El Sauce: The Land of Honey

This cultural article was written by one of our English students, Cesar Marin who studied with Enlace Project for four years before moving on to use his English skills for a job in Managua.

Honey is an important agricultural product for El Sauce. Thanks to the laborious activity of producing honey/beekeeping El Sauce has had the opportunity to grow economically.

El Sauce is one of the biggest honey producers in the country; it’s production reaching up to more than 500 barrels per year. There are more than 200 small producers that generate about 600 jobs.

The barrel in the internal market has a price of about 450 dollars, while in the external market the price amounts to 690 dollars. Honey production brings in about $250,000 of revenue per year to El Sauce.

All the material that is used in the production of honey is made locally; the beehives themselves are situated locally, and, on top of that, they are even rented to locals of El Sauce. The annual investment per hive is about $20. Most of the honey produced is organic honey and, generally, there isn’t a need for intermediaries to market the product, which theoretically increases the net income. Production is the individual effort of each beekeeper- they do not receive financing from anyone.

Beekeepers are generally people who have inherited their businesses from their parents and their grandparents from generation to generation; they are people who continue on with the family business as a tradition. Some of them have had the opportunity to travel to the United States with work Visas, contracted to work with big companies in the United States in order to produce and extract honey. Thus, in this way they have carried out their families wishes and have also fulfilled their own personal dreams and goals.

El Sauce has been recognized for the quality of its honey many times by both national and foreign organizations; some beekeepers say that this is thanks to the type of flowers and trees that are in the areas where the beehives are placed. Unfortunately, in the last few years the Honey production in the municipality has decreased this because of drought, pollution, deforestation, and the migration of beekeepers that go to work in the United States.