Sítios de mel

We spent much of the day scouting suitable areas for locating hives when the pilot project commences. The roads here don’t cope well with much wet season traffic, especially when the drivers are completely ragging the vehicles and hoping for the best. A morning of getting stuck in the mud, fending off sweat bees, intermittent rain and eventually a peaceful lunch spot on some rocks next to a river (pictured). At night I was nervous in the tent during lightning flashes and crunching thunder after one of the Conservancy’s scouts sadly died last week in a direct strike.

There is an interesting cast of characters on this field visit. Ernie from Kenya who’s of Italian descent and whose father was a prisoner of war brought from Somalia by the British. As a Kenyan Ernie speaks Swahili and can communicate with Mozambicans who here speak Swahili in common with the rest of East Africa further north. Tito the driver is a friendly guy but with a terribly misshapen arm after a bad bone break that was never surgically treated. His forearm bone looks like it has re-fused with the rest of his arm but that the original break has remained embedded in his arm tissue, creating a large lump. Underneath I picture it resembling the shape of a catapult. He says it doesn’t give him any pain now, but it would be good to know if metal plates and surgery were still an option.