Honey and Beekeeping

2019 Featured Project

Every once in a while, but with frightening regularity, coffee prices plummet, leaving producers with little or no income to feed their families. The Coffee Trust has always supported a variety of projects that help producers supplement their income from coffee. With the price of coffee remaining low throughout 2018 and 2019, we have turned our focus to our Honey Project.

For years, The Coffee Trust has been working with the fair trade, organic honey cooperative CopiChajulense and over 140 coffee producers who are also beekeepers in San Gaspar Chajul, in Quiché, Guatemala. The Coffee Trust has helped these producers improve their honey production, produce great quality, organic honey, and export that honey to Europe for higher prices. Lately, production levels have hovered around 3 containers jam packed with 60-gallon barrels of honey.

However, more coffee producers can become beekeepers, and honey producers can open new markets for even greater income. Our three-year goal is to expand the number of beekeepers to 250 producers and open a channel of export to the U.S. marketplace.

Why Honey?

Coffee and Honey Go Hand in Hand: Regions where coffee is grown are surrounded by a plethora of shade trees, fruit trees, and a number of flowering plants, providing an abundance of nectar, pollen and propolis for bees to feast on and produce some of the finest quality honey in the world. For that reason, it is not uncommon for apiaries to be located nearby a variety of coffee plants.

Check out this photo essay about our beekeeping project in Chajul: “Honey in Chajul”