRIEND Training Centre in Tuvu, Lautoka.
The Conference will be facilitated by Mr Thomas Körsten from Germany, an Apiary Farmer with more than 25 years of experience.
The One day forum will be bringing together around 100 Bee Farmers and stakeholders from the Western Division. We are hopeful that the event will provide the farmers and stakeholders an opportunity to share their challenges and have new learnings to further their success in bee farming.
The farmers will have the opportunity to learn new techniques for maintaining and expanding their apiary knowledge from Mr Thomas Körsten, a Qualified and highly experienced professional beekeeper, who brings extensive experience having worked as a consultant in Samoa, Fiji and the Caribbean.
“Fiji honey is good quality honey. There is great scope for capitalizing on bee farming. It can be done using simple materials and once people know the basics they should be able to develop and expand their own projects at relatively low costs,” says Mr Körsten.
Mr Körsten has expertise in all areas of tropical beekeeping including hive construction and site allocation, maintenance and propagation of hives, honey and pollen analysis, queen bee rearing, disease identification and control, honey extraction techniques, quality control, product diversification and development of marketing strategies for local consumption and export.