Support Sustainable Livelihoods in Rural Guatemala

Our beekeeping team kicked off the month of April in Cumbre de Huicá, Huehuetenango, where they led a training with the all-female beekeeping collective Las Diez Rosas. Project manager Ana Cabrera and senior project technician Genaro Simalaj introduced the women to many of the skills they will need to function as a successful beekeeping enterprise, including:

• Teamwork: What are the benefits of teamwork? How can we work efficiently as a team?

• Collaborative decision-making: How do we make decisions and resolve problems as a group?

• Strategic planning: How do we plan for the short- and long-term? What are the components of a good plan?

• Cycles of production: What is the cycle of production for honey production? How do we use this knowledge to design a year-long beekeeping plan?

The teamwork portion of the day involved an activity called the "spider web". In this exercise, participants pass around a ball of string until it connects each member of the group to the others. "The activity makes teamwork visible by showing that if anyone drops their part of the string, the whole web falls down," explains Genaro. At the conclusion of the day, Ana and Genaro delivered the bottles and labels that Las Diez Rosas will need to sell their hard work.

Ana and Genaro traveled to Cumbre de Huicá again in May. This time, they led a technical training on best practices for bottling and quality control of honey products. The training also involved discussion of the business skills the women will need to effectively manage their income as a collective.

This knowledge quickly became necessary because the long-awaited harvest followed shortly after! The beekeepers collected over 375 pounds of honey, the largest harvest ever recorded by a Pueblo a Pueblo partner. After the harvest, Genaro led the beekeepers in dividing their hives, creating “daughter” hives from existing “mothers”. Through this process, the women turned their 17 hives into 30! This sets them up for an even more impressive yield next harvest.

We can’t wait to see all that the women of Las Diez Rosas continue to accomplish. Thank you for helping us support their success!