A GLOBE-trotting farmer is making a beeline to Tanzania to help boost honey production for remote farmers.

Tom Hughes, from Salford Priors, will be spending 10 days in the east African country with the aim of helping to build 70 beehives.

Dubbed the Beehive Challenge, the trip will see the 29-year-old of Salford Farm, team up with other UK and Tanzanian farmers and agricultural professionals as well as carpenters to build the beehives which will be given to two local beekeeping groups.

The self-styled “Bee Team” will be collecting sponsorship for their efforts and have set themselves the daunting challenge of raising £50,000 for Farm Africa, a charity working to end hunger in eastern Africa by providing smallholder farmers there with improved tools, skills and know-how so they can grow more food in challenging conditions.

In addition to raising money to fund Farm Africa’s life-changing work, the Bee Team are also hoping their efforts will have a lasting impact on the lives of Tanzanian farmers because the bee hives traditionally used in Tanzania are only able to produce small quantities of poor quality honey.

The hives the Bee Team will be building will be able to both improve the quality of the honey and to double the amount produced by each hive. This will have the added advantage of enabling the farmers to fetch a better price for their honey at market, increasing their income and transforming the lives of their families.

This is not the first time Mr Hughes has volunteered for a major community challenge on African soil. After completing his GCSEs, he spent part of the summer vacation working on a project to help build a library for a Ugandan school that had links to a local school in Burford.

“As soon as I heard about the Beehive Challenge I knew it was something I just really wanted to do," he said. "It’s going to be an incredible experience being back in Africa, and I can't wait to be out there in the vast forest and learning about the challenges faced by my fellow Tanzanian farmers, and how they overcome them.”