Bees bring honey and money to poor villages north of Mumbai

For the longest time the lemon trees of Baratpada, a tribal village north of Mumbai, stubbornly refused to fruit. The flowers would appear and then drop off. But of late they have been laden with lemons, thanks to India’s most underrated agrarian soldier – the indigenous honeybee.While climate change is overwhelming the globe, a micro-agricultural intervention in Maharashtra’s impoverished Palghar district is helping villagers fight unseasonal rain and other crop-eroding surprises. More than 1,500 villagers, mostly women, across 113 villages in this Warli tribal belt now own bee boxes, providing a window of relief from chronic family alcoholism and erratic daily wage living. Further north, in Gujarat, another 3,000 villagers have become enthusiastic bee caretakers. Medium108409997 “Our children consume honey, we sell honey, and are growing a variety of vegetables on our land,” says Gangu Ravte, 36, of Zari village, while slipping on her netted hat and protective gloves as she gingerly lifts the lid of her bee box. “I feared bees when I first started, but I slowly learned how to handle them and I now train other women to do this.” The uneducated Ravte earns Rs 4,500 a month as an apiculture master-trainer.The small revolution in this part of western India started some five years ago when Vijaya Pastala, a Mumbai-based entrepreneur who has specialised in rural livelihoods, started a non-government organisation called ‘Under The Mango Tree Society’ to resist both climate change and monoculture, a silent scourge which is impacting agricultural patterns across the country. “What if we put a bee box in every small farm in India?” says Pastala. “Imagine having an entire army working for you – one box has anywhere from 40,000 to 60,000 bees and they circulate up to 2km from the hive, pollinating flora.”Her focus was not so much on honey production as on increasing local agricultural yields for marginal farmers. After visiting the apple orchards of Himachal Pradesh, where the government actively supports beekeeping, Pastala realised that not just any bees but indigenous varieties like the Apis cerana had to be cultivated in these parts. “Indian bees are generationally familiar with the local flora and fauna and so the pollination cover is wider,” she explains. “If the bees abscond from the colony, they will still be buzzing around locally, so they can be relocated in the bee box.”The role of the bee in our food production is nothing short of extraordinary, say agricultural experts. About 70% of fruits, vegetables, nuts and oilseeds depend on pollinators, and these are under great threat. The impact on food security, especially for small farm owners, is immense. “Earlier, these villagers would subsist on rice and daal, mostly; now they have added vegetables to their diet, which, in a malnourished district like Palghar, means a lot,” says Sujana Krishnamoorthy, who heads the Under The Mango Tree Society and has observed the gradual change in the lives and confidence levels of the village women. Medium108409998 “Bees have helped me find my identity,” says Jasvanti Gharat of Baratpada, who now leads a group of 21 women farmers in her village. “My husband and sons are very supportive of my work, so if I get late from my inspection visits, they cook dinner.”While traditionally, forest-based tribals have resorted to honey hunting and smoking out hives – as was shown in the Oscar-winning documentary The Elephant Whisperers – this intervention focuses largely on empowering village women and explaining the value of bee cultivation to enhance their kitchen gardens. The revenue impact from enhanced agricultural yield is 14 times more than from honey production.“Beekeeping is an activity which even a landless or marginal farmer can take up in order to supplement his or her income,” says Naveen Patle, executive director of the National Bee Board in Delhi. Different varieties of bees work best in different parts of India, he adds, pointing to mustard honey in the north, multi-flora honey in the south, and ajwain honey in Rajasthan.“The beauty of the bee box is that it is a really simple idea and anybody can do it,” says Pastala. “Every single flower on a tree should be pollinated. There is this intrinsic connectivity between bees, human beings and the environment. Every school child needs to recognise that without bees or pollinators, there will be no mangoes on our table this summer, no pizza, no chocolate cake.”Besides being one of the most important creatures in the food chain, bees, as cited in the Upanishads, are a living allegory for unity in diversity, for they collect nectar from many different flowers, but the honey they create is one, and no drop can say I am from this flower, or that one. So bee it.Also watch: 110017022