Honey: Specialty of Lac Son forests

9/29/2017 - 7:58:20 AM

(HBO) – We had to travel through a bumpy road to reach a mountainous commune of Tu Do (Lac Son district), home to a variety of pure and viscid honey bearing scent of mountain and wild flowers.

Bui Van Nhuan of Tren hamlet, Tu Do commune (Lac Son district) collects honey from forest bees.

Bui Van Nhuan of Tren hamlet, who collects honey from bees raised in the forests, said that his family currently keeps four beehives. The bees return to their hives to make honey and every day, they come to the forests to search for food and suck pollen from dawn till dusk.

Before, Nhuan’s family only kept one hive, but with the support of a poverty alleviation programme, the number went up to four. He collects about 50 litres of honey in each crop. With a current price of about 280,000 VND per litre, his family’s earnings from beekeeping has increased by tens of millions dong, becoming the family’s main source of income.

Families of local beekeeper still follow traditional method to collect honey. Accordingly, the wax, which is full of honey, will be squeezed manually.

Local beekeepers revealed that to collect pure honey, they have to prepare all equipment for honey collecting, along with funnel, honey vibrating filter machine, bee brush, knife, bee smoke sprayer and gloves, among others. All equipment must be clean before the process.

Each honey crop is one month apart and time for honey collecting lasts about half a year, usually from April to September, when the weather is warm and flowers blossom all over the forest.

It is also the time that local beekeeping families are ready for their annual honey collecting. Every household patiently waits until the frame hives are fully coated with bee wax, they would start to take those frames out and collect honey.

Bui Van Tue, head of the beekeepers in Tren hamlet said local beekeepers have to be patient in order to obtain fully ripe and high-grade honey. According to statistics, the commune is home to more than 70 beekeeping households in Sat Thuong, Trên, Tren, Khay, Mu and Mon hamlets, which scatter in those localities.

Only Tren hamlet has the most concentrated beekeeping area with participation of 37 families and over 200 bee colonies. It is also the first hamlet that has formed a beekeeping group which has gone under fundamental technical training with support of each group member.

Bui Ngoc Thien, Chairman of the People’s Committee of the hamlet said local people have tapped the potential of the rich natural forest in the Ngoc Son – Ngo Luong Natural Reserve to keep forest bee for honey, greatly increasing local income and improving living standards./.

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