Under mulberry trees at a bee farm in Taipei’s suburbs, students watched intently as instructor Tsai Ming-hsien (蔡明憲) wafted smoke over a hive box, explaining to aspiring apiarists how to keep the insects happy in an urban setting.
His audience included entrepreneurs, retirees and even a six-year-old who reached eagerly for a frame pulled from the box, as Tsai demonstrated how bees can be kept calm with a smoker.
“Many join my class out of curiosity,” said the 43-year-old instructor who also heads the Bee and Wasp Conservation Association of Taiwan. “They want to learn more about this insect, which has important economic values and a crucial role in agriculture.”
Photo: I-Hwa Cheng, AFP
Bee populations around the world are facing disaster from overuse of pesticides, predatory mites and extreme temperatures due to climate change.
That also spells catastrophe for humans, as three-quarters of the world’s main crops depend on bees to act as key pollinators.
Temperature and weather fluctuations in Taiwan have affected honey output in the past few years. From 2020 to 2021, it jumped nearly 60 percent to 13,260 tonnes, before dropping to 9,332 tonnes the following year.
Photo: I-Hwa Cheng, AFP
Recreational beekeeping in Taiwan has grown steadily over the past decade, with people tending about a dozen to up to 60 hive boxes in their yards or rooftop gardens, Tsai said.
“The city is overdeveloped with less green space and declining biodiversity,” he said. “We hope this creature will act as a key to open more knowledge about nature and ecosystems.”
Six-year-old Hsia Wei-yun, who attended a class last month, was thrilled to watch bees flitting on a box frame.
“I think it is a lot of fun keeping bees. I got to hold a bee frame,” she said excitedly.
Her mother, Hsia Cho-hui — who also brought along her son — said she had been concerned about whether there was enough nectar in the city, and fretted after one class that beekeeping seems “very complicated.”
However, the class has fueled her children’s interest in getting their own hive box, and “it would be a little difficult to dissuade them,” she said.
Some, like Edwin Huang, see Tsai’s class as a chance to make money while taking part in the “under-forest economy” — a practice of developing and selling eco-friendly products that help the environment.
“I think keeping bees can help improve the overall ecosystem ... it is a very positive activity for both personal and public reasons,” he said.
The 40-year-old produces colored dyes from aster, a flowering plant, that he grows on a hillside in New Taipei City, and plans to one day open a diner where he could serve the honey he produces.
“I am learning the techniques while researching my menu,” he said.
Retiree Sherry Liu, who took a class seven years ago and is now an avid apiarist, said she is “not in this to make money.”
She started with three hive boxes for bees that had flown into her rooftop garden and has expanded to 12.
“It is very healing to watch bees fly. They look very cute when they fly... It is a pleasure for me,” she said, dressed in protective headgear and a jacket as a swarm of bees flew around her.
Liu usually harvests honey three to four times a year, sharing the fruits of her labor with relatives, friends and neighbors.
She lamented that this year’s rainy and cold conditions have hit her production.
“I could not collect any winter honey because the weather was really bad and the bees ate all the honey” in their hives, she said, adding that it can be “quite troublesome to tend” to her boxes.
“You need to be loving — you cannot just keep them but not look after them,” she said.
Tsai said that he does not expect everyone who attends his class to become a bee farmer or keeper.
“But we hope at least [people] can get to know and understand them, and would not rush to destroy them when they appear,” he said.
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
‘LEADERS’: The report highlighted C.C. Wei’s management at TSMC, Lisa Su’s decisionmaking at AMD and the ‘rock star’ status of Nvidia’s Huang Time magazine on Thursday announced its list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI), which included Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰). The list is divided into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Wei and Huang were named in the Leaders category. Other notable figures in the Leaders category included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Su was listed in the Innovators category. Time highlighted Wei’s
EVERYONE’S ISSUE: Kim said that during a visit to Taiwan, she asked what would happen if China attacked, and was told that the global economy would shut down Taiwan is critical to the global economy, and its defense is a “here and now” issue, US Representative Young Kim said during a roundtable talk on Taiwan-US relations on Friday. Kim, who serves on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, held a roundtable talk titled “Global Ties, Local Impact: Why Taiwan Matters for California,” at Santiago Canyon College in Orange County, California. “Despite its small size and long distance from us, Taiwan’s cultural and economic importance is felt across our communities,” Kim said during her opening remarks. Stanford University researcher and lecturer Lanhee Chen (陳仁宜), lawyer Lin Ching-chi
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) was wooing leaders from across Africa with a banquet on Wednesday night, King Mswati III of Eswatini was notably absent. That is because the kingdom — about the size of New Jersey and with just 1.2 million people — is one of Taiwan’s remaining dozen diplomatic allies. That means Eswatini does not participate in Xi’s Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, the centerpiece of China’s diplomatic outreach to Africa, which was held in Beijing this week. The landlocked nation, which sits between Mozambique and South Africa, is the last holdout in Beijing’s seven-plus decade mission to make Africa
RSS