The Flight of the Beekeepers
Part of A Better Guide to Běijīng
The beekeepers from Huáng Shān in Ānhuī Province and elsewhere arrive in Běijīng’s leafy west from the late spring, when the scholar trees that cover the hillsides start to flower, and you may well see them sitting at the side of the road outside drab tents surrounded by 30 or 40 blue-painted hives. Patterns of movement for these migrant apiarists vary, some taking long tours through Inner Mongolia for instance. For an Ānhuī farmer a typical year might begin with the bees feeding on cabbage flowers before a move to Shāndōng Province in the early spring, where the trees flower earlier, then north to Běijīng after about two months, returning to Ānhuī in July. Honey production then drops as the flowers disappear and leave the bees in need of a supplementary diet of sugar. In some Huáng Shān villages many people keep bees, and a light industry is formed around them, with specialist carpenters making the hives, although these look far from sophisticated. Local workers are hired to look after the farms while the bees are taken out on tour.
The reason to come to Běijīng is for the sophoras, or scholar trees, which give a particularly transparent honey with a premium price, although still very cheap if you’re buying almost straight from the hive. Beekeepers who go to Inner Mongolia, for instance, feed their bees on sunflowers and the flowers of a type of grain, and the resulting honey, black in colour, costs only a few kuài a half-kilo. They live simply — husband and wife in an ex-army tent, sleeping on a trestle bed surrounded by oil drums used to store the honey, and cooking on a single gas ring that doubles as a heater. They keep moves to a minimum; the trucks they hire to transport the hives cost ever more per kilometre, and roadside officials pop up with unexpected ‘taxes’.
The hives themselves are made of two boxes stacked one on top of the other, and the beekeepers are often willing to take off the roof and slide out one of the vertically mounted honeycombs to show you the bees hard at work, entering and leaving the hive by small holes at the top and bottom, clustered round these entrances in furry lumps. Rarely wearing veils, the beekeepers fearlessly pick up individual insects and identify for you worker and drone. In hot weather bees can be seen collecting water from dishes put out for them and carrying it back to the hive. The queens, which the Chinese call fēngwáng (蜂王, ‘bee kings’), are moved from hive to hive several times a year to improve the honey, but they are otherwise kept in place by plastic barriers.
If you want to buy some honey, you might want to take your own container. A mineral water bottle will do. This is attached to a (long illegal) stick balance and the price calculated by weight, upwards of ¥10. Or there are flasks of royal jelly for ¥100 or so — much cheaper than in Běijīng’s shops, and a fraction of the cost at home. Either honey or jelly make an unusual souvenir of the continuance of at least one ancient rural tradition in China.
Some caution, though: as with other Chinese foods there can be problems with toxic additives, in this case an anti-bacterial agent called chloramphenicol, sprayed into hives that should have been destroyed following a 1997 epidemic.
But colony collapse disorder in the US, one of the world’s largest consumers of honey, has driven a large rise in imports in recent years. To avoid customs delays with Chinese honey, which is detained for random checks that still find traces of toxicity, Chinese producers have developed a filtration technique that removes all traces of pollen, used by experts called melissopalynologists to identify its origin. This not only means that dyed corn syrup and rice fructose may be passed off as honey, but also makes possible export via third parties such as Russia, India, Malaysia, and Australia, relabelling the honey as a product of those countries in a process known as ‘honey laundering’.
Next in Běijīng Suburbs and Beyond: Jiètái Sì
Previously: Tánzhè Sì
Main Index of A Better Guide to Beijing.
For discussion of China travel, see The Oriental-List.
