Family beekeeping in the hills around Trivandrum — and the promise behind every jar.
Thenthulli began, like most good things in Kerala, at home.
In 1975, our family placed its first few hives behind the house and learned — slowly, season by season — to read the bees. When the rubber trees flushed their tender leaves, the bees told us. When the forest bloomed after the monsoon, they told us that too. Half a century later, that same patient listening is the whole of our craft.
Today JX Harvest tends more than 200 colonies of the native Indian bee, Apis cerana indica, and over 50 hives of the tiny stingless cheruthen bee, across the hills and estates around Trivandrum. We also work hand-in-hand with a trusted circle of local beekeepers who share our refusal to heat, blend or adulterate. Everything we bottle under the Thenthulli name carries that promise.
Apis cerana indica is the gentle, native honeybee of India — smaller and calmer than the imported Italian bee, and perfectly adapted to Kerala's climate and flora. It yields less, but what it yields is honey of real character. Alongside it we practise meliponiculture: keeping the stingless cheruthen bee (Tetragonula iridipennis), whose rare, tangy honey has been prized in Kerala households as medicine for generations.
There is one more thing that shapes this honey: we move for it. As the monsoon eases and the high forests come into bloom, we migrate our colonies up into the mountain ranges to meet the wild flowering at its peak — and bring them home again in December. Migratory beekeeping is demanding, unglamorous work, but it is the only way to gather true wild forest honey in quantity. The bees follow the bloom; we follow the bees.
We pull frames only when the comb is fully capped and the honey is ripe. It is cold-extracted, gravity-strained to remove wax, and bottled without pasteurisation or ultrafiltration. Nothing is added; nothing living is cooked out.
India's shelves are full of cheap, blended, often adulterated honey. We chose the opposite path: single-origin, season-dated, lab-tested batches at a fair premium. If a harvest isn't good enough to carry our name, it doesn't.
Every hive we keep is a small engine of the ecosystem. Honey bees pollinate the plants that feed people and wildlife alike — protecting them protects the whole habitat.
Roughly three-quarters of the world’s leading food crops benefit at least partly from animal pollination — from fruits and nuts to coffee and cardamom.
About a third of global crop production by volume depends on pollinators. Fewer bees means thinner harvests, and a narrower plate.
Across the Western Ghats foothills, our colonies pollinate the wild blooms and farms around them — not just our jars.
To bring the true honey of the Western Ghats — raw, traceable and unblended — from our hives to your home, and to prove that Kerala honey deserves a place among the world’s finest.
But a honey brand that only counted jars would be missing the point of what it keeps. Bees are not livestock; they are the reason a great deal of what we eat exists at all. Roughly three-quarters of the world’s leading food crops depend at least in part on pollinators, and in Kerala that includes the cardamom, coffee, coconut and fruit that this state is built on. Every colony we tend is working on that, quietly, whether or not it ever fills a jar for us.
So the second half of our mission is simpler than the first: put more native bees into more places, and keep the knowledge of how to look after them alive. That means keeping Apis cerana indica and the stingless cheruthen bee rather than importing European honeybees that compete with them. It means practising meliponiculture at a scale that helps a fading Kerala craft survive. It means leaving colonies their own stores through the monsoon dearth instead of stripping them for one more harvest. And it means selling live colonies with guidance attached — because a hive in someone else’s garden pollinates a whole neighbourhood we will never see.
We are a small family business and we will not pretend otherwise. We cannot fix habitat loss or change how a district sprays its crops. But we can be certain that every hive under our name leaves the landscape around it a little better fed than it found it.
Trivandrum, Kerala, India
Family beekeeping since 1975
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