Queen Bee

In the early 1980s,when her husband,an Agriculture Department employee,got her 36 boxes teeming with bees,Bimla Devi had not even heard of apiculture. (“I used to wear a ghoonghat back then,” she says.) Not that illiteracy ever stood between her and her bees. She learned that a bee never strayed beyond a 3-km radius from its hive,and that it flew at a furious 3,000 kmph when disturbed so you might well be stung a dozen times before you could say ouch. Now,with 130 boxes,each home to 20,000 bees,she runs the Shivalik Gramodya Mandir,a unit certified by the Khadi Commission in 1998,which produces and sells up to 400 quintals of pure AGMARK honey in a year.

One of India’s first women beekeepers,Bimla Devi,52,insists the pollinators understand the language of love. “I have been stung many times,but when I handle them gently,they cause me no harm,” she says,at her home in old Gurgaon,where life still moves at a relaxed pace. Here,there is a steady trickle of elderly gentlemen with cloth satchels who come to buy honey but stay on for a chat. “She is an extraordinary woman,” one of them says,even as Bimla Devi asks,with rustic candor,“Beta,tell me the truth,will this interview benefit me in any way?”

After the family moved here from Yamuna Nagar,Haryana,in 1987,she hired helpers to tend to her bees,kept in a farm in Kurukshetra for a good part of the year. “Till four years ago,there were many mustard fields in this part of Gurgaon so we could keep our bees here in winters. Now there’s only concrete,” says Bimla Devi’s son Amit,a student of environmental science at Delhi University who also works with an NGO. “As a kid,I remember receiving letters addressed merely to ‘Honey wale,old Gurgaon’,” he says. When former president Venkataraman expressed a desire to keep bees,the Yadav family sent some boxes across to the presidential estate.

All is not sweet about the trade of beekeeping,though. Amit recounts the horror of the Vorroa mite attack two years ago,which effected a steep fall in Apis mellifera (the domestic bee) populations in India. “Within a month,we were down from 500 boxes to less than 40 boxes. The mite,first seen in 1987 in the US,is a terrible affliction. There were rumours that it originated in China and somehow spread to India,” he says.

The scourge was contained,but there are always other things to worry about. Bimla Devi complains about inordinate delays in payments from Khadi units,her key buyers. And she doesn’t like it when people insult the purest honey,the food of the gods,calling it “sugar syrup” when it solidifies in low temperatures. “It is a common misconception that pure honey doesn’t solidify. Honey from mustard flowers becomes greasy and white like ghee in winter. Honey from eucalyptus,though,becomes thicker and forms crystals,” Amit explains.

The family stores away a couple of jars of the produce every year—there’s even a wood-corked 1922 jar of medicinal honey in the stash. Indeed,honey may age like wine,but with good health glinting in every amber drop,it is more sobering than inebriating in this age of artificial sweeteners and sucrose overdose.