Over the past decade, colony collapse disorder has become a growing concern worldwide. A complete wipeout of bees could severely impact the food we eat and the products we use on a daily basis. While a majority of the globe is struggling to solve the intensifying issue, Cuba is one of the few locations that is experiencing the opposite effect: a flourishing of the bee population. While beekeepers in many other countries end up losing 20% of their colonies in the winter months, beehives in Cuba are growing an average of 20,000 per year, as they produced about 52 kg of honey in 2017. The Caribbean nation has experienced great success for a number of reasons. Bees in Cuba are well cared for and have access to a variety of food sources, such as fresh vegetables, fruit trees, and bountiful flower gardens, to maintain excellent nutrition. In addition, since there remains a lack of modern farming equipment, little economic incentive to farm, and the inability of farmers to afford pesticides, wild vegetation is able to grow, which keeps the bees well-nourished and helps them produce high-quality honey.<\/p>\n
According to the article, approximately 10 tonnes of honey was managed by Cuban farmers the previous year, but are forced to sell the government a little over $600 a tonne. The valuable substance is then exported to mainly Europe, where it collects $4,600 a ton for ordinary honey and 16% of the profit for organic. While Cuba’s industry is rather small compared to some of the bigger world leaders’, (China, the biggest producer of honey, makes over 500,000 tonnes a year) it is considered to be a very valuable agricultural export. In fact, the government has opened a new bottling facility that will increase production capacity to 15,000 tonnes annually. It also plans to sell more organic honey and by-products such as beeswax. However, Cuba’s terrible road conditions and scarce fuel is making the transport of this popular good rather difficult. In order to keep the business going, it will need to improve these factors.<\/p>\n
I find it very surprising that China is the leading producer of the world’s honey. Not only do they severely struggle with controlling heavy pollution in their cities, but a majority of the country is urban based, which is not an ideal environment for bees to live in. Although Cuba is nearly invisible on the world’s economic stage, their increasing honey and honey-product production could help them gain more global recognition in the future. On another note, I believe that the beekeeping business in Cuba could help strengthen relations with the United States. If we provide financial funding for the reconstruction of Cuba’s roads, then they could give us with honey in return, which would temporarily solve our honey deficit issue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Over the past decade, colony collapse disorder has become a growing concern worldwide. A complete wipeout of bees could severely impact the food we eat and the products we use on a daily basis. While a majority of the globe is struggling to solve the intensifying issue, Cuba is one of the few locations that is experiencing the opposite effect:… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":112,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/112"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2422"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2425,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2422\/revisions\/2425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}