ANGUILLA—On Friday, April 22, eighteen women in Anguilla, along with eighty-seven of their counterparts from Antigua & Barbuda, St Kitts & Nevis, Trinidad & Tobago, St Lucia and Grenada, officially graduated from a first of its kind on-line Iyanola Apiary Collective beekeeping course. The graduation date fittingly coincided with the established worldwide Earth Day.
All 105 graduates successfully completed 14 practical and 3 theoretical modules of study which began on November 16, 2021 and ended in March 2022.
While 56 percent of the graduates are male, the Anguillian beekeeper graduates are 100 percent female and have labelled themselves ‘The Queen Bees’. Anguilla’s graduates are Terrel Babrow, Vernice Battick, Robertha Campbell, Tamara Carty, Ronya Foy-Connor, Kay Ferguson, Cleo Fleming, Sammi Green, Janaire Hughes, Leneta Jules, Clarissa Lloyd, Lynne Morancie, Farah Mukhida, Isabel Rosario, Shirley Richardson, Dahlia Shields, Mary Smith and Louise Soanes.
Director of the Anguilla National Trust (ANT), Farah Mukhida noted that the training dovetailed superbly with an ongoing ANT three year project whose goal is to support pollinator conservation in Anguilla. She said: “We are really grateful for this opportunity to take part in this training course. We are proud of our group of 18 women who all successfully completed the course. We are all new beekeepers, and are excited about putting our newly found knowledge into practice and to formally launch our women’s beekeeping collective.” The ANT partnered with both Anguilla’s Departments of Natural Resources and Gender Affairs in this training opportunity.
The graduation ceremony was held in St Lucia with graduates tuning in via a social platform. Presenters and key lecturers included Geraldine Lendor-Gabriel, Mayor of Castries, St Lucia. Among other presenters were Richard Matthias, President of the Association of Caribbean Beekeeping Organisations in St Lucia, and Sharda Mahabir, PhD in Environmental Biology in Trinidad and Tobago. Matthias said, “This online course is the first in its kind in the Caribbean and the next step in the development of beekeeping in our region. This course represents the flavour of the Caribbean, and captures our seasons and the cultural norms that happen in our society. We developed something that represents our people and the Caribbean.”
The Anguilla graduates will complete their practical training when their beekeeping individualised equipment, and live bees from the island of Barbuda, arrive on the island in late summer 2022.
