“We don’t seem to have a typical day,” says Kathleen Cooper of Cape Pelé, a small Acadian village on New Brunswick’s Northumberland Straight, from her new home in the Solomon Islands. “One day we’re sitting at a computer in an air-conditioned office, the next we’re navigating open seas in a canoe to small villages of leaf huts on beaches straight off a postcard.

“But then if I was expecting the familiar I should have stayed home.”

Cooper and her partner Peter Hardie are six months into a two-year posting with CUSO, a Canadian non-profit development agency that works in 30 developing countries. They are volunteering in the Solomons to promote beekeeping as a way for rural communities to increase food self-sufficiency and earn a bit of money.

Lying off the Northeast coast of Australia, the nation called the Solomon Islands is a collection of over 900 islands, from large ones with active volcanoes to tiny atolls of sand held together by palm trees.

Cooper is originally from Corner Brook, Newfoundland, an interesting contrast. “I’ve come from a big island in the cold Atlantic to a small island in the warm South Pacific.” Hardie, from Ottawa, made his way to the Maritimes to attend university and never left. Until now.

Together, the couple have embarked on a journey that will take them to most of those 900 Pacific islands, where a majority of the 480,000 citizens toil as subsistence farmers and speak one of 70 local idioms and dialects, including English, the official language.

Peter Hardie is a marine ecologist on leave from his job with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) researching Atlantic Salmon. Kathleen Cooper has a degree in marine biology, and was teaching at an elementary school in Moncton before embarking for the Solomons. Both are also long-time beekeepers, Hardie for almost 30 years, Cooper for 16.

“My beekeeping experience has been as a hobbyist for 25 years,” says Peter. “It’s fluctuated from being a profitable hobby to a borderline commercial venture.”

That experience in honey production is what attracted CUSO. Based on the island of Malaitia, the pair will help run the Solomon Islands Honey Co-operative and train islanders in the sweet science of beekeeping. Cooper will also help develop curriculum.

“Honey production may not contribute greatly to helping the Solomons get back on its feet economically, although I feel we may have lasting effects with small groups of people,” says Cooper. For example, a rural women’s group is hoping to use small-scale honey production as a way to earn a bit of money for things like school fees, kerosene and soap.

Beekeeping certainly contributes to local food security, but it is not yet known if it can become an export commodity and bigger income earner. Even so, “bees make pretty good farmers and foresters,” says Hardie, “able to be productive without destroying the land and in fact providing a service in exchange — pollination.

“I guess it’s a bit like the ‘teach a man to fish’ model of development, with less of a risk that the resource will be exhausted.”

The job has had its sticky moments, particularly when Hardie and Cooper visited Father David Galvin, a beekeeper of 30 years on the island of Guadalcanal. They were inspecting the remains of what had been a thriving beekeeping operation in the late 1990s before the Solomon’s “ethnic troubles” erupted.

“The hives were in serious decline with only a few weak colonies surviving. Kathleen’s younger eyes picked up the small reddish brown creatures first, but once we had adjusted to the microscopic search we all started seeing them. Our fantasy of a disease-free beekeeping paradise crashed.”

What they saw was the first report of the Varroa mite in the Solomon Islands, a bee-killing pest that has set up camp in many corners of North America’s beekeeping community. A quarantine was quickly established by the Ministry of Agriculture, and so far no new mites have been found on other islands. They are hopeful the risk will fade and the busy bees can continue to collect what the Canadian couple calls “pacific dew.”

A larger pest in the form of human strife has plagued the islands, a complicated story of politics, paramilitaries, corruption and ethnic rivalries. In July, an initial contingent of foreign peacekeepers led by Australia arrived to quell a conflict on the verge of civil breakdown; some government officials had already fled because of kidnapping rumours.

Cooper and Hardie knew it would be a challenge. “CUSO pulled no punches about the struggles we might face in the Solomons,” says Cooper, “ but apart from a few tense moments I feel secure.”

She recalls one night at an open-air fundraiser for a local church, which featured food and musicians. “Suddenly the very festive audience is up and moving toward the darkness. There are muffled cries, mothers pick up their babies and head away from the lights at a quickened pace, and then I hear the shots. I get to my feet and start to move in the direction of the crowd, into the shadow of the church.

“Suddenly, a woman who had smiled at me earlier as we sat near each other watching the performance emerges from the shadows and lays her shaking hand on my arm. With her quivering voice she reassures me [in the common dialectal English] that, ‘Everything all right. Solomon Island, all rite, little bit dangerous no moa. Ui safe. No worry.’”

A crowd of nervous women gathered around Cooper, gathering their children in theirskirts, scolding them if they wandered more than an arm’s length away. Calm returned and the fundraiser continued. That the women were concerned for Cooper’s safety — and her perception of their country — in the midst of chaos was moving for the Canadian volunteer.

“The memory of this stranger, who took the time and made the effort to try to comfort me in the middle of the bedlam and her own fear, that will stay with me for a long time.”

So why would Cooper and Hardie sign on for what some might consider a hardship post? Cooper had previously ventured to South America and Africa to volunteer in the summer months through the Canadian Teachers’ Federation. She had been bitten by both the travel and volunteer bugs. Hardie says his decision to work in the developing world was similarly inspired by a desire to travel, “not as a tourist, but to try and live in the world, not just on it, and to try to experience the exotic without exploiting it.”

And neither considers this a hardship post. “I continue to be surprised and amazed by so many things on the Solomon Islands,” says Hardie. “The depth and richness of colourand light, the torrential yet benign rains, the incredible diversity of reef and forest, the strength of family, the instant transformation from fierce to smiling, the wealth andrichness of life amidst the poverty of a cash economy.”

“It really is beginning to feel like home,” adds Cooper, “and the community is making us feel welcomed and appreciated. It really is a great place to be a beekeeper.”