By Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE (Stingless Bees (Trigona sp. ?)) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
This article was originally published on Rappler.
“The Villa Corazon farm in Bulusan town is 7-hectare coconut plantation and an annex of BBu farm. It has been pollinating coconut trees with stingless “kiwot” bees, which are native to the Philippines and are known pollinators of high-value crops like mangoes, pili, and coconut.
As coconut pollinators, kiwot bees have helped the farm increase its yield by 35% to 50%. “The reason for the higher yield is that fewer young coconuts fall to the ground,” Catindig said. “The tiny size of the bees let them penetrate the coconut flowers,” explained former BBu beekeeping consultant Floreza Palconitin-Broqueza, daughter of the late Rodolfo Palconitin.
…The municipality of Bulusan adopted the beekeeping project as its banner agriculture program in 2017 with the aid of the Agriculture Training Institute (ATI). Its 40 beneficiaries – mostly bee hunters and recipients of lands in upland areas – reside in the outskirts of Mt Bulusan.
The project’s main objective is to improve the farmers’ productivity, which is also one of the main goals set by the Philippine Coconut Authority (PCA) in its 2018-2022 road map for the industry.
Each beneficiary received 11 colonies of kiwot bees, which were bought from 6 bee hunters for P500 per colony. Some of the beneficiaries bought a few more colonies, giving the hunters who are beneficiaries themselves, additional income…”
Read on at: Rappler.
