Development of apiculture in the Zhytomyr region

Abstract

Ukraine is compelling in looking for ways for its agriculture products in new markets, like European or Asian, in today's realities. One of the agriculture branches, which is promising in looking for new markets, is considered beekeeping. This industry provides high-quality, nutritious, biologically active products and also allows to enter Ukrainian farmers in the international markets. Beekeeping is not only the direction of agricultural industry, but long time respected industry. UN organization says that beekeeping can be a key element to problem solving the global food crisis. Honey is a product that is one of the first to enter the level of trade relations. Currently, the global honey market is considered not only as maximal globalized as possible, but also one, wich often suffers to falsifications, therefore the control of the quality and safety of beekeeping products is the key to the success of the aforementioned industry. The purpose of this article was to analyze the development of beekeeping in the Zhytomyr region. Zhytomyr region, in some its areas, can make the honey production like a business card. The studying and comparison of information about beekeeping development was carried out in the context of the districts on the basis of statistical data from the Main Directorate of Veterinary Medicine of the State Service of Ukraine for Food Safety and Consumer Protection in the Zhytomyr region. In the article presented the analysis of the information about the number of apiaries and the number of api-families, which was registered in the different districts of the Zhytomyr region. The vast majority of the apiaries are privately owned in Zhytomyr region. Only less than 1% percent of the apiaries are in the public sector. This case is complicating the quality control of products. We estimated the middle size of the apiary. These intents were based on the number of the bee-families and numerous of bee-gardens in the regions of the Zhytomyr region. The percentage of apiaries certification was determined, which was a marker of quality and safety of the beekeeping products held in these farms. This index reaches 100% in some regions. Laboratory tests of detecting bee-diseases showed predominantly a positive epizootic situation in regional bee-farms.