HONEY BEE KEEPING

Honeybees play an essential role for rural mountain communities and

the environment. Honeybee products, especially honey and beeswax,
are an important source of income, nutrition, and medicine, while the
bees themselves play an equally or even more important role as
pollinators for agriculture and natural ecosystems.

As pollinators, they support agricultural production, forestry, and

the maintenance of biodiversity. It is estimated that one third of
the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and that
honeybees provide 80% of that pollination.

Traditionally, poor and landless farmers in remote forest areas of

the Odisha have found bee colonies in the forest, protected them,
and harvested small amounts of honey from them.

Beekeeping is an essential activity, which is predominant during the

months from March- May. For Beekeeping, Italian Bees are mostly
available everywhere in Bihar, Chennai etc where apis India less used
in comparison with Italian Bees.

Honey collection and its marketing in India is still not fully

organised. Generally People from the tribal community are collecting
the honey from wild bee combs and sold in crude form.

Off late, there are some groups and companies who have started
bee keeping for commercial production of honey.

It is proposed to start bee keeping in the trial pockets of the

district and make it a sustainable livelihood activity for them. For
this purpose, a total of 500 families (20 families from 25 villages) of
the district would be selected and trained.
For creating the critical mass in the district a cooperative society
would establish a bee keeping farm. Society would be catalyst for
honey production and provide necessary training, boxes, bees,
equipments etc to the famers.

They will also buy back the raw honey produced from the farmers
thereby making forward and back ward linkage for project.
Expected Year wise income of the farmers and projected honey production is given in the
table below:

Year. No. of Production (In Expenses Profit for

Boxes KGs) (@20% of farmer
production)
@25 Kg per
box

I 25 625 12,500 50,000

II 50 1250 25,000 1,00,000

II 75 1875 37,500 1,50,000

IV 100 2500 50,000 2,00,000

Thus, 500 families could be provided a good annual income to come

out of vicious circle of poverty.