Apinautica, Egypt II - Minya & Pyramids
Its been some time since I posted the next installment of the memoir. Last time I posted the beginning of the Egypt chapter. This is the second of three installments of it. This one will have a lot about beekeeping, but also notes about pyramids and helpful suggestions for cat names :3
Monday, April 22nd, 2013 - There’s 500 hives in close rows, arranged in roughly a rectangle, with a loose canopy of palm fronds overhead to provide shade and a slat fence around the the perimeter. The hives are frame hives like we use in the US, raised up on stands so they’re at a comfortable working height, the top of the one brood box at elbow height. And in fact, there’s no more boxes than the one brood box.
The way we keep bees in the US, the first brood box is just the beginning, the minimum requirements of a hive that they soon outgrow, more boxes then being added on top. Here (I would find this hive to be absolutely typical of the rest of the beekeeping operations I saw in Egypt), if the bees are across all ten frames of the first box, it’s time to split it and have two boxes! Husam cynically explained that “here, the beekeepers would rather be able to brag about the number of hives they have than have fewer stronger hives.” I don’t know if that’s necessarily true, I believe in people’s self interest enough that I hold out hope it’s not so short sighted and maybe the conditions in Egypt actually favor this, but I can’t say for sure. When a hive is smaller than two boxes of bees, the bees spend proportionately more of their time and effort raising brood - they must have 6-11 frames of brood, so these smaller hives are perpetually concentrating on that brood making. When you have 10 frames of brood, six of those frames of bees at least are working on brood. When you have 20 frames of bees (60,000 bees), there’s still only 6-11 frames of bees rearing brood and 9-14 frames of bees out collecting honey.
And in this case, any frame you try to harvest honey from will also have brood on it. Normally, in The West, I would never harvest a brood frame, but here they just carefully uncap the honey cells but not the brood ones, and run it through the spinner at slow speed so the brood doesn’t et extracted.
But, and here is maybe a crucial difference, this beekeeper primarily harvests bee venom, and so did a significant number of other beekeepers in Egypt I met. This hasn’t been a major activity among beekeepers I have known in the West (To be honest I’ve never met anyone who said they did this in the US or Australia). They do this by putting bees in a glass tube in which they get electrically shocked, which causes them to sting the glass, the venom is then collected and dehydrated. Bee venom is by far the most valuable commodity that can be harvested from bees per weight (they were getting $60/ounce ($2/gram), about 1000 times the value of honey, though one can only collect less than a gram per hive per harvest). Obviously it can’t just be sold at the corner market but it has medical uses and pharmaceutical companies will pay good money for it. Probably the conditions in Egypt, the relative amount of honey produced, costs of running a hive, price of honey and of venom, make harvesting venom the particularly best remunerative beekeeping activity there. Economic supply and demand curves often explain things like this.
Another twist on the economics of beekeeping, in many places farmers pay beekeepers for pollination - in Egypt the beekeepers have to pay citrus growers for the privilege of locating their hives near the orchards.
I have a variety of advice I can share. Such a concentration of hives in one place facilitates the spread of disease (“yes but it’s practical for working them”), bees will be unable to find the correct hives in such grids and rows, they could at least paint the hives different colors (“they find this works okay as it is”), they’d probably get better honey production if they let the hives increase in size rather than constantly splitting them (“they would prefer maximum number of hives”). They had an answer for my every advice, while looking at me expectantly waiting for me to divulge some sort of easy golden bullet they’d never heard before that would revolutionize their production, giving them an advantage over their competitors, without them having to actually change any of their cherished ways. I begin to feel anxious again as to whether I’ll be able to accomplish anything. The owner of the hives shows me the business cards of several other beekeeping experts who had already visited him and said the same things as me, obviously similarly failing to convince them to change anything.
I learned something myself from them. The hives only had as many frames within them as were occupied by bees. The way I had learned beekeeping, a ten frame box always had ten frames in it even if there were only three frames of bees. In Egypt, unoccupied frames would probably melt in the heat so they only add a new frame when it looks like the bees within are ready to occupy say a 5th or 6th frame, and the rest of the space is left vacant. If one did this and didn’t check your hives for a few weeks in Spring you’d return to find they’d built comb willy-nilly throughout the empty space, which would be a mess to clean up, but labor being very cheap in Egypt the owner had several workers who could ensure each of the 500 hives were checked weekly. Inspired by this, much later in Australia when starting new hives I’d often not put a full complement of frames in a box until a few weeks later so it wouldn’t melt or warp in the heat.
The workers were in fact just sitting down to lunch when we arrived. The bees were nice enough that they were having their lunch (falafels with a pickled cheese in pita bread, very strong tea brewed up in a kettle over an open flame) in a cleared space in the middle of the apiary. They were very friendly and welcoming, sharing their lunch with me. Afterwords as we were going through the hives we found a scorpion in one - from the way they all jumped back I’m guessing one particularly doesn’t want to get stung by one.
Tuesday, April 23rd - I present to Dr Adel’s apiculture class about comparative beekeeping in the various countries I’ve worked and visited. The students are studious and intelligent. It’s also clear that Dr Adel is thoroughly knowledgeable about apiculture, there’s nothing scientific about beekeeping I can say he doesn’t already thoroughly know. But he’s intrigued by the Australian j-hook hive tool design and takes a tracing of the one I have brought with me. Then we visit an agricultural high school, which has a beekeeping department, and I take questions and answers from the staff there and look at their hives. Like many places, they have folk remedies for the “incurable” bee disease American Foulbrood (it didn’t come from America I promise, we just first discovered it) - in this case something involving cinnamon?
Wednesday, April 24th - I present to the Minya Beekeepers Association, Dr Adel and I sitting at the end of a long table of old beekeepers. Dr Adel acts as my translator. As with the beekeeper earlier, I have plenty of suggestions, but they’ve heard them all before and aren’t interested in the suggested changes, and yet they seem impatient for me to tell them something revolutionary. I tell them the very most up-to-date information on treatment of the bee pest the Varroa mite, but they’ve heard that already too.
At least Dr Adel is able to often enlarge on my answers. He knows the exact context of what they know and which points need re-enforcing. I am very confident that he thoroughly knows his business and am more than happy for him to do so, it takes a bit of the pressure off me. However, Husam apparently has other ideas and takes Dr Adel aside for chastisement, telling him he is only to repeat me word for word. I feel bad about this, Dr Adel is very nice, an expert in apiculture in his own right and with the academic credentials to prove it, being told he must act as the mere translation device to me must be demeaning. He bears it with dignity, however, and after the meeting with earnest handshakes and good will, we say goodbye.
This time I’m awake for more of the drive back and I notice often there’s a random pyramid in the distance. Like most people I had only been particularly aware of the three famous “great pyramids” at Giza, but it turns out there’s actually 118 of them all over the place. Once again I’m intrigued to later read about what I see. That slouchy pyramid in the distance? It’s apparently the Meidum Pyramid, the first straight-sided pyramid (as opposed to earlier pyramids with distinctively stepped sides), built between 2613 and 2498 BC. Originally built as a step pyramid at a steep angle, it was finished in the now familiar more or less (nearly) equilateral triangle design, but the angle being too steep it collapsed possibly during construction. The burial chamber is missing the usual inscriptions, with unfinished walls and wooden supports still in place that are usually removed, it seems probable Pharaoh Sneferu gave up on completing it.
Shortly later I see another oddly shaped pyramid in the distance. The Bent Pyramid was under construction at the same time as Meidum Pyramid, started after they’d decided against steps, but hadn’t figured out yet the steep angle wouldn’t work. After Meidum collapsed they finished this one at a shallower angle. Sneferu may be buried here, or he perhaps went with his third attempt, the Red Pyramid. Sneferu strikes me as a great name for a cat. An indecisive cat.
Back in Cairo the guest house is now full. The potato expert is there, now plus a citrus pest management expert and another tomato expert. When I express to them my frustration that the beekeepers I’ve been meeting had already been visited by experts and knew practically everything there was to know, they all said the same - all the operations they visited had been regularly visited by consultants and were better than typical comparative operations in the states. It’s my cynical hypothesis that this is what happens when somewhere at “the top” it is said “Egypt is a strategic ally of ours, we need to give them a large amount of aid money,” And so projects to run consultants through Egypt are constantly put forth regardless of if they’re needed, because the aid projects must happen.
Thursday, April 25th - It’s once again a three-day weekend. It’s almost a relief from the anxiety of trying to teach people who already know everything, though I didn’t come here to play tourist.
The Organization organizes some tours for us. On Thursday we visit the Great Pyramids at Giza. These are the pyramids everyone thinks about when they think about pyramids. They were built by Sneferu’s son Khufu and avoided the mistakes he had made in his earlier pyramids.
I had been here before of course, but this time tourism is down 90% due to the political situation. This time there’s no crowds, just the enormous pyramids under the blue dome of sky and a handful of tourists. Even the peddlers and touts are few since these small crowds can’t support a robust tout/peddler(/pickpocket?) ecosystem. And of course, being the youngest of my colleagues they mostly leave me alone.
From Giza we go to Saqqara, just south of Cairo, where I hadn’t been before. If the Giza pyramids, just visible rising above the city to the north, leave an impression of a singular unrivaled ancient grandeur, Saqqara leaves the impression of an immense amount of grand history. There’s about a dozen pyramids here in various stages of disintegration, for these are among the oldest. Besides the pyramids, there’s ruins of temple complexes. And a lot of holes in the ground from excavations. The three Giza pyramids stand majestically on an empty flat slope, the pyramids of Saqqara are crowded amongst ruins, and in addition to Giza to the north one can see the Bent Pyramid and others to the south.
Djoser’s Step Pyramid is the most impressive here. It is the oldest standing pyramid, built 2670-2650 BC (ie finished about 40 years before the Meidun Pyramid was begun). It has scaffolding along several of the step walls, presumably preservation work going on but it gives it the appearance of still being under construction.
Friday we go down to the docks on the Nile and for $10 (in total) one of the lateen-rigged felucca sailboats takes us all out to sail around on the Nile for an hour.
On Saturday we go to the Egyptian Museum, another place I hadn’t been before. It’s absolutely stuffed with fascinating unbelievably ancient artifacts. From 4,000 year old relics of pharaohs to Roman mummies which seem comparatively recent at only 2,000 years old.
Driving around Cairo we also see “Cemetary City” where people live right among the tombs of the cemetery, and “Garbage City.” Because Christians face substantial discrimination in Cairo, garbage collection is one of the few jobs open to them, so they collect the garbage and process it right in the area of town where they live.
We also learn a story about the “swine flu” scare in 2010. The government had ordered all pigs killed, which experts say wouldn’t have any beneficial effect on human health but was easy to do politically since only Christians had pigs. But all the Christians just kept their pigs in their apartments for a few months until it blew over. And that they were able to get the pigs through alive was good because the pigs eat a substantial amount of the garbage.
Three days of tourism are alright but by Saturday night I’m looking forward to getting back to work, though already once again feeling anxious about how I’ll be able to benefit the beekeepers I meet.
Monday, April 22nd, 2013 - There’s 500 hives in close rows, arranged in roughly a rectangle, with a loose canopy of palm fronds overhead to provide shade and a slat fence around the the perimeter. The hives are frame hives like we use in the US, raised up on stands so they’re at a comfortable working height, the top of the one brood box at elbow height. And in fact, there’s no more boxes than the one brood box.
The way we keep bees in the US, the first brood box is just the beginning, the minimum requirements of a hive that they soon outgrow, more boxes then being added on top. Here (I would find this hive to be absolutely typical of the rest of the beekeeping operations I saw in Egypt), if the bees are across all ten frames of the first box, it’s time to split it and have two boxes! Husam cynically explained that “here, the beekeepers would rather be able to brag about the number of hives they have than have fewer stronger hives.” I don’t know if that’s necessarily true, I believe in people’s self interest enough that I hold out hope it’s not so short sighted and maybe the conditions in Egypt actually favor this, but I can’t say for sure. When a hive is smaller than two boxes of bees, the bees spend proportionately more of their time and effort raising brood - they must have 6-11 frames of brood, so these smaller hives are perpetually concentrating on that brood making. When you have 10 frames of brood, six of those frames of bees at least are working on brood. When you have 20 frames of bees (60,000 bees), there’s still only 6-11 frames of bees rearing brood and 9-14 frames of bees out collecting honey.
And in this case, any frame you try to harvest honey from will also have brood on it. Normally, in The West, I would never harvest a brood frame, but here they just carefully uncap the honey cells but not the brood ones, and run it through the spinner at slow speed so the brood doesn’t et extracted.
But, and here is maybe a crucial difference, this beekeeper primarily harvests bee venom, and so did a significant number of other beekeepers in Egypt I met. This hasn’t been a major activity among beekeepers I have known in the West (To be honest I’ve never met anyone who said they did this in the US or Australia). They do this by putting bees in a glass tube in which they get electrically shocked, which causes them to sting the glass, the venom is then collected and dehydrated. Bee venom is by far the most valuable commodity that can be harvested from bees per weight (they were getting $60/ounce ($2/gram), about 1000 times the value of honey, though one can only collect less than a gram per hive per harvest). Obviously it can’t just be sold at the corner market but it has medical uses and pharmaceutical companies will pay good money for it. Probably the conditions in Egypt, the relative amount of honey produced, costs of running a hive, price of honey and of venom, make harvesting venom the particularly best remunerative beekeeping activity there. Economic supply and demand curves often explain things like this.
Another twist on the economics of beekeeping, in many places farmers pay beekeepers for pollination - in Egypt the beekeepers have to pay citrus growers for the privilege of locating their hives near the orchards.
I have a variety of advice I can share. Such a concentration of hives in one place facilitates the spread of disease (“yes but it’s practical for working them”), bees will be unable to find the correct hives in such grids and rows, they could at least paint the hives different colors (“they find this works okay as it is”), they’d probably get better honey production if they let the hives increase in size rather than constantly splitting them (“they would prefer maximum number of hives”). They had an answer for my every advice, while looking at me expectantly waiting for me to divulge some sort of easy golden bullet they’d never heard before that would revolutionize their production, giving them an advantage over their competitors, without them having to actually change any of their cherished ways. I begin to feel anxious again as to whether I’ll be able to accomplish anything. The owner of the hives shows me the business cards of several other beekeeping experts who had already visited him and said the same things as me, obviously similarly failing to convince them to change anything.
I learned something myself from them. The hives only had as many frames within them as were occupied by bees. The way I had learned beekeeping, a ten frame box always had ten frames in it even if there were only three frames of bees. In Egypt, unoccupied frames would probably melt in the heat so they only add a new frame when it looks like the bees within are ready to occupy say a 5th or 6th frame, and the rest of the space is left vacant. If one did this and didn’t check your hives for a few weeks in Spring you’d return to find they’d built comb willy-nilly throughout the empty space, which would be a mess to clean up, but labor being very cheap in Egypt the owner had several workers who could ensure each of the 500 hives were checked weekly. Inspired by this, much later in Australia when starting new hives I’d often not put a full complement of frames in a box until a few weeks later so it wouldn’t melt or warp in the heat.
The workers were in fact just sitting down to lunch when we arrived. The bees were nice enough that they were having their lunch (falafels with a pickled cheese in pita bread, very strong tea brewed up in a kettle over an open flame) in a cleared space in the middle of the apiary. They were very friendly and welcoming, sharing their lunch with me. Afterwords as we were going through the hives we found a scorpion in one - from the way they all jumped back I’m guessing one particularly doesn’t want to get stung by one.
Tuesday, April 23rd - I present to Dr Adel’s apiculture class about comparative beekeeping in the various countries I’ve worked and visited. The students are studious and intelligent. It’s also clear that Dr Adel is thoroughly knowledgeable about apiculture, there’s nothing scientific about beekeeping I can say he doesn’t already thoroughly know. But he’s intrigued by the Australian j-hook hive tool design and takes a tracing of the one I have brought with me. Then we visit an agricultural high school, which has a beekeeping department, and I take questions and answers from the staff there and look at their hives. Like many places, they have folk remedies for the “incurable” bee disease American Foulbrood (it didn’t come from America I promise, we just first discovered it) - in this case something involving cinnamon?
Wednesday, April 24th - I present to the Minya Beekeepers Association, Dr Adel and I sitting at the end of a long table of old beekeepers. Dr Adel acts as my translator. As with the beekeeper earlier, I have plenty of suggestions, but they’ve heard them all before and aren’t interested in the suggested changes, and yet they seem impatient for me to tell them something revolutionary. I tell them the very most up-to-date information on treatment of the bee pest the Varroa mite, but they’ve heard that already too.
At least Dr Adel is able to often enlarge on my answers. He knows the exact context of what they know and which points need re-enforcing. I am very confident that he thoroughly knows his business and am more than happy for him to do so, it takes a bit of the pressure off me. However, Husam apparently has other ideas and takes Dr Adel aside for chastisement, telling him he is only to repeat me word for word. I feel bad about this, Dr Adel is very nice, an expert in apiculture in his own right and with the academic credentials to prove it, being told he must act as the mere translation device to me must be demeaning. He bears it with dignity, however, and after the meeting with earnest handshakes and good will, we say goodbye.
This time I’m awake for more of the drive back and I notice often there’s a random pyramid in the distance. Like most people I had only been particularly aware of the three famous “great pyramids” at Giza, but it turns out there’s actually 118 of them all over the place. Once again I’m intrigued to later read about what I see. That slouchy pyramid in the distance? It’s apparently the Meidum Pyramid, the first straight-sided pyramid (as opposed to earlier pyramids with distinctively stepped sides), built between 2613 and 2498 BC. Originally built as a step pyramid at a steep angle, it was finished in the now familiar more or less (nearly) equilateral triangle design, but the angle being too steep it collapsed possibly during construction. The burial chamber is missing the usual inscriptions, with unfinished walls and wooden supports still in place that are usually removed, it seems probable Pharaoh Sneferu gave up on completing it.
Shortly later I see another oddly shaped pyramid in the distance. The Bent Pyramid was under construction at the same time as Meidum Pyramid, started after they’d decided against steps, but hadn’t figured out yet the steep angle wouldn’t work. After Meidum collapsed they finished this one at a shallower angle. Sneferu may be buried here, or he perhaps went with his third attempt, the Red Pyramid. Sneferu strikes me as a great name for a cat. An indecisive cat.
Back in Cairo the guest house is now full. The potato expert is there, now plus a citrus pest management expert and another tomato expert. When I express to them my frustration that the beekeepers I’ve been meeting had already been visited by experts and knew practically everything there was to know, they all said the same - all the operations they visited had been regularly visited by consultants and were better than typical comparative operations in the states. It’s my cynical hypothesis that this is what happens when somewhere at “the top” it is said “Egypt is a strategic ally of ours, we need to give them a large amount of aid money,” And so projects to run consultants through Egypt are constantly put forth regardless of if they’re needed, because the aid projects must happen.
Thursday, April 25th - It’s once again a three-day weekend. It’s almost a relief from the anxiety of trying to teach people who already know everything, though I didn’t come here to play tourist.
The Organization organizes some tours for us. On Thursday we visit the Great Pyramids at Giza. These are the pyramids everyone thinks about when they think about pyramids. They were built by Sneferu’s son Khufu and avoided the mistakes he had made in his earlier pyramids.
I had been here before of course, but this time tourism is down 90% due to the political situation. This time there’s no crowds, just the enormous pyramids under the blue dome of sky and a handful of tourists. Even the peddlers and touts are few since these small crowds can’t support a robust tout/peddler(/pickpocket?) ecosystem. And of course, being the youngest of my colleagues they mostly leave me alone.
From Giza we go to Saqqara, just south of Cairo, where I hadn’t been before. If the Giza pyramids, just visible rising above the city to the north, leave an impression of a singular unrivaled ancient grandeur, Saqqara leaves the impression of an immense amount of grand history. There’s about a dozen pyramids here in various stages of disintegration, for these are among the oldest. Besides the pyramids, there’s ruins of temple complexes. And a lot of holes in the ground from excavations. The three Giza pyramids stand majestically on an empty flat slope, the pyramids of Saqqara are crowded amongst ruins, and in addition to Giza to the north one can see the Bent Pyramid and others to the south.
Djoser’s Step Pyramid is the most impressive here. It is the oldest standing pyramid, built 2670-2650 BC (ie finished about 40 years before the Meidun Pyramid was begun). It has scaffolding along several of the step walls, presumably preservation work going on but it gives it the appearance of still being under construction.
Friday we go down to the docks on the Nile and for $10 (in total) one of the lateen-rigged felucca sailboats takes us all out to sail around on the Nile for an hour.
On Saturday we go to the Egyptian Museum, another place I hadn’t been before. It’s absolutely stuffed with fascinating unbelievably ancient artifacts. From 4,000 year old relics of pharaohs to Roman mummies which seem comparatively recent at only 2,000 years old.
Driving around Cairo we also see “Cemetary City” where people live right among the tombs of the cemetery, and “Garbage City.” Because Christians face substantial discrimination in Cairo, garbage collection is one of the few jobs open to them, so they collect the garbage and process it right in the area of town where they live.
We also learn a story about the “swine flu” scare in 2010. The government had ordered all pigs killed, which experts say wouldn’t have any beneficial effect on human health but was easy to do politically since only Christians had pigs. But all the Christians just kept their pigs in their apartments for a few months until it blew over. And that they were able to get the pigs through alive was good because the pigs eat a substantial amount of the garbage.
Three days of tourism are alright but by Saturday night I’m looking forward to getting back to work, though already once again feeling anxious about how I’ll be able to benefit the beekeepers I meet.