The honey year
What blooms, when
Our bees follow the blooms, and the blooms follow the seasons. This is the rhythm behind every jar.
The native bees and the botanical library that give our honey its character.
Honey is a landscape you can taste. Ours is the Western Ghats — a 1,600-km mountain chain that runs down the spine of Kerala and ranks among the most biodiverse places on the planet. The bees here forage a botanical library no other region can offer, and each bloom leaves its signature in the jar.
Smaller, gentler and hardier than the imported European bee, the native Indian hive bee nests in cavities, adapts beautifully to Kerala's humidity and monsoon rhythm, and forages a wide sweep of flora. Its colonies are modest, so its honey is comparatively scarce — but it carries a delicacy high-yield industrial bees rarely match. This is the bee behind most of our floral honeys.
Barely 3–5 mm long and completely stingless, the cheruthen bee (‘cherutheneecha’ in Malayalam) builds resin-and-wax nests and forages the tiniest, deepest flowers larger bees cannot reach. A whole colony yields only a few hundred grams a year — which is why cheruthen has always been treated as medicine, not sweetener. Keeping these bees is called meliponiculture.
Fifty years in, the thing that still stops us is not the honey. It is that a colony of insects runs a working information system — and has done for millions of years.
A forager leaves the hive and searches until she finds a bloom worth the trip. She drinks nectar into a separate crop — a “honey stomach” kept apart from her own digestion — packs pollen onto her hind legs, and flies home. Our native Apis cerana works closer to home than the imported European bee, usually within a kilometre or so, which is one reason its honey tastes so specifically of the ground it was made on.
One round trip, endlessly repeated. A single kilo of honey takes many thousands of them.
Back on the comb, she dances. She runs in a straight line while waggling her abdomen, loops back, and runs it again — tracing a figure-of-eight. The angle of that straight run away from vertical is the angle of the flowers away from the sun. The length of the waggle tells the others how far. Her sisters follow her, take the bearing, and fly out to a place they have never seen.
Decoded by Karl von Frisch, who received a Nobel Prize for it in 1973.
Most of the year our hives sit in the estates and homesteads around Trivandrum. But once the southwest monsoon eases and the high forests of the Western Ghats begin to flower, we pack up and move.
From roughly September we migrate our colonies into the mountain ranges, placing them where the wild flowering is richest, and we keep them there through the post-monsoon bloom. In December, when the flow tapers, we bring them home again.
This is the oldest discipline in beekeeping and none of it is convenient. Hives are moved at night when the bees are inside and calm. They must be sited, watched and defended in unfamiliar country. But it is the only honest way to gather genuine wild forest honey in any quantity — and it is why our Wild Forest Honey tastes of the high Ghats rather than of a garden.
Our bees follow the blooms, and the blooms follow the seasons. This is the rhythm behind every jar.
When rubber trees flush tender new leaves (roughly Jan–Mar), tiny extrafloral nectaries at the base of each young leaf weep a steady, sugar-rich nectar. The bees work it intensely for a few short weeks. The result is a very light, clean, mild honey — our Rubber Flora Honey. A genuinely seasonal, single-harvest honey.
Beyond the estates lie the forests of the Agasthyamala and southern Western Ghats — a shifting canopy of wild trees, shrubs and climbers that bloom in waves after the rains. Honey gathered here is multifloral, darker, more aromatic and more robust: our Wild Forest Honey. No two seasons taste identical. To reach it we migrate our colonies up into the hills after the monsoon and bring them home in December.
Coconut, coffee, cardamom, tamarind, moringa, tulsi and countless garden flowers feed the bees around Kerala's homesteads through much of the year, adding their own quiet notes to the honey.