We are in business of fortifying honey – architect

Bukola Adesiyan, an architect, runs a thriving, international bee-keeping business. In this interview with OLUYINKA ALAWODE, she explains how she uses the addition of other health foods to fortify honey, the primary product of bees, to create a niche for her business. Excerpts

Business

At A and Shine International Limited, we produce honey. We are actually into beekeeping. The major product of bees – honey has a whole lot of health benefits; it is a preservative and sweetener. For instance, it can be added to tea or pap and various other cereals to sweeten them.

Products

But the uniqueness of this business stems from the fortification of the honey. Apart from producing pure natural honey, we also produce honey fortified with garlic. Ordinarily, people do not like eating garlic even though it has a lot of health benefits. But we have been able to merge the good nutritional values of honey and garlic together. When mixed with honey, the resultant product becomes friendlier to the taste buds, so a larger amount of it can be taken and it works for ailments like arthritis.

We also produce honey and ginger, and this is very good in the treatment of colds or very stubborn cough. Ordinarily, honey can treat coughs but when the coughing is persistent, honey infused with ginger would be more effective. Another of our products is honey infused with moringa. Moringa is known to have several health benefits and when fortified it is tastier and the nutritional and health benefit of the mixture is even more effective in treating several ailments.

We also produce snacks with these health foods. We have sesame seeds infused with honey, and sesame seeds fused with moringa. They are produced in such a way that they can be eaten like biscuits. So, they can be used to drive away hunger, yet they do not just fill the stomach but have nutritional benefits. This is so much better than eating the snacks that are available today, which are junk foods doing more harm to the body than good.

We are also looking at fortifying honey with Aloe Vera. The advantage in all these products is that they can be enjoyed yet they have preventive and curative health benefits.

Starting

I started honey production in 2000. I was just into honey production but in order to expand the business, we brought in a consultant and through research we realised we can further increase the health benefits of honey by fortifying it with other foods and we can give customers more choices by introducing other health foods.

Background

I was a lecturer at the Federal University of Technology, Minna, Niger State. After I had a surgical operation, I needed pure honey to speed up the healing. But I could not find pure natural honey, which is very good in treating wounds and it could be very disastrous if one uses honey mixed with sugar. The results of adding sugar to a wound can only be imagined. In 2000, there was virtually no pure natural honey on the shelves like we have today. The fact honey was not being packaged meant no NAFFDAC number and so the honey being sold could easily be adulterated. That was what motivated me to start its production.

Future prospect

We want to grow the business, get a bigger farm to do bee-keeping so as to get more honey. The demand is very high, much higher than we can meet. We plan to have an orchard in that bee farm to grow fruits as well, because the flavour of such fruits grown where there are beehives are excellent. This is the practice internationally.

Challenges

We have a farm in Minna, but it has not been easy, cattle herdsmen go in there with their cattle and destroy things, we tried using pots for production but they get broken by the cattle. We want to have a farm that can be wired so that when there is arbitrary bush burning it would not spread to our farm, because that has also been a challenge.