Baku, Azerbaijan, March 7
By Anvar Mammadov - Trend:
The Azerbaijan Beekeepers Association expects honey production growth in the country in 2018, Badraddin Hasratov, head of the association, told Trend March 7.
He said that it is planned to increase both the yield of bee families and the total production volumes of honey in 2018.
“Over the past year, we have carried out a lot of work related to the improvement of the honey bee gene pool,” he noted. “In order to find pure genetic lineage of bees of gray mountain Caucasian breed, samples of insects from various districts of Azerbaijan were collected and sent to Turkey’s Ankara, where biological and genetic analyses were carried out.”
“Samples of bees were selected from a total of 56 beekeepers from 28 villages of Azerbaijan for examination,” he added. “For selection purposes, 125 bees were sent to back to Azerbaijan. They were delivered to gene pool honey bee nurseries. Presently, these bees are used as pure genetic material.”
Thus, the association expects productivity growth from 10 kilograms of honey last year to 12-14 kilograms of honey from each bee family, Hasratov noted.
“In addition, we increased the number of bee families,” he said. “If last year we had 250,000 bee families, this year we sent 300,000 families for wintering. Taking into account these two factors, we expect that 3,500 tons of honey will be produced in 2018.”
In 2017, Azerbaijan produced 3,000 tons of honey.