Supporting Uganda's precious wildlife with Wild Discovery’s Bee Project

Wild Discovery has been mitigating human-wildlife conflicts in Uganda with the power of bees and honey.

Run by the team’s Conservationist, Cris Mongly Kaseke, the Ugandan Bee Project has officially been running for 5 years and is based in Queen Elizabeth National Park.

The team introduces bee hives to help protect local farm land, where human-wildlife conflict has been recognised. By situating bee hives around the villages and farmland, they create a safe zone for the villagers to live and work as well as protecting crops. Thus, this work is creating a new safe corridor for the wildlife to navigate around.

They currently have approximately 500 bee hives in 4 communities and plan to expand this to 2000 hives in 10 communities this year.

This mitigation is needed now more than ever, due to the rise in human populations around the national park, home to many wild animals including elephants, buffalo, antelope all of which destroy crops, homes and people’s lives. The retaliation from this sees these animals injured or killed.

The bee hives assist to prevent this as well as providing a secondary income. Wild Discovery trains the farmers how to look after the hives and they then receive 20% of the honey produced, 20% goes directly to the community and the remaining 50% comes back to the Zoo, to clean and sell.

They are in the process of applying for an export license so they can sell the honey in the UK to tourists. This will generate an income to provide even more hives. The farmers and the community can choose to sell their 20%, so goes back into their community to provide water pumps or help educate the next generation.

Wild Discovery’s next plan for this project is to provide an educational book, with crosswords and other fun things for children and adults to do which will help them learn about their local area and how important it is to protect it. These will be given to every child, so they take it home and the family can indirectly begin to learn about Wild Discovery’s International Conservation.