Beekeepers tap the buzz to cash in on pure honey
Print Edition
UNDER a shady starfruit tree Taiwanese beekeeper Jiang Hwan-bin tends his hives, pumping out pure honey for a rapidly growing market of health-conscious consumers.
Jiang’s family has been keeping bees for 80 years and he now manages 500 hives in the northwest county of Hsinchu. His family operates a total of 2,000 across northern Taiwan.
A string of food safety scandals in Taiwan has driven demand for clean, traceable produce, with pure honey seen as particularly beneficial — whether stirred into water as a summer thirst-quencher or used as a sugar substitute in desserts.
But although domestic appetite is voracious and outstrips supply, which keeps prices high, beekeepers say it is hard to fully capitalize as climate change and disease hamper expansion.
This year’s early blossoms were affected due to typhoons and an unusually cold January.
Jiang, 54, who sells most of his produce “Ah-bin Pure Honey” through his shop in Hsinchu city, says his production fell 30 percent due to the adverse conditions.
The situation for the whole family is even worse: overall production across the thousands of hives they run has dropped by two thirds, he says.
The unpredictability of the seasons is reflected in islandwide honey output over the past five years.
Taiwan produced 11,726 tons of pure honey in 2015, more than doubled in a decade, with the number of bee farms rising by over a fifth to 860. The industry is worth NT$2.7 billion (US$85.9 million) annually.
But production has been unstable since 2011, when it peaked at 15,000 tons, with extreme weather a major factor.
Jiang says his focus is now disaster prevention.
“We prepare for everything as much as we can,” he said. “What we can do is manage the bees well and do our best to keep more bees. The rest depends on the weather.”
Disease problems troubling beekeepers around the world have also taken their toll on Jiang’s stock.
In 2005 he saw half his bees wiped out by a bacterial infection.
He quarantined his queens, burned the infected frames from his hives, and started again, sharing those hard lessons with other local beekeepers.
The government says it is also giving bee farmers advice on disease prevention and violent weather swings.
“In Taiwan, climate change has been huge,” says Wu Tzu-hsien, a senior apiculture expert for the island’s agriculture bureau.
“If the changes are too extreme, bees cannot control their body temperature and die.”
In rural Yilan county in the northeast of Taiwan, the “Bee Farmer” cafe and education center sits against a backdrop of misty mountains.
Giant bee statues greet visitors, who buy everything from royal jelly to pollen sachets at the store inside.
There is a honey museum and active hives to teach the public about bees. Visitors come mainly from Taiwan, and also from Hong Kong and Singapore.
There are 10 “Bee Farmer” shops around Taiwan but the company sells mostly online through its Chinese-language website, a more modern approach than most traditional beekeeping families. The business brings in NT$50 million annually.
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