When bees visited Mems Ramaila’s farm in Brits, North West, she embraced the opportunity to create a thriving honey business, focusing on sustainability and environmental education.

Ramaila is the founder and managing director of BeeAfrican, a beekeeping enterprise she started in 2019.

Before starting BeeAfrican, Ramaila was curious about what a visit from bees meant in the African context. She discovered that bees signify wealth, wisdom, and wellbeing.

“I decided to embrace bees but importantly use the bees to empower communities and teach them about the importance of bees to our ecosystem.” 

Today, BeeAfrican produces protective clothing for beekeeping, manufactured bee hives, honey range and liquid honey, super immune boost honey, honey source, sachet, creamed honey, and coconut oil.

The company also started making skin balms using beeswax.

BeeAfrican employs three full-time workers.

Ramaila said she did not know anything about beekeeping, but her partnership with PUM Netherlands senior experts offered training to BeeAfrican for three weeks after she started the business.

“It [PUM Netherlands] helped us with the marketing strategy to develop a financial business plan. It also funded our business to establish our initial community beekeeping project,” she said. PUM Netherlands is an international organisation that works with small enterprises involved in the ecosystem.

Ramaila added that whenever her team is not sure about something, BeeAfrican reaches out to the organisation for advice.

Three years ago, Sibanye-Stillwater partnered with BeeAfrican to share value in establishing the community project of beekeeping for the benefit of people in Marikana, and the partnership is still running. Furthermore, the business partnered with the University of Venda in April to launch a beekeeping academy.

“This is because there was only one beekeeping academy in the country besides us and the university can offer the services, so we decided to partner with it,” she said.

The partnership provides programmes including a comprehensive education on the fascinating world of bees. Their course covers everything from beekeeping basics to advanced hive management techniques. In 2021, the business received funding from the Small Enterprise Development Agency which was used to purchase the production line of bee hives.

In June, BeeAfrican was among South African companies that travelled with the FoodBev SETA to New York in the US to showcase their products.

This enabled the business to secure a deal to supply a US-based company with 100 tonnes of honey.