The 2025 BEE in Kenya Tour was amazing.  This year we got to experience the Maasai harvesting honey from a bee tree.  African bees are notoriously more aggressive then bees kept in the United States.  Often you will see someone in the US not using gloves or sometimes even skipping the veil on a known docile colony.  I have experienced first hand how aggressive the bees can be in Kenya.  Simply walking past a beehive that was 30-40 feet away elicited alarm pheromone that caused the colony to pour out of their hive and attack me.  Having experienced that, I was extremely interested to see how the Maasai would handle this aggressive behavior.  Simple, they just built a fire a few feet from the bee tree and then took a burning stick and shoved it into the earth to put out the flames, then with the stick smoldering, they stuck it into the cavity of the bee tree followed by their bare hand and grabbed chunks of honeycomb and pulled it out.  Surprisingly enough they only got stung a few times.  Once they were satisfied that they collected all the honey we all ate it on the spot.

We spent some time working with the Maasai community of beekeepers discussing how to make money from value added products from beekeeping.  Traditionally they either eat the comb and honey as soon as they harvest it or they crush and strain and then throw out the wax that is left behind.  We shared some tips on how to make candles and other products from the hive byproducts in hopes that they can then begin to increase their revenue from those products.

We had the chance to work with a beekeeping cooperative in the Lake Bogoria area where we checked some traditional log hives and discussed with them how to make value added products.  They too were accustomed to crush and strain and did very little with wax.  Empowering them to product other products will greatly increase their revenue from beekeeping.