Bee Keepers World. The Honey Bee
Posted by Bill Bourlet
Our own Jag Dhillon was our speaker today and he told us about the Bee Keepers world.
Jag told us the story of two people: John Gibeau and Shlomo Silverman. John is an ex-policeman and Shlomo is a self made millionaire and a great philanthropist.
John while in the police force developed bee keeping as a hobby, which overtook his profession and became a full time bee farmer. To grow he needed money that no bank would advance.
Shlomo keeps bees too. Bee keeping brought them together and Shlomo advanced John large amount of money without any collateral to build the Honey Bee Centre at 7480-176 Street in Surrey.
The Bee Centre is a commercial honey farm, research laboratory and visitor attraction. Besides bee keeping training, honey sales. The Centre supplies bee hives to local berry growers and hotels for pollination. The honey bees visit thousands of blossoms collecting nectar and pollen to provide food for pollinating the plants.
While on their travels to Africa, John and Shlomo saw a great potential in expanding their expertise to bee farmers in Ethiopia and Uganda. Shlomo decided to spend $250,000 in Africa to start one or two bee keeping training schools. I was asked to do a feasibility study for two locations, one in Gondar (Ethiopia) and one in Mbale (Uganda).
Ethiopia is a land locked country of over one million square kilometres with a population of over 93 million. It is one of the oldest locations of human life known to scientists. Gondar was the capital of Ethiopia from 1632 to 1855, and it has the remains of castles and palaces constructed by a series of emperors, making it a popular tourist attraction. Gondar is a trade centre for grains, oilseeds, and cattle; the economy of the surrounding area is basically one of subsistence farming. It is becoming an attractive tourist centre, several large luxury tourist resorts are under construction.
Jag studied the Gondar location, met with local municipal and other government authorities and the local architect and some of the developers of major tourist resorts. After spending a week there went to Mbale (Uganda) to study the other location.
The Mbale location contains an existing vacant vocational school site that was constructed in the mid 2000’s, mostly from donations from abroad. After the economic meltdown of 2008 the operating funding for this school disappeared and it has remained closed and vacant since then. The site is in a rural area about 15 km south of Mbale, surrounded by small farms. It is comprised of seven main buildings plus a few smaller ones of varying vintage.
After studying the two sites, Jag recommended the Gondar location and made recommendations on the sitting of proposed building, parking, landscaping and other functional needs of the proposed training centre. He recommend that the Bee World to proceed with this project. I recommended against the Mbale project as the existing buildings and their location was not considered suitable for the proposed project.