Sweet and with a floral touch, that's the honey we normally consume. Lanzarote, despite its aridity, also produces this food thanks to the beekeeper Manolo Zerpa and the Canary black bee. In the north of the island, from Teguise, passing through Guatiza to Haría, around 210 hives are spread across the orography, which generate quality and local honey for more than 20 years.
Zerpa started with a single nucleus of Canary black bees, with half of a hive, with which he began to grow and delve even further into the world of beekeeping. "I started studying them and I have read everything there is about beekeeping, at that time I was calmer so I decided to take the step despite the fact that there were people who had tried and it had not turned out well, but I knew that in Lanzarote it was going well," he says.
In the case of beekeepers from Lanzarote, Fuerteventura, Gran Canaria and La Palma, they are obliged to work with the Canary black bee in their hives.
The beekeeper "always has to be constantly aware of the hives, observing them to avoid diseases and that they grow healthy," says Zerpa. One of the main problems facing the Canary black bee is varroa, a parasite that affects honey bees and kills the hive little by little. In other islands there are more diseases although, as the beekeeper says, "in Lanzarote we are lucky that they do not exist."
Despite the climate of Lanzarote and the appearance of little vegetation, the island's countryside has a staggered flowering from when it rains until September. In addition, "during the summer, the bees feed on fruits when they are ripe such as figs," says Zerpa. They also feed on the flowers of plant species such as sow thistle, bejeque, hierba múa and even verol.
In the daily life of bees in hives, they enter and leave when they wish, although as the beekeeper explains, "the climate is what most conditions them, on cold days they work less and on hot days they work more." Normally, these insects work to a greater extent during the day, but everything depends on the temperature inside the hive. "It is something that must be constant, if it is hot more bees go out to work and if it is cold fewer go out because they must maintain a constant temperature," he explains.
The honey harvesting process
The honey produced by Manolo Zerpa has been marketed for years in Lanzarote under the name Haría Miel since he became a professional beekeeper after exceeding the 150 hives needed for this designation.
Regarding the honey harvesting process, the beekeeper explains that "this is something that the hive itself indicates to you, since the bees seal the so-called 'cells' with wax when the honey is already formed and has the ideal humidity, that is the time to harvest it."
When extracting the product, it is carried out with a centrifugal machine by inertia and then it is packaged. The time of collection depends, according to Zerpa, "on the flowering we have because, for example, the spring one is being harvested now, but the weather now with the cold does not allow opening a hive." Later, at the end of the year, a second honey harvest is carried out.
For ten years, Monolo Zerpa's work and dedication has led him to raise his own queens and divide the hives, so their number is increasing year after year.
APICLIMPACT, a project to protect wild pollinators
The different threats that affect the Canary black bee have led the ADACIS association to create the APICLIMPACT project that began in 2022, one of the many strategies that have been carried out for the adaptation of the island territories of the Canary Islands to the impacts of climate change. Its objective is to conserve the biodiversity of the islands through the protection of wild pollinators.
As Letizia Campanale, technical coordinator of the project, explains, "the drought was having an impact of up to a 50% reduction in honey production in most of the territories and from the association we understand that it is a very serious problem due to the impact that the disappearance of pollinating species would have on biodiversity, so we began to investigate how the situation was."
In this sense, APICLIMPACT not only set to work to protect honey bees, but all pollinator species in the archipelago. In fact, there are only 130 species of bees in the Canary Islands. This decrease "was causing a negative impact on food production because more than three quarters of it depends on the activity of these insects and in the Canary Islands, a third of the island crops depend on them," says Campanale.
The threats that endanger wild pollinators are prolonged droughts, alteration of flowering processes, forest fires, erosion of territories, extreme heat waves and haze that, in the words of the technical coordinator of the project, "cause the shoots to burn during the fleeting springs that we often have on the islands." Also the arrival of invasive exotic species as has already happened in the Iberian Peninsula with the arrival of insects from Asia pose a threat because they feed on bees.
However, the action of human beings also has a negative and direct impact on the survival of these pollinators "with the use of toxic products such as pesticides or fungicides because it not only affects the insect per se, but it is a chain because if an insect is dying and a bird or lizard eats it, they will in turn carry that contamination to their young or may even end in death," explains Campanale. For this reason, the project is working to raise awareness about the importance of being careful with these products.
Protection of the Canary black bee
Another of the main impacts that affect the Canary black bee is the importation of foreign species that is being carried out in some territories of the Canary Islands although "there are some islands in which it is forbidden to import bees from outside to protect the local bee," says the professional. However, something that the coordinator highlights is that "in the archipelago we are very lucky because the local bees that have developed here for hundreds of thousands of years are the ones that have the most capacity to adapt to the environment."
For this reason, APICLIMPACT works to prevent other species of bees from being imported from abroad and thus prevent them from affecting their genetics and, therefore, their production, adaptation and aggressiveness. "The Canary black bee has historically never had predators on the islands and is very docile, so it is an advantage, since beekeepers handle it without gloves," she details.
Although the Canary black bee looks for its own food, the beekeeper offers some help on many occasions. "They offer them shade or water resources so that they can always have water available," says Campanale. This joint work of the Canary black bee and the farmer results in islands such as Fuerteventura and Lanzarote "a unique honey because we have very specific floral resources and it is something that is highly valued."
In the Canary Islands there are 1,242 beekeepers, according to the 2024 census of the ISTAC, and just over 33,700 hives, but of all of them only 2% are professional beekeeping farms. "This translates into the fact that on the islands there is a beekeeping tradition mainly linked to self-consumption due to the characteristics of the archipelago and currently the sector is in crisis, there are years in which it fluctuates, some go better and others worse, but there is recognition of the lack of generational change and a lot of work is being done to recognize the role of women within beekeeping because in the Canary Islands they are only 12%, while in other parts of Europe they represent 50% or more," concludes the technical coordinator.
