The story of honey
Honey is a wonderful product and beekeeping is an extremely interesting activity, on so many levels.
First of all bees provide a food product that is completely unchanged between the moment of harvesting and the moment of eating. The honey in the comb is literally the same as the honey in the kitchen. No need to heat or to cool, no additives, preservatives.
Bees are an essential part of our ecosystems. They provide service to a multitude of flowers, vegetables and trees. Without pollination by bees there would be a lot less natural food. Therefore it’s very important to protect bees.
At BFF, we invest in nature conservation and restoration. Additionally, we ensure that our beehives are placed in natural areas where no chemical pesticides are used.
How BFF supports families in Eastern Europe
Beekeeping is a relatively low entry way of making a living specifically in low income areas, like Eastern Europe.
Of course in Ukraine there are additional reasons for beekeeping. In Ukraine the climate and the vegetation is extremely beneficial for bees. Also the situation where there is a full-scale war and a lot of arable land has been mined, makes beekeeping an agricultural activity of choice.
When your land is not usable for plowing, sowing and harvesting, the bees can still safely fly there, collect nectar and provide rural families with an income.
Through the revenues generated from honey sales, we not only assist farmers in achieving a sustainable income but also contribute to post-war de-mining efforts, aiming to restore access to their farmlands in the future.
What we are doing to help these beekeepers is first of all investment in some equipement to start again, or to scale up a little bit. But also, we can help them to take up organic beekeeping which obviously makes the product much more marketable in Europe. For this we worked together with USAid, who sponsored organic certification.
We are now a very mixed group of beekeepers. It started with Dmitro, who with his wife and daughter fled from the frontline in the South Mykholaiv province and moved up north with only thirty of his threehundred colonies. So we helped him to get back on his feet, bought all of his honey, and he was one of the first beekeepers to become organically certified.
And what about Genadi, the retired rocket scientist from Pavlograd who now supports his family with the help of his bees? Or Maksim, Valentin and Yuri, farmers in Sumy province, just thirty kilometers from the Russian border who are local YouTube celebrities because they arrested some Russian soldiers were lost there, but are actually very serious beekeepers and nature conservatists?
There are many many stories of how Bees Feed Families, and we will share them with you here.