Shangri-La Handicrafts Center's beekeeping program is designed to help local farmers add a skill, hoping to improve the economic income of the local people through beekeeping skills, and the pollination of bees is beneficial to the surrounding ecological environment, which can make Shangri-La's natural environment better. The center has two beekeeping project sites in Shangri-La, one in Dongwang and the other in Vixi, and also keeps a few boxes of bees in the courtyard of the ancient city of Dokuzong, which are used for high-altitude wintering experiments of bees.
Speaking of the beekeeping program, we must talk about the two amazing people at the center - the beekeeping program administrator, "Qing", and Katie, a beekeeping expert from the U.S.
"Qing" is actually not a brother, but a beekeeping expert from the U.S.
"Qing" is actually not a brother, but a beekeeper. "She is a long-haired girl with a lot of personality, and is respectfully called "Qing" by the volunteers of the center because of her lovely personality and her magnificent Tibetan dancing skills. "Qing is from Inner Mongolia, which is on the other side of the country from Yunnan. She used to be an office worker in the big city, doing foreign trade work in Shenzhen and Beijing. After resigning in 2012, "Qing" embarked on a journey, "bamboo stick and shoes are lighter than a horse, a straw raincoat is a rainy day", not realizing that she would be able to travel with her family. I didn't realize that just like us, "Qing" was y attracted to Shangri-La when she passed by. She lived in an old Tibetan-style house and became a librarian at the Shangri-La Handicrafts Center, where she came into contact with beekeeping and found great joy in it.
Qing once described to me that her dream was to have a big truck full of beehives, so that she could happily drive the truck wherever there were flowers, traveling along the way to keep bees and collect honey, and have both beauty and sweetness. In the past few years, she has been moving closer to this dream, studying beekeeping techniques, working as a beekeeping administrator at the center, managing the beekeeping program in a practical and serious way every day, and recently getting the opportunity to go to the United States several times to attend professional beekeeping training, and she has become a professional beekeeping expert who can take charge of her own business, and is now a beekeeping consultant at the center. It's really enviable to watch her take one step at a time towards her life's goal. If you want to go to Shangri-La pilgrimage this "Qing", the night to the moonlight square on the line, she will be there to jump pot Zhuang, head wearing a panda hat jumped the most happy is her.
Our "master" Katie, is a younger than us all fresh beekeeping expert. She was born into a beekeeping family in the United States, majored in biology in college, and her parents and brother have their own beekeeping business in Texas. She's only in her twenties, but has twenty years of beekeeping credentials and speaks Chinese. She is now a beekeeping consultant with projects all over the world, following the scent of flowers like a bee. "Qing learned a lot of her beekeeping skills from Katie, who is our beekeeping mentor, so although Katie is young, she is already our mentor, Katie has a wealth of knowledge about beekeeping, loves to help people, and is a kind and courageous girl. Every summer Katie would come to Shangri-La to give free technical training to the villagers, teaching them about beekeeping from scratch. Although Katie is no longer working at the center and has only been seen in photos, the volunteers have all heard of her legend.
The test colony in Doktor Dzongri, Shangri-La, was a great opportunity for the volunteers to get in touch with the bees. Every time Qing went to inspect the bee colony, we would volunteer to follow behind and play a hand. Under her hands-on tutelage, we learned a lot about beekeeping, and there were quite a few fun tidbits among them.
Qing said, we are in the ancient city of Doktor Dzong is the bee species is Xifeng. The main domestic bee species are the center and western bees. The center fronts are native bees, the most common bee species in the country, while the western bees are an exotic species, from the central Mediterranean. These two types of bees often fight with each other for nectar, with the western hornet being larger and more aggressive, often killing the queens of the center frontal swarms and occupying their hives. Despite the disparity in strength, the center front is after all the leader of the colony and is more adaptable, so the west peak has never been able to completely wipe out the center front. The delicate relationship between them was like the Saudi coalition forces and the Yemeni Houthi Army, although the Saudi coalition forces were far superior to the Yemeni Houthi Army in terms of military and financial strength, the war lasted for a long time and still had not been divided into winners and losers because it was difficult for a dragon in a river to defeat a snake in the ground. But the center has better luck than the Houthis in Yemen, because many local governments in our country are on the same side with them, banning the breeding of western bees.
When Qing introduced the classification of bees, he said that male bees don't need to work, and their only job is to mate with the queen bee, and the male volunteers listened and tsked, and were envious of these male bees. Later, when I read the book, I realized that in winter, in order to save food, the bee colony would kick the male bees out of the hive first, leaving them to fend for themselves in the snow and ice. After knowing the truth, I was really chilled for a few days in a row and couldn't slow down. It seems that I still have to go back to the warmth of Hong Kong for the winter. I'm not sure if you're going to be able to get a good deal on a new product, but I'm sure you'll be able to get a good deal on a new product, and I'm sure you'll be able to get a good deal on a new product.
Bees are not like pets, they are not loyal to their owners, and if they don't like the place they live, they will run away at any time and find another good place to move to. Proper management will make the size of the colony gradually larger, this time more can not be careless, because the colony is too large they feel crowded will produce the phenomenon of bee division, that is, a part of the colony will rebel, embracing the establishment of a new "queen bee", resulting in a part of the bees to leave home to go outside to establish a new home. Therefore, we must pay attention to the fact that if we find that there are too many bees in the hive, we have to divide the bees artificially, that is, we have to move half of the colony to another hive and turn it into two independent colonies. The technical level of manual bee separation is very high, and if you don't have a good grasp of it, you may go back to the original colony, or even worse, the original colony will be affected if you can't separate the bees, and you'll end up with nothing at all.
Sometimes, the reason for the decrease in the number of colonies may be that the bees are sick, and many dead pupae and young bees will be found in the hive. We encountered a situation where the bees were sick, when Odd Chai had to go back to Beijing, so Qing rushed back to Shangri-La from a faraway village, and then took Uncle Zhaxi's car to take the samples of the dead bees to the airport, and handed them over to Odd Chai before the plane took off, so that she could send the samples to the labs in Beijing for checking, and the whole process was as exciting as a relay race. It seems that it is not easy to take care of the bees.