aggienaut | First Day of Group 2

Monday, May 30th, Day 26 - Today was the first day with a new group. It's once again "youth" so should be demographically and generally just like the previous group.
   But... remember I said the first day of the other group they asked _no_ questions and we flew through like 70% of my prepared presentations for the week in one day? I don't know what's different, but this group is normal -- they ask questions. We only got through the first topic, which is more the pace I expect. I dunno if somehow we'd set the tone wrong at the start of the last one and got it right this time; or, as I mentioned the translator last time tended to just make pretty abrupt translations of what I said, speaking suspiciously shorter than I had just done -- this time we have a different translator (named Chris, which is confusing, because of course MY name is Kris) who translates for more normal lengths of time after I've spoken.
   Also, and I don't know if this was true last time and we just didn't notice or this group is indeed demographically different, but when asked who could understand English 90% of the participants raised their hands -- only about 4 or 5 of the 50 couldn't. However, like with my very first project in Nigeria, we found they can't understand MY English, so the translator has to translate to English they can understand in addition to local language.

   In the afternoon we went out to look at some beehives. The schedule as originally envisioned had only lecture on the first day but after last group I had insisted we have a field visit the first day because it effectively functions as an icebreaker. Plus a lot of participants have no prior experience in beekeeping and I think it makes everything we talk about more real to them if they've already had a go at it before we talk about it. Plus I hate long days that are all lecture, I think it's really too much lecture in one day for the trainees.

   Got to the bee site and found we didn't have a smoker. This was a potential big problem, though we found a metal chicken feeder that we could put smouldering stuff into. It worked alright for calming the bees it seems, but it was hard to prevent it from just shooting flames and/or getting way too much smoke in my eyes.
   Hives were kind of disappointing. They were moooostly well made but often the topbars had been left a bit jumbled so everything was cross-combed. And it appears this bee yard was in a state of dearth -- there was nearly no honey and even brood was at a minimum. Anyway I think we had a good beekeeping experience.