THAILAND: Learning From Honey Hunters in Chaing Mai

APIS DORSATA IN NORTHERN THAILAND

The morning haze is a damp blanket over the hills outside of Chang Mai. We pull to the side of the curving road in an old pick-up truck. The old man at the side of the road sees us chugging up the hill, and he picks up his machete and a plastic bucket by his feet. He tosses them into the truck bed beside me, and climbs in after them, wearing a camouflage arm jacket, rain boots, and fingerless knit gloves. His long pointed thumbnail pokes through to pick at his teeth as we continue our drive up the winding rural road. The air is thick enough with moisture that it wipes a shine of dew on my face, and the truck is driving slow enough up these hills that the air moving past me barely helps to cool be down. We park the truck beside a small farm where the reddish earth is churned open. A small band of Thai men and I jump out of the truck and start to climb this hill of farmland, over thin irrigation drips, and past a small altar in the center of the hillside farm. My feet sink into the crumbling soil, as the gray-haired men who have taken me honey hunting glide over upturned dirt furrows with ease while I feel heaving and heavy. On the ascent, we catch our breath at the treeline of a wild bamboo forest. Two men emerge from within the green woods, and greet us with enthusiasm. I can’t understand the directions they are giving in Thai, but I don’t need to know the words that they use to catch their excitement. With arms stretched wide, they show that a huge colony of wide Giant Asian honeybees is waiting for us in the forest of ahead.

In parts of Asia, honey is traditionally collected from wild colonies of honeybees, nested high above the ground in trees or caves. In Nepal honey hunters dangle from the cave roofs on woven ropes, dropping honey comb to the waiting party below, as they flame clouds of smoke up below the nest. It’s dangerous for the honey hunters, removing the bees’ hard won honey stores, as they are face to face with thousands of defensive honeybees more than 50 feet off the ground. In this way, the bees are able to remain free and wild, foraging and migrating as they wish, with very little intervention beyond the removal of some combs of honey from the honey hunters. This is the most ancient of ways of collecting honey. I imagine our first ancestors encountered the sweetness of the comb this was – finding wild nests and braving stings for a sweet liquid unmatched in nature. Some say that the introduction of honey into our ancestors’ diet was the boost of carbohydrate and essential minerals that fast tracked our brain’s development and evolution. Imagine the bee with honey as both their creation and their sustenance. What intelligence has that developed in them?

With the smoking leaves, the honey hunter brushed at a swaying dark mass in front of him -- a nest of 50,000 Giant Asian honeybees, latched to the underside of a branch.

In Thailand, honey hunters find nests in wooded areas to collect a portion of honey from migrating Giant Asian honey bees. As the thickets of untouched forest become more diminished each year, as farmland creeps further up the hill into the bees’ nesting sites, the ‘bee trees’ where wild bees return each season are disappearing, and with it, the practice of collecting honey from wild colonies. Migration of young people to urban Bangkok has a dirty cosmopolitan allure - nightclubs and malls, steaming fish markets and high-rise apartments, Chinese lanterns and red light districts, traffic-choked arteries and tech jobs in the main port city of Thailand. Not only are there fewer bee trees, but fewer young people are staying to learn the agrarian ways of their grandparents, of our ancestors.

I am with four honey hunters in their sixties who have been collecting honey in these hills for nearly thirty years together. They agree for me to tell their story and their tradition of honey hunting in the hopes that more bees and honey hunters are still to come. In a sort of global family of bee lovers, they asked me to wish other beekeepers well and to remind them to keep safe so the bee guardianship can continue. But like old fishermen not wanting to reveal a prized fishing hole, they asked that I not share their names or specific locations.

This group of four started collecting honey together in forests north of Chang Rai as young men nearly 30 years ago. I imagine their small frames must have been lean with muscle as young men, sinewy from building their small wood homes by hand and planting this farmland of native taro yam. Now with a belly pouch and a few missing teeth, they still come to life with the honey hunt.

At the edge of the bamboo forest, we exchange a few more introductions. The leader of the group, nameless to me, scratches at some tree roots with the tip of his machete. He unearths a massive mottled mushroom, an auspicious find for the day of hunting ahead. The men chuckle together, congratulating themselves already for a good start, and then turn in silence to walk a path into the forest that my eyes can’t discern.

A short walk through the dried bamboo leaves on the ground, and we slow to a stop next to a large tree, nearly 100 feet tall. This bee tree is where this colony of Giant Asian honeybee makes a migratory return year after year. Their internal clock returns these bees here at the same time each year. But with blooming seasons in the area shifting up to six weeks due to climate change, sometimes the bees return after the flowers have faded, leaving them hungry and the flowers without proper pollination. The honey hunters are worried that they are seeing fewer hives each year and smaller ones as well. Looking up, I can barely see the waxy nest in the tree, as it’s covered with dark bees, blending into the color of the forest canopy above us. The bees are layered like shingles, all facing upward, with their wings touching each other, overlapping rippling waves down the length of the open hive. But I can hear the loud hum of the bees at work above. They go about their business, gathering nectar and pollen, feeding brood babies, tending to the queen as she lays eggs in a methodical pattern across the face of the very large, very yellow, single-comb hive.

Below, the men scatter into tasks as they have hundreds of times over their years hunting honey together. Over time, each man’s role in this group evolved to be fixed, allowing them now to work in silent tandem with each other.

The youngest honey hunter of the group, now just 63 years old, is the climber. His full flat hands pull a makeshift beesuit of stitched rice sacks over his clothes. The Thai word for rice, K̄ĥāw, is printed over his elbows and ribcage in haphazard directions as the rice sacks are tied tight around his frame by another hunter who checks he is safely covered. Instead of a traditional veil, he tops his beesuit with a dinged motorcycle helmet, the plastic face shield replaced with a square of mosquito netting that tucks into the rice sacks at his throat to make a full cocoon around him.

While the climber is getting dressed, the other men have their own jobs. The leader is gathering fresh bamboo leaves from nearby trees and lighting a bunch of branches for the fragrant oily smoke to calm the bees above. One hunter has macheted a thin bamboo pole to be a ladder for the climber to scale the bee tree. Another hunter is lining the plastic buckets with fresh cut banana leaves, cracking their spines to get them to fit into the rounded bottom of the bucket.

Glancing at each other silently, the honey hunters know they are ready, and the leader motions for me to stand back from the tree, get low to the ground, and stay very still. My heart is racing, and I’m suddenly starting to question if this was a bad idea. The Giant Asian honeybee sting is potent, and there are legends of men lost on the hunt, succumbing to stings from this very large bee. The Giant Asian honeybee venom can cause a range of allergic reactions – from a simple localized redness to organ damage and even gangrene. The leader was in the hospital last month with a dozen stings, placing him under care for five days as his body flushes out the bee venom through sweat, vomit, panting breath. I lay down on the ground in my head-to-toe canvas bee-suit, as salty sweat from my forehead starts pooling in the corners of my eyes, rolling back across my cheeks to drip in my ears.

The leader crouches down near me and shades his eyes from the sun as he looks up into the tree. He wands the bunch of smoldering eucalyptus, and smoke starts to reach the bees above. The climber places the pole ladder against the bee tree and begins to ascend towards the hive.

In what seems like seconds, the climber’s rubber gumboots were firmly jammed in the crook of a tree, perfectly placed to reach the hive high above us. He balanced his own smoking bundle of bamboo in his left hand, and untied a rope that had been wound around his waist. Tossing the rope over a spare tree branch, he pulleys up two plastic buckets from the ground to meet him in the canopy.

The climber brushes at a dark mass in front of him with the smoking bamboo -- a nest of 50,000 honeybees. With each swipe of the leaves, more waxy yellow comb was visible as bees are dusted away from their home. The patterning on the hive was a swooping necklace of many strands, colorful nesting crescents of cream, pale brown, and gold. The queen moves through the hive to lay eggs, with each ribbon of color representing a change in the developmental stage of what is happening there. An empty cell looks dark until filled with an egg, develops to a white pupae, is capped with orangish papery wax, and then looks dark again when the new bee emerges.

I double check the zip on my suit, pulling it up under my chin, tug on calf-leather gloves with elastic pinching at my forearm as the air fills with bees. I am not allergic, and I love the ticklish feeling of bees crawling across the back of my hand, feeling the buzz of their vibration on my veil. There is something about the wildness of these bees that is unlike anything I have seen before, and I have to say I’m a bit nervous. I think of the many beekeepers I know with managed hives like mine, and I’m not sure how many of us have seen bees in the wild.

With the hive now fully exposed above us, the comb looks huge, maybe a meter long, and it’s just one flat piece firmly attached to the underside of a thick branch. The hives can be as big as five feet long. What a miracle that they are structurally strong enough to stay firm on the branch, carrying thousands of large bees, dozens of pounds of honey, and the weight of the next generation in brood comb.

The airborne honey hunter dropped the smoking bundle of green leaves to his friends below, eased out a rusted knife from the bamboo sheath at his hip, and reached forward to cut the comb off the branch. Starting from the bottom and working his way up to the branch in sections. First he took some small sections of brood, in stages from rice-sized eggs, to larvae swimming in jelly, to pupae capped with papery coverings. All of that went into one bucket.

Next, closest to the tree, the honey head was cut loose. This fat ribbon of golden honey and chalky red pollen cells fell with a weighty thud into to the other bucket. Quickly, the blue pulley rope released both buckets down to the waiting hunters below. They scooped the contents of the brood bucket, and wrapped it tightly in more banana leaves. For the honeycomb bucket, they bagged the contents into plastic bags, and started moving quickly down the hill to get away from the disoriented bees. The sound of their buzz had changed to a higher pitch of defensiveness as they started missing parts of their brood comb and honey stores. The leader urged me down the hill faster, and I didn’t look back to see the bees or the other hunters as we skidded on dry eucalyptus leaves down the hill.

Soon, we emerged again at the treeline, at the edge of farmland, now looking downhill from the forest into the taro plants and banana trees. At a safe distance from the bee tree, the leader of the group set down the baskets of honey and comb, and lit the thick green banana leaf cigarette that’s been tucked behind his ear this whole time. This is the celebratory cigarette of relief and pride. The rest of the men catch up with us before the beedi is smoked to his fingers, and together, we walk happily down the hill. All are safe and well.

Behind us, the bees will adapt, and start to rebuild the comb parts we took away. Being large and productive, the Giant honeybee can quickly rebuild parts of its hive, if only honey from the honey head is taken, without ruining the brood comb or pollen stores. Any removal of comb or honey is a loss to the hive, and takes the bees’ extra energy to re-establish both the structure of the wax comb and its contents. The damage to the hive is compounded if taken at the wrong time in the season or if greed guides the decision on how much to take. Young bees are the wax creators, so if we’re in the season when there aren’t many new bees, rebuilding the wax will be a challenge. Or if it’s too late in the season after the blooms have yielded to seed, there won’t be enough nectar to recreate their honey stores. If honey hunters limit themselves to less than 30% of the comb, the bees can rebuild, creating a new store of honey two or three times over each season. More than that, and the whole colony will be too weakened and susceptible to threats. Some honey hunters don’t have the restraint of the group of seasoned hunters I am with.

Dr. Orawan Duangphakdee is Director of Native Honeybee and Pollinator Research Center at King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi (Ratchaburi Campus). She has spent years building relationships with full-time honey hunters along Thailand’s border with Laos. They have shared their insights being face to face with bees, tracking their migrations and habits. She has shared with them insights from science and global trends. Together, Dr. Orawan and the honey hunters are working to preserve their traditional methods, while also respecting the needs of the bees. When she first started her work, Dr. Orawan saw many honey hunters who would wipe clear a hive of apis dorsata bees. In high season, they would take four, five hives from a single tree. But the hunters reported back to Dr. Orawan that they were also seeing fewer wild colonies in these trees each year. She shared with them the challenges that bees have to rebuild when their nests are robbed too often. The honey hunters started to see how cutting whole hives was no longer possible if they wanted to preserve the bees and their hunting for years to come. Together, science and tradition have learned from each other to create a forest resource management approach. Wild bee hunting could be akin to managing any other forest resource like hunting boar or selectively picking wild mushrooms from the rich soil below. For hunters that relied on the wild honey for their only income, it was a sacrifice forgo revenue in exchange for having a livelihood for years to come and preserving the bees.

Once we are at the base of the mountain, at the home of the lead hunter, the men reconstruct portions of the honey comb on a patchwork of overlapping banana leaves. Two men lean together against an old motorcycle, smoking cigarettes and laughing. A few children run over to see the honey hunters’ spoils. One gruff honey hunter transforms to a tender grandfather as he places a pinch of waxy honey in each child’s mouth. The honey hunter that sat beside me in the truck bed is responsible for cutting pieces of the comb. The value of his long sharp thumbnail is now apparent as he drags it through the wax to measure out small sections for each hunter. With his machete, he goes back over where his nail had traced, slicing comb into clean blocks, and then places oozy dripping sections in plastic bags.

Like a nursery rhyme, they start to list what they will do with their honey. This one man will go to market. This one man will take it home. This man will have it with roasted bee pupae. This other man will have none, giving it instead to his sister as a gift later that day. In the recitation of what they will do, it’s clear that collecting this honey is a special treat, a gift from the forest to the hands of these men. They took care of each other on the hunt, and they continue to care for what happens with this precious bounty.

They also care about what happens to the bees. Like Ravindu lamenting the loss of Sri Lankan elders from whom to learn, these honey hunters list names of children and grandchildren who have left the farm or forest. Among the four of them, they have dozens of young people in their lineages, and not one honey hunter. I struggle what to think about this – perhaps letting the wild bees to themselves is best, allowing them to nest, build, migrate, adapt to the changing landscape. There still are too many honey hunters that take all from the bee trees, leaving nothing for the bees. Is it such a bad thing to have this practice die out? But I also think about the modern ways – bee boxes transported from one place to the next for mass pollination, plying boxes with chemical pesticides. Modern commercial beekeeping certainly isn’t the better alternative.

I think instead of what knowledge would be lost if these honey hunters don’t have the next generation engaged in this traditional practice. These honey hunters know these woods, delight in the mushroom on the floor, have collective wisdom of thirty years walking among bamboo forests and marking the changes of each season. They know how the honey tastes at different times of the year, depending on which tropical fruit is blooming. They walk together in the woods, and point out changes to each other, build a shared knowledge of what is happening. They know when a bee tree is empty one year, when it was full the last. The men of these woods know what the bees have to teach us all about the health of our wild lands. Who will speak for the bees in these woods when the responsible honey hunters are gone?

** As a request from the Honey Hunters, they've asked not to have their faces shown. I have some amazing photos that I'm dying to post, but will refrain!