Beekeeping in India

Here's a bit of light relief from the tone of the last couple of posts. We should, of course, be aware of what's wrong with the world but that should not blind us to the simple pleasures of life. These are the things that remain when the storm has passed.

During my time running a small guesthouse in South India in the 1980s I met several interesting people who would come up to the hills where our guesthouse was situated to escape the heat of the plains in summer. The seasons in South India are hot, hotter and hottest and, just as the British at the time of the Raj had retreated to places like Simla in the north and Ootacamund in the south (they have different names now but I'm sticking with tradition), so Europeans in India at the time I was there sought cooler climes at certain times of the year. No doubt they still do. We were 5,000 feet above sea level which was regarded as providing an ideal climate for the latitude. Locals were proud that you could grow mangoes and strawberries in the area, two fruits not normally found growing in the same place. Other products were coffee, avocados, guavas, oranges and bananas. There was also pepper and rubber.

I mention these plants because while I was there I became interested in beekeeping. There was a regional beekeepers cooperative which I joined. See if you can identify me in the group photograph.

Yercaud Beekeepers Cooperative 1982

I never had that many hives but I kept a few in the compound (i.e. garden) of our property, and one of the things I soon learned was that the taste of the honey would vary depending on which plants were in bloom. The flowers of the coffee plant in particular gave a distinctive taste to the honey and this was very noticeable because Yercaud was a coffee growing district (as Ooty, at a slightly higher elevation, was a place for tea) so there were times when the coffee was flowering that the bees went for that and nothing else. Rubber also had a strong signature. The Ayurvedic practitioners in the district would recommend different honeys for different ailments but I'm not sure how scientifically valid their theories were. I do know, however, that honey is a good disinfectant as it has anti-bacterial properties and helps in the healing of wounds.

Me with flowering coffee plants. The tie was a present.

My colleagues in the cooperative were mostly peasant farmers though there were a few higher caste people there too. Beekeeping brought them together in a way not much else did though I did notice that the hierarchy was still observed, albeit not in an unpleasant way. For instance, in the photo above the high caste people are all in the front row. The chap in the middle with the sunglasses was, as he seems, the local bigwig. He was actually very friendly to me but he made sure everyone knew he was the boss though of what I'm not sure. He was a Syrian Christian which is one of the oldest forms of Christianity in the world, dating back to the time when St Thomas, the doubting apostle, came to Kerala in the south west of India and preached the Gospel converting many of the local population, Brahmins among them which is very unusual. So Christianity has existed in India for nearly 2,000 years.

Members of the cooperative would go out into the hills in search of swarms and while on the hunt caste was set aside, all working together. I was told that the peasants were never stung. The reason was that they never washed with soap so they smelt as nature intended. Bees don't like soap, it seems. I myself did use soap but I was only stung a few times as the bees in our area were mostly gentle types who wouldn't sting you unless you really startled them. I never wore any protective equipment. Nobody did. I was taught how to put my hand, slowly, into a nest of bees and just let them cling to it after which you would gently shake them off into your collection box. As long as you had the queen the rest would follow. I can tell you the first time I did this I was pretty nervous but thought I'm representing the British here, I can't let the side down, and went ahead.

Our equipment at that time was very simple. The hive was just a wooden box into which slotted several frames. You would put your bees in there and they would build up their wax honeycombs on the frames. When you extracted the honey you would take great care not to damage the combs because it would take the bees a lot of time and energy to rebuild them, time and energy they would otherwise be putting into producing the honey which you hoped to steal from them. It's a cruel world.

The machine we used to extract the honey was cleverly designed. Essentially a metal drum or cylinder, you would place the frames full of honey in spaces on the inner part of the drum. Then you would turn a handle on the outside that would rotate the drum at high speed and centrifugal force would throw the honey out into a container at the bottom from where it was collected. When the process was complete you replaced the undamaged combs back in the hive with a request to the bees to start all over again. This may seem like straightforward robbery but in the seasons when there were no flowering plants about you would feed the bees with a sugar water mix so that the colony could survive in the lean times. Of course, you only did this so you could exploit them again. Some people, I heard, would extract honey produced by the sugar water but this was regarded as very unethical besides which the resulting honey was not nice. Far too sickly sweet.

One summer we had someone from the Sri Aurobindo ashram in Pondicherry visit our guesthouse. We had actually had a few people from there before, Europeans and Americans who needed to take a break from the intensity of Indian life down in the plains. But this fellow helped run the ashram canteen and that is why a few weeks later we found ourselves on a bus to Pondicherry with several 25lb drums of honey which we were delivering to the ashram on behalf of the cooperative.

To be continued.