Dear Ed: Your colleague should get in touch with Nicola Bradbear at IBRA. She will have a good handle on who is doing what in beekeeping in Ethiopia. There is lots of potential for beekeeping, honey and wax production in Ethiopia. There have been some development projects, but the earlier ones were not very well conceived nor very useful and generally unsuccessful. I don't know about more recent, in the last 5 years, projects. It is difficult to know what sort of help is needed for your colleague, so I can not offer much advice. I know that Langstroth hives have been used in the past, but mostly without much success. That probably resulted from inadequate training and in-country infra- structure (i.e. no trained apiculuralists). For small scale operations Kenya Top-bar hives would probably work better. Development projects in beekeeping in may underdeveloped countries have failed because of lack of adequately trained national apiculturalists. It's all very well to teach people to keep bees, but the knowledge of the average beekeeper, even in N. America and Europe, is pretty shallow. The presence of trained professionals is needed for extension work and for knowing how, or who to contact elsewhere, to address the unforeseen or unusual problems by way of techniques or research. Without that sort of infrastructure to support beekeeping, sooner or later, it fails and leaves disillusioned ex-beekeepers behind. Cheers, Peter.