Women on Wings’ business partner Under The Mango Tree (UTMT) continuously innovates its ways of working to get the best out of bee keeping and involve more female famers at the same time. Recently, expert Judith van Riet again worked with the team of UTMT on the way forward.
Female bee keepers successful
The local UTMT team in Gujarat meets fortnightly at the Bee Resource Center to share experiences, planning and track their achievements. Judith: “UTMT recently started two successful projects in which only women are trained. Skills required to be a successful bee keeper are quite feminine, like consistency, care and patience. One of the female master trainers managed to split a natural bee colony from 1 to 2 colonies – an important technique to scale up.”
Cross pollination improves crop yield and involves more female famers
Judith worked with the local UTMT team in Gujarat and also two days with the management of UTMT at their office in Mumbai on the future business model of UTMT. The challenge is to make the model more self-supporting. Vijaya Pastala, Founder and CEO at UTMT: “Now we have an intense involvement in both training the bee keepers and giving the handheld support after that. The new model should develop entrepreneurs in bee keeping in the local villages. They should be self-supporting and renting out bee boxes and providing pollination services to other local farmers. Through these services other farmers benefit from cross pollination which substantially will improve their crop yield. Pollination services seem an interesting way to involve more women.”
