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Every business has a beginning. Most beginnings are not glamorous. Mine started with fear, a string of unhelpful government offices, and a Luo proverb that refused to leave me alone.

It was 2019. I was looking for something — an alternative source of income, a way to build something of my own, a reason to go to the farm with purpose. I had been thinking about beekeeping. The idea kept coming back to me, the way ideas do when they are meant for you.

But thinking about it and actually doing it were two very different things

Let me be honest with you. The thought of keeping bees used to send shivers down my spine.

Not the quiet, manageable kind of nervousness that you push through easily. Real, genuine fear. Bees sting. They move in thousands. They do not negotiate. And here I was considering inviting them onto my farm, into boxes I would have to open with my own hands.

For a while, that fear was enough to keep me exactly where I was — thinking, but not starting.

“Chak Achaka.”
“Just start.”

— A Luo proverb that refused to leave me alone

Not “start when you are ready.” Not “start when the conditions are perfect.” Not “start after you have figured everything out.” Just start. Begin. Take the first step and trust that the next one will reveal itself.

It is the kind of wisdom that sounds simple until you are the one standing at the edge of something unfamiliar, with fear in your chest and uncertainty ahead of you. Then it becomes the hardest and most necessary advice in the world.

The Offices That Led Nowhere

Determined to do things properly, I set out to find information. I visited several government agricultural offices, ready to learn, ready to be pointed in the right direction.

What I found instead was a cycle of polite disappointment.

The officers told me they would come and visit — visit the place where I keep my bees. There was just one problem. I did not have any bees yet. I was still at the very beginning, and the promise of a farm visit felt like being handed a map to a destination I had not yet set off for. None of them showed up.

I am not bitter about it. It is simply the reality that many Kenyan farmers know well — sometimes the support systems that are supposed to be there for you are busy with other things. You learn quickly that you have to find another way.

The Show That Changed Everything

Then, before I had taken a single practical step into beekeeping, something happened.

There was an agricultural show. I went along — not with any grand expectation, just with the curiosity of someone still searching for answers. And it was there, walking through the stalls and displays, watching and listening and asking questions, that something shifted.

For the first time, beekeeping stopped being an abstract, frightening idea and became something I could actually picture. I saw the equipment. I heard from people who were doing it. I began to understand, in a real and tangible way, what the work involved and what it could offer.

That agricultural show gave me what the offices could not — a genuine sense of what beekeeping was all about.

And That Is How It Began

I went home from that show a different person. Not an expert. Not fearless. But ready.

The shivers did not disappear overnight. The uncertainty did not vanish. But I had enough — enough information, enough inspiration, enough of that chak achaka spirit — to take the first step. And that first step, taken back in 2019 out of equal parts fear and determination, is what became Amori Bee Farmer.

If You Are Standing Where I Was Standing

Maybe you are reading this and you recognise something in this story. The idea that keeps coming back. The fear that keeps you from moving. The search for information that does not seem to go anywhere.

Here is what I would tell you, from the other side of that hesitation:

The perfect moment to start does not exist. The shivers do not fully go away before you begin — they go away because you begin. And sometimes all it takes is one conversation, one visit, one agricultural show to show you that what you are dreaming of is not only possible, but already being done by people who were once just as afraid as you.

Chak achaka. Just start.