Jagdish and his wife Kanta Devi live in a sleepy village in the foothills of the Himalayas in the Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh. The couple, in their sixties, make a living out of agriculture and sheep rearing. However, the surprise element in their two-storied mud house is a khuddi, a beehive in the wall of their living room. The hive has a wooden door which is locked, but when you peep out of the window, you can see a colony of bees entering the hive through a hole.

The beehive on the wall, says Kanta Devi, is an integral part of their lives, and she doesn’t remember a single instance when the bees have stung her children and now her grandchildren, who are prancing around in the house. “The bees attack only if you intrude into their lives,” she says in her local dialect. Harvesting honey is a ritual every year for the family. “Honey is auspicious. If there is a newborn in the family or a wedding, we offer honey to the guests. If your knees are hurting or you are having any aches and pains, the pain vanishes if you tie a cloth soaked in hot honey,” she patiently explains how honey is an integral part of her culture.

Bee farming isn’t unique to Jagdish and Kanta Devi. It used to be an integral part of the lives of most Himachali homes, which is sadly vanishing. Just as families in cities consider beehives to be a nuisance, the bee population is dwindling in these areas due to rampant deforestation, and the local flora and fauna are gradually becoming extinct.

In the village of Badsar (also in the Kangra district), Malini Kochupillai and Kunal Singh, co-founders, Tenacious Bee Collective, are trying to rebuild the ecosystem for bees. From collecting the purest honey from bee-keepers across the western Himalayan belt and bee apothecary (making of beeswax products such as lip balms, candles, etc.,) to help revive bee farming by investing in bio-diverse agriculture, the duo is building a collective to revive bees and natural honey.

Despite honey being considered among the purest of foods (like ghee) by Indians, the per capita consumption of honey in India is a meagre 8 gms as opposed to 20-25 kgs in countries like Germany. Indians consume the worst quality honey after the Chinese, claims Kunal Singh, co-founder, Tenacious Bee Collective. “Most of the branded honey we consume comes from China and is adulterated with sugar syrup. That’s the reason you can get a 250-gram bottle of honey for ₹100.”

Though the duo’s claim to fame is their honey variants (such as raw unpasteurised Lahaul forest honey, Kangra forest honey, curry leaf flower honey or chichiri honey priced between ₹1,100 and ₹1,900 for a 275 gm jar) making it to the luxury hamper of Karan Johar’s celebrity talk show Koffee With Karan, the intent is not really to make profits, but encourage bee-keepers to invest in bee farming and collect honey and beeswax from them at three times the market price.

Kochupillai points at a bottle of chichiri honey and says, “I may not have this honey five years from now. Chichiri is a high-altitude flower, and we harvested that honey in small quantities last year; its fragrance is incomparable. But we are not able to find pure chichiri since then.”

A Collective Effort

While Singh quit his cushy corporate job in Delhi to become a certified bee-keeper, Kochupillai is an art-practitioner who works with communities to bridge social schisms with creative collaborations. From the word go, they realised they needed to build a collaborative in order to bring about a systemic change. They partnered with the local honey cooperative, beekeepers, the panchayat, as well as environmentalists and self-help groups. They have also leased a piece of land where they do bio-diverse agriculture.   

“Instead of being preachy, the idea is to demonstrate that even with bio-diverse agriculture, you will be able to generate income, you will have the wheat you need, but you will also create an ecosystem for the bees. Our job is to demonstrate those values in making those shifts. It has to be a collective effort,” explains Kochupillai.

An integral part of Tenacious Bee Collective is the Gaddi (a shepherd tribe) women of villages in and around Badsar. Kochupillai and Singh broke the ice with them in 2018 by organising a training programme in soap-making and candle-making. Though they managed to get 15 women to do the training, only six stayed with them.

Today, these six women can not only bottle honey and make candles and lip balms, but also take care of quality control, packaging and shipping with equal ease. They earn ₹6,500 a month, which has given them the confidence of being financially independent. “They have a sense of ownership. They make products and first get feedback from friends. They have become our brand ambassadors. A lot of women are coming and asking for jobs, and that is because these women are talking about what we do,” says Singh.

Business Model

The ₹36 lakh bee collective is eyeing a ₹1 crore in revenue by the end of 2025. Though honey and bee apothecary are the main products, which it sells through its website, it has also started retailing honey through premium food retail chains such as Nature’s Basket and Modern Bazaar. The collective has a consulting vertical, through which it encourages locals as well as institutions and hotels to invest in beekeeping and harvesting honey.

Building a wellness business is also on the cards. In the centre of their leased agricultural land is a cottage with intricate art on the walls that depicts a day in the life of bees. The cottage is built on a bee box -– an apidomik. While one may fear getting stung by a bee while walking into the apidomik, it’s the same logic shared by Kanta Devi. If you don’t trouble the bees, they will not trouble you either. The apidomik has wooden planks, and the moment one lies down on them, one can hear the bees buzzing, which is considered therapeutic.      

“There is research which shows that humming of bees corrects your nervous system. Apitherapy is a huge industry globally. Over time, we will have a wellness vertical too,” says Kochupillai, who has also started curating experiential tours around bees and honey in the Kangra valley.

The Tenacious Bee Collective founders admit that they are idealistic, but to build a strong narrative, monetisation is key. Their target is now to ensure their honey enters more homes through a brick-and-mortar retail strategy. But at no point would they play the mass, volume game. “The pure forest honey that we collect is at the risk of becoming extinct in the next five years. Therefore, we want the consumers to pay a premium for it so that we are able to keep the ecosystem alive,” points out Kochupillai, who says that she may eventually be open to launching smaller packs of the premium honey so that more people can consume them. Luxury, after all, is all about rarity.