FAIRVIEW, Alta. – Spend a bit of time on the main street of this picturesque town in the northern Peace River country and you’re likely to run into someone who speaks with a Spanish accent.
But whether they’re Guatemalan, Nicaraguan, Uruguayan or Filipino is impossible to say. On any given day, accents heard in the local coffee shop could run the full gamut of those derived from African or Middle Eastern languages.
Fairview College’s beekeeping program has attracted more than 150 international students to the northern Alberta town over the past 12 years. It’s a small program, generally taking in only 15 students per year, but its reach spans the globe.
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“I’m really interested in international work,” said apiary program director Dennis McKenna. “It’s interesting to see the kind of people it attracts.”
One of those is Rodrigo Mendez, who grew up in the Uruguayan capital Montevideo and Toronto, before deciding to become a beekeeper. Four years after he moved to Fairview for the program, he’s still living here.
He works for McKenna’s personal bee operation, which has 1,000 hives.
“I just liked the way things are here, so I came back,” said Mendez, who spends the coldest winter months in Uruguay with his family.
Every spring he returns for another season with his favorite of God’s creatures.
“I like bees,” he said. “I like all insects, actually. They’re so well organized.”
Fairview’s program is able to attract international students because it takes a hands-on approach to beekeeping, which most university programs don’t, said McKenna.
This year students from Kenya, Bolivia, Jamaica and Guatemala are working with one student from Quebec, two from the Edmonton area and two Peace region students.
For the past few years, there have been more international students than Canadian, said McKenna. That’s probably explained by relatively bad times in the Canadian honey business.
The Canadian International Development Agency pays some of the costs to bring students to Canada and to send Canadian instructors to other countries.
McKenna said the Fairview College program tries to develop beekeeping expertise in agricultural programs in other countries, brings interested beekeepers to Canada to improve their skills and arranges producer to producer exchanges.
The program is housed on the Fairview campus. There is a honey collection room, a candle and wax-working room, a laboratory, classrooms and storage space. A large building behind the apiary provides overwintering storage space for the college’s 500 hives and for 1,000 for local producers.
McKenna, who has been with the program since it started in 1979, said Peace farmers are happy to have the international students coming into the area because it provides them with skilled workers during the honey season.
And McKenna said the international students have been good for the program, because their presence attracts quality staff.
