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- Cutting wood to make a Comfort Hive
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- With his entourage
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- Carpentry apprentice Kofi
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- Comfort Hive bodies coming together
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- Trimming a top bar comb to fit in the hive
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- Tying the comb
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- Ready to go!
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- Combs going in…
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- Comfort Hives are easy to feed.
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- Sam with the finished Comfort Hive
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- Sam’s package boxes and funnel
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- Visiting a beekeeper’s large operation in Hanover.
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- At the St. Catherine Bee Farmers Association workshop
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- With Catherine Ryan and Denrie Muirhead of the St. Catherine Bee Farmers Association
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- At the St. Ann Bee Farmers Association
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- Singing Bee Songs with members of the Robins Bay Bee Farmers Association
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- At the almost-dry waterfall at Black Sand beach
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- With some free “tour guides”
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- Singing some songs at the second Robins Bay Bee Club meeting, after top bar hive inspections
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- With Kwao
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- This training apiary at Yerba Buena Farm looks great after Sam helped to clear it out with a cutlass and hoe!
This is a long-overdue blog post. Trainer Sam Comfort, a top bar beekeeper from America, came to Jamaica in September 2013. We had a month of learning from this really interesting man – Sam has such a unique perspective, it is refreshing and inspirational. If anyone can inspire people to color outside the lines of conventional beekeeping, it’s Sam. We got to listen and sing along to Bee Songs, written and performed by Sam. We got to explore a new hive design, the Comfort Hive. We got to share our time with Sam with 156 Jamaican beekeepers from all over the island. Thank you, Sam, for your willingness to clean out an overgrown apiary with a cutlass and hoe, for being so open to the culture and people of Jamaica, and for so generously giving us all a month out of your busy life. Please take some time and visit Sam’s outrageously interesting and engaging website, Anarchy Apiaries.
