With honey consumption steadily growing, the cultivation of honey is becoming popular day by day, as many families have started living a prosperous life through apiculture.
It also increases yields through pollination, provides vitamins, while many people become economically solvent by selling it.
Tanvir Sharif, a mobile bee farmer from Nababganj near Dhaka, depicted his successes in mustard honey cultivation. He started his business with Tk 1 lakh and now earns Tk 2.5 lakh or more annually, based on production.
Rearing the honeybees, honey farmers start collecting honey from the mustard plants as a new method to collect honey during the winter. The bees also collect honey from litchi orchards, cumin, Sazina tree etc. based on the season. The bee-box method of honey farming is expanding fast with each passing day.
Presently there are 2,500 honeybee farms and more than 1.20 lakh bee boxes in Bangladesh. These farms produce 10,000 tonnes of raw honey a year. This ever-increasing cultivation of mustard seeds has opened a new horizon in quality honey production especially in winter.
BSCIC honey farming project Director Khandaker Aminuzzaman earlier said, as much as 8,000 tonnes of the sweet viscous food substance have been yielded so far during the ongoing honey collection season.
According to him, BSCIC is already providing all sorts of assistance to the honey farmers to come up with the losses that have been occurred during the stagnated situation of coronavirus.
Mustard honey is harvested from November 15 to December 20, cumin and coriander honey from January to February, litchi honey from early March, and forest honey from Garo Hills from April.
Khondoker Aminuzzaman, project director of the Bee Keeping project of BSCIC, said that the box bee honey cultivation started in 1963, after 1990, the European bee ‘Apic Molifera’ species was introduced with success in honey production.
Tanvir Sharif told The Bangladesh Post that “Due to the outbreak of coronavirus we thought we would not be able to achieve our target, but with the help of BSCIC we are overcoming our damages caused by the pandemic.”
Meanwhile, the Bangladesh Association for Social Advancement, a non-governmental agency, is also engaged in a honey processing plant. The organisation collects honey from all over the country and has so far trained a good number of people.
