Grahamstown: Story of a Sweet Man

Bees. Bees. More Bees. And a brilliant young scientist and his team doing wonders out at the Old Power Station...

By Julienne du Toit - Photographs by Chris Marais

Mad Scientist

The sun has gone, and the wind is howling over the grasslands of Frontier Country, Eastern Cape. Beside creaking blue gums, a half-derelict Victorian power station hulks like the Rocky Horror Picture Show in the last light. Every window is dark, except for one in the far corner. If this were an old Gothic horror story, that would be the mad scientist’s hangout.

But in fact, this decommissioned power station outside Grahamstown is home to a series of intriguing projects run by Dr Garth Cambray – a young scientist fascinated by bees.

Up in that single lit room are shelves of beakers, test-tubes and pipettes, samples of mead, and in one corner, a padded u-shaped bench covered in brown vinyl.

“It’s one of Spur’s old benches,” says Cambray with an impish grin.  “I use it as a kind of conversation pit.”

Bee-Brained

He and his team moved into the Old Power Station eight years ago, and since then, the place has slowly come alive again. And it started with a fascination for bees.

 Visit the old red-brick power station during the day and the first thing you’ll notice are the aloes planted all over the surrounding area.

“We must have moved tons of them here,” says Cambray, unconsciously glancing at his formerly blistered hands.

The aloes flower prolifically during winter, giving his bees the boost they need through the cold weather.

We stand under a tree, watching bees flying back and forth into their hives. They’ve located a blue gum coming into flower, and are harvesting its nectar at top speed.

“Bees are highly intelligent,” says Garth. “A bee’s brain is the size of a pinhead. But if it were reconfigured the way a mammal’s brain is, it would be the size of a rat’s. And each hive can have around 60 000 bees. Just think of all that intelligence, concentrated into such a small space.”

Quaffing Mead in Africa

Garth became fascinated by these insects during his Biotechnology degree at Rhodes University. He earned extra money measuring bee wings for a researching scientist, and eventually became so comfortable around them he removed unwanted swarms from buildings and gardens for extra cash.

Then he’d set up bee-hives, but was astonished to find they were being stolen – by people making mead.

Most might think of it as a quaint European drink quaffed in the days of wimples, codpieces, doublets and hose. The Blackadder days.

But Cambray found out that in Africa, mead is still being made, and drunk. He ended up doing his doctorate on its long history.

First created by Khoi and San people at least 15 000 years ago, this simple mixture of honey, water and yeast was the first human experiment in biotechnology. The technique moved north to Europe, where mead became the alcoholic drink of choice right through Mediaeval times, spurred in part by the Catholic Church.

Monks and Mead

Candles made from animal fat spluttered and smoked, so many monasteries specialised in making an alternative – clean-burning beeswax candles.

Of course, there was all that honey as a by-product.

“That’s how monks became major players in the alcohol industry,” smiles Garth.

In those days, there was no such thing as bee-keeping. Any honey or beeswax came from the destruction of hives. Inevitably, honey gradually became scarce, and European mead-making vanished 500 years ago.

In Africa, though, bees and humans co-evolved, the very reason African bees are renowned for being more aggressive. And while mead production failed in Europe, it carried on just as it always had right here in Africa.

After his PhD, Cambray set up the Makana Meadery with partners Vuyani Ntantiso and the late Dr Winston Leukes, his doctoral supervisor.

Cape Fig and Coffee

The Xhosa way of making mead is far more effective than the European way, he says. And Makana Meadery, which marries African and European techniques, makes a delicious product that is selling well and winning international awards.

It’s bottled under the label Honey Sun African Mead (sold overseas under the Xhosa word for mead, iQhilika) and there are six different options: dry mead, chilli, herbal, sweet, coffee and Cape fig mead.

When we arrived, things were buzzing in the Old Power Station.  Sindiswa Teyise, who normally manages meadery operations, was lending a hand with the labeling, getting thousands of bottles ready for a supplier in the US. And there was a large group arriving for a mead-tasting that afternoon.

Bees, like humans, number several billion. But unlike us, their impact on the planet is wholly beneficial, and they in turn thrive in healthy ecosystems.

Here at the old power-station was a similar hive of industry with humans using their ingenuity to benefit themselves and the Earth.

Not much madness here, then.

• For more information, see www.iqhilika.co.za.

Honey, Money & the Mafia

• Alcohol, of which mead was the first, can be a curse, but it’s part of civilisation. It requires co-operation to make, and the silly things people do under the influence elicit tolerance and forgiveness, says Cambray.
• Vladimir Lenin was a bee-keeper, and the way bees organise themselves is thought to have inspired Communism.
• After the Soviet Republic was founded, bee-keeping was the only industry that was not nationalised.
• Because hives could be sent freely all over the country, criminals soon took advantage and smuggled opium in them – the start of the Russian mafia.
• Most of the agricultural stability of the world is underpinned by bees – a fact that is deeply worrying for America and Europe where bees are dying out because of Colony Collapse Disorder.
• Albert Einstein reportedly said that if bees disappeared from the Earth, humans would only be able to survive another four years before also perishing.
• Dr Cambray has a theory that our attraction to gold stems from our hard-wired love for golden honey. Which is why we can’t help putting gold into our mouths.

So You Want To Be a Beekeeper?

A hundred bee-stings a day is standard for Paul Collett.

“Three hundred give me really weird dreams. But 500 give me a venom headache, and then I get pretty grumpy. And take it from me: by far the most painful place to be stung is your armpit.”

Paul and his wife Val farm sheep and bees near Cradock, and Paul has become something of an unwilling sting expert since he learnt his bee-keeping skills with Garth Cambray. Now Val is picking up the prickly mantle.

Their organic unheated honey, sold under the label Speelmanskop, is in high demand in the Eastern Cape – possibly because their bees harvest nectar entirely from the wild Karoo bossies. Paul and Val also make a tincture of propolis, which is a natural antibiotic material created by bees to seal their hives. It’s excellent for humans and livestock.

“When I first started working with bees, I’d get stung incessantly,” says Paul. “I remember once I was doing a desperate kind of breakdance, and Garth told me to just stand still and imagine I was on a beach, and that all was beautiful. Somehow I managed to do it, and the bees stopped stinging. What they really hate are panic pheromones.

“Do you know there’s a distinctive smell when bees start stinging? It smells just like bananas.

“But eventually you also build up an immunity to stings, and they say bee venom also prevents rheumatism.”

• For more information, email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .