And IF they do, will it effect the character of the honey?
I have a close friend who is a pastor of a church in a remote village in high sierras of northern Mexico. Many of the women in his congregation are (young) widows (with kids) whose husbands used to work for narcotraficantes in the vast opium and marijuana fields hidden in the canyons. They are widows because it is easy to end up on the wrong side of a gun in the dope business.To see the need of these Indian women and their kids would break your heart. ANY source of income would be an improvement in their situations.
There is a carpenter in the village who has the skills to make all the woodenware we use here in the States for beekeeping, and there is enough waste pinewood from the local sawmill available for free. That's the one source of jobs in 40 miles -- other than drugrunning, and the sawmill only runs when they can snake big pine logs off the mountainside, about 6 months out of the year. Would there be any reason to NOT use green-cut pine for woodenware?
Some of us here in the States that know what these folks are up against have been brainstorming about how to start teaching beekeeping to the widows, but people keep asking if the bees would work the opium poppies, and thus effect the honey. I have no idea about how to get a straight and dependable answer to that question. I read the earlier string from March 2004 about bees and marijuana. Where else could somebody ask such a question other than Beesource.com?
Elevation of this village is about 6500 ft, and the terrain and plant mix looks a lot like the mountains of New Mexico, just several hundred miles further south. Outside of the poppies and ganja, there isn't any agriculture to speak of other than sideyard cornfields (milpas) In my trips there, I haven't seen ANY visible signs of beekeeping, nor any local honey on the shelves of the tiny ma & pa stores.
Michael et als. -- anybody have any idea about how honeybees near opium would turn out?