Bee Keeping:

Young school leavers and adults can suppliment their income from bee keeping as a hobby. The bee hives can be made from grass, tree trunks, tree bark or even 25 litre tins.

Problems:
The main probem is ignorance of bee makagent techniques. The young bee keepers usually use fires to subdue the bees in order to harvest the honey. In doing so many of the bees die and the colonies are let too small to produce honey for next season. This problem is cause by lack of adequate protection from bee sting.

The project requires someone with bee managent skills to teach some of the young people over maybe one season. It also requires a sambple of the Bee suits that the adults on the dress making project can use to make the required bee suits for the bee keepers.

With successive droughts in southern Africa, the number of bees is generally being reduced. It would be advantageous if those that keep bees could develop techniques to encourage larger colonies if possible. Ideas of what to do with the bees in the winter are welcome.

Maize:

The winter maize is always lucrative because most people do not produce it and so the price for green millies is higher. The young people living in areas wet enough and warm enough to produce winter maize, sometime get a good crop.

Problems:

• There are many problems with winter maize, including:
• Wild animals such as baboons, wild pig, kudu, etc that will travel long distances to eat the succulent green stalks of the maize plant.
• Domestic animals are usually left to roam free in the winter.
• The young farmers cannever earn enough to fence their gardens and the government's environmental policy prohibits the cutting down of tree, a traditional way of temporarily fencing a garden. This means that the farmer must resort to sleeping in the garden for the duration of the crop, and sometimes it is not practical.

Spinach:
One of the fastest growing plants is the spinach plant. Although it is not yet a popular choice in southern Africa, when need be, the people will by it as a source of green vegetables. It does not require a large garden and harvesting starts within a few weeks. It also is usually listed in government information leaflets as a dietary requirement.

The spinach seeds are usually very cheap and when planted, harvesting can go on for many months as it grows over at least three seasons.

We encourage growers to collect seeds from their own crop for at least three years, and only buy new seeds once every four years to save money.