Honey bee hero gets buzz from running backwards

Farai Chinomwe waves as he bounces up the sand track in a borrowed Mercedes.

"OK, let me get these guys out," he says, pointing to the bees that have escaped from a box in the back and are swarming around the car's windows.

Chinomwe is known on Johannesburg's streets as "Rasta Bee".

The dreadlocked beekeeper has lost count of the number of hives he's rescued and relocated, or persuaded people with big properties to "adopt".

But it is his remarkable exploits in the name of bee conservation, as a backwards long-distance runner, that have brought him national attention.

Since 2015 he has run backwards in races such as Om die Dam, Two Oceans and the Comrades Marathon, to highlight the plight of bees, which are threatened by habitat loss, viruses, the increasing use of insecticides and climate change.

Next Sunday Chinomwe will tackle his fifth Comrades and, for the third year in a row, will run the punishing 87km race backwards.

During races, as the tail-enders take turns for a chat and a picture with the "backwards guy", it's easy to forget that in 2014 he ran his second Comrades "the normal way" in seven hours and six minutes - good enough for a silver medal.

"I like to encourage the social runners. I tell them when I overtake them: 'Don't feel offended, you're in front of me, you're doing all right.' I also get inspired by the determination I see on their faces," said 38-year-old Chinomwe.

Born in Masvingo in southeastern Zimbabwe, he moved to Cape Town in 2000 and embraced Rastafarianism because, he said, he wanted nothing to do with a "flashy lifestyle".

After failing to raise the money to study for a BCom degree at the University of Cape Town, he moved to Johannesburg and joined a band playing traditional Zimbabwean music. The story of how he decided to take up beekeeping reads like a parable: "We were rehearsing and when we came back from a break we found bees had occupied my drum so we had to quickly stop playing."

The band folded but Chinomwe kept the bees and began researching them, their indispensable role in pollinating plants and the commercial benefits of honey.

"I thought this was a good time for me to get into beekeeping full time," he said.

He got some training and equipment from established beekeepers, but is mainly self-taught.

His bee relocation and management company, Blessed Bee Africa, also provides training to youngsters from poor families and is based on a smallholding near Lyndhurst, Johannesburg, where he lives.

Although he produces and sells some honey in the neighbourhood, has an assistant and works with a few youngsters from nearby Alexandra township, he believes his business has a long way to go.

"I would like to produce premium honey, make honey accessible to everyone," he said.

Chinomwe got the idea of running backwards for the bees a few years ago when the old Peugeot he was driving broke down in the early hours of the morning on an incline on Corlett Drive, during a bee removal.

He knew he had to move the car quickly - its boot-full of bees might have caused havoc in peak-hour traffic in a few hours - but he lacked the strength to push it up the hill, "so I pushed it backwards and found I had some strength".

The next day he discovered that his exertions had given him an incredible workout and he thought: "What if I could start training backwards, would it improve my running?"

It was only when he arrived late for the start of the Om die Dam ultra-marathon at Hartbeespoort Dam in 2015 that he made the big switch and ran the race backwards.

"Guys kept asking me: 'What are you doing?' Others would joke with me that maybe I had smoked something." Chinomwe hopes to win his third Vic Clapham medal for finishing in 11 to 12 hours on the up run to Pietermaritzburg next weekend.

Asked whether he would return to competitive marathon running, he said: "I want to do more than 10 Comrades in reverse. I love running. Every morning my breakfast is running - then I go into foodstuffs. The only trouble I have with running is that people want to do it the old-fashioned way!"

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