 But 10th Caribbean beekeeping Congress got underway in St. Lucia on Tuesday. The week-long Congress for the most part is being held virtually, with a few activities on the ground. Day one of the 10th Caribbean beekeeping Congress was held at Viji at the site of an ecotourism project that involves beekeeping. Experienced and novice beekeepers learned about Queen Raring. The session was conducted by John Frederick, the vice-president of the Ionola Epiculture Collective. Queen Raring allows you to be able to mass produce hives. And so if you have a colony that already has an existing queen and you want to make a new colony, you simply take nurse bees from that colony, you put it into a separate box and then you introduce a new queen to that separate box. So now you start with two hives. Sometimes your queen is not producing good enough for you. So actually you could actually do Queen Raring, create a better queen so you have a better hive to produce honey. Queen Raring is critical for increasing honey production and for the perpetuation of healthy and vibrant hives. And yeah, it gives me like a spider web of connections to be like, okay, what kind of bees you have, what do you want to help me create a new, can I switch, can we do something. Yes. With this program what we are doing, we are actually looking for productive hives that are producing honey where we could graft from these hives to actually create better queens. Queen Raring is very much important if you want to jumpstart the sector and increase in a short space of time. It is anticipated that the workshop generates more public interest in beekeeping and assures potential beekeepers of the availability of the most productive queens and colonies. The best and foremost we have to look at is the quality as a breeder, the quality that you give, the characteristics that you look forward to and especially with most of our beekeepers focusing on honey production as key. Production is the main indicator for the quality of that queen. The beekeeper wants to maintain genetics and certain traits in his hive. So he would mass produce queens from his colonies that he is satisfied with. A field trip to Debarra was also part of the day's program where apiculture is being practiced by young beekeepers. They were trained by the Ionola apiculture collective and are now in the commercial production of honey. The 10th Caribbean Beekeeping Congress continued on Wednesday at Orchid Center in Union. For the Government Information Service, I am Jessie Layons reporting.