Bee Biz buzz: ‘Get ready to make more money with mustard honey’
Punjab’s total annual honey production is around 20,000 tonnes, which is around 15% of India’s total production; In the state, 75-80% of honey is mustard flower honey which is mostly exported.
As apiarists of Punjab keep their fingers crossed ahead of harvesting the remunerative mustard honey from the end of the month, experts advise struggling beekeepers to go for mass adoption of the queen bee rearing technique with high hygienic behaviour to make beekeeping a profiteering avocation, enhance productivity and combat mite attacks.
The honey, which is derived from mustard flower nectar, is highly demanded in the US and is also called ‘cream honey’. Progressive beekeepers say subsidy is needed as it costs about ₹500 per queen bee per box, which is beyond the reach of most apiarists working at the small and medium scale.
Farmers transport bee boxes to the villages of Rajasthan and Haryana to produce mustard honey as the cultivation of Punjab’s staple diet of ‘sarson’ has reduced drastically over the last decade.
Industry sources say Punjab’s total annual honey production is around 20,000 tonnes, which is around 15% of India’s total production. In the state, 75-80% of honey is mustard flower honey which is mostly exported.
Beekeeping expert Jaspal Singh, principal entomologist at Ludhiana-based Punjab Agricultural University (PAU), said mass queen bee rearing is the key factor to making apiculture a success and the institute has intensified a campaign to ensure more farmers take it up. “The PAU was the first institute in India to standardise queen bee rearing. Presently, very few beekeepers are able to use the recommended technique under which a larva is fed royal jelly, a natural highly nutritional product in beehives, to transform a worker bee into a queen one for egg laying. The PAU provides a queen that has been reared from the colonies having a high honey-producing history,” he said.
According to beekeeping mentor at Bathinda’s Krishi Vigya Kendra (KVK) and scientist Vinay Pathania, a queen bee lives for nearly three years but her best egg-laying phase period lasts up to one-and-a-half year and it is recommended to re-queen hives every year for the best results.
Progressive Beekeepers’ Association president Jatinder Sohi said Punjab has about two lakh bee boxes with the capacity to produce 30-kg honey per box but it saw an average of 12 kg in 2023 due to unfriendly climatic conditions.
“Bee rearing is result-oriented but less than 20% of beekeepers are doing it as each costs ₹500 in the open market. A way should be explored to make it affordable,” he added.
A veteran beekeeper from Moga, Narpinder Dhaliwal said he attained a licence to rear for three years until 2021 but stopped as there were very few takers for artificial re-queening of hives. “I witnessed that artificial queen bee rearing expedites egg laying, thus saving a cycle of three weeks that means more worker bees collect nectar from flowers. I had to stop due to high cost involved in mass queen bee rearing. The government should devise a policy to subsidise it,” said Dhaliwal.
Another progressive beekeeper from Bathinda’s Bandi village, Kuldeep Singh, plans to switch to mass queen rearing the next year but demands support from the government to initiate a mass awareness drive against misconceptions, like crystalisation of honey means adulterated honey.
