The pandemic has brought in some positive changes! In India, across Maharashtra, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, more than 900 women honey hunters have turned beekeepers, improving rural incomes and creating sustainability!

As a Mongabay-India report highlights, during the pandemic, due to travel restrictions, these women honey hunters were not able to carry out or conclude the honey harvesting process and prepare colonies before the arrival of monsoon.

This initiative is part of the ‘Under The Mango Tree’ (UTMT) network, a social enterprise that is working with bees to generate income and ecology enhancement. During the pandemic, bees became a lifeline in terms of an increase in the kitchen gardens’ food production, courtesy of pollination. Beekeeping gives women social and economic empowerment in their communities. Their kitchen gardens pollinated by bees offer an increase in food production: a lifeline during the lockdown when migrant workers were coming back to rural areas.

According to UTMT data, the beekeepers’ community has seen increased productivity of above 60% percent in crops that benefit from pollination, like tomatoes, guava, mango, and aubergine, generally, in a year of production. Spinach, red pumpkin, green coriander among others composed the lush gardens that beekeepers planted before the lockdown. This meant more food for the families in a rough time, thanks to bee boxes. Most of these women honey hunters turned beekeepers after the training given to them by the UTMT experts.

The beekeepers found feral colonies of indigenous bees such as the Indian honey bee, giant Asian honey bee, and the Indian stingless bee. The colonies are found in mud or in tree cavities and then relocated into a beebox. The time taken can be anywhere between half an hour to a couple of hours, depending on where the colony is located. The boxes are kept closer to the homes or agricultural lands of the beekeepers to facilitate pollination.

The Mongabay-India report states that as much as 75% of the world’s food crops depend at least or in part on pollination, according to the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). The FAO adds that the recent COVID-19 pandemic has “had an undeniable impact” on the beekeeping sector affecting the production, the market and as a consequence, the livelihoods of beekeepers. As humans stayed home, bees have faced less pollution and disturbance.

More than 9600 government-registered entities, including individuals and societies, depend on beekeeping for their livelihood in India. More than 15,59,700 registered bee colonies dot India. Apiarists in regions such as Kashmir (where beekeeping dates back to the 15th century) underscored the lockdown had initially crippled the industry but revised guidelines by the Indian government eased the transport of bee boxes in states such as Uttarakhand where nearly 7000 beekeepers are active.

The report points out that the pandemic has also spotlighted emerging infectious diseases in bees, some of which have been implicated in large-scale population (colony) losses. A study finds that the massive expansion in global trade in honey bees, owing to their use for managed pollination and honey production, can also increase the geographic distribution of viral, bacterial, and fungal honey bee parasites and pathogens. In many countries such as strife-torn Yemen, Colombia, Kenya, despite constraints, beekeeping is seen as a path to empowering women.

‘Bees for development’ (BFD) is an organisation that promotes sustainable beekeeping to combat poverty and to build sustainable, resilient livelihoods. It supports beekeepers to maintain environments that are good for bees, for biodiversity, and for people. Increasingly both governments and NGOs are working to encourage women’s participation in rural development and beekeeping has been identified in many places as a means of additional income generation that is suitable for women. Beekeeping can be started cheaply and built up as resources allow, there is little need for land ownership and, with some technical know-how, hives can be located close to home.

The demands of time are not much and these can fit in with family responsibilities. Nonetheless, beekeeping is frequently perceived to be a male activity and women’s participation in beekeeping projects is often lower than might be expected. Therefore, the promotion of beekeeping as an income-generating activity for women raises interesting issues.

The BFD says that keeping bees can make a real difference – for example in Ethiopia, one of the beekeepers obtained her first honey bee colony with their help. She sold 18 kg of honey in the first year – enabling her to buy seeds for her vegetable garden and school books for her children.