Apiculture in India – UPSC

• Apiculture is the study and craft of managing honey bees. The word comes from the Latin apis, a bee.
• Beekeeping is its practice: people deliberately maintain honey bee colonies, commonly in hives.
• A beekeeper may keep bees for any of three aims: honey and beeswax, pollination of crops, or bees for sale to other beekeepers.
• The place where hives stand is an apiary.
• Beekeeping in India has been mainly forest based, because many wild plants supply bees with nectar and pollen.
• It is now an allied farm activity as well, with its own national programme aimed at a Sweet Revolution in honey.

Bees and Beekeepers

Bees and the Colony

• Over 20,000 wild bee species exist worldwide. Many nest singly or in small burrow groups, the mason bee among them.
• Beekeeping works with a far smaller group, the social honey bees, whose large colonies may reach 100,000 individuals.
• A colony has three classes of bee:
  • A queen, normally the only breeding female.
  • Workers, about 30,000 to 50,000 females that serve the queen and build the hive.
  • Drones, the males, numbering thousands in spring and very few after the deaths of the cold season.
• Locals in Himachal Pradesh collect honey on hills and in forests, and the State also has commercial beekeepers.

Honey Bee Species in India

• Five species matter most. India’s range of relief, climate and flora supports a wide variety of bees.

• The dammer bee is Tetragonula iridipennis. It was long placed in Melipona, which is an unrelated New World genus.

• Who keeps which bee:
  • Log hives of Apis cerana are found in houses across the high Himalaya.
  • In the south, this beekeeping grew under the Bee Research and Training Institute at Pune and the Khadi and Village Industries Commission at Mumbai.
  • In central India, the rock bee is worked mainly by tribal people in thick forests.
  • Apis mellifera has been steadily spreading in the northern States.

Types of Beekeepers

• Beekeepers usually fall into these classes:
  • Commercial: bees bring in the main income, as for many in Himachal Pradesh.
  • Sideliner: bees bring a second income, in many parts of the country.
  • Hobbyist: bees bring in little or no income.
  • Migratory: colonies are moved with the flowering season. Kanniyakumari is a known centre.
• Transhumance of hives in Himachal Pradesh shows the geography at work. Colonies go up the mountains in summer to pollinate apple orchards, then come down to the plains in winter for eucalyptus and sunflower.

Methods and Uses

Methods of Apiculture

• Commercial honey comes from two methods, indigenous and modern. The modern method gives purer honey in larger quantity.

Indigenous Method

• This is the primitive, unplanned method, with two kinds of hive:
  • Natural fixed combs, which bees build on walls or tree branches.
  • Artificial hives made from wooden logs or earthen pots. The pot or log can be carried, but its combs stay fixed.
• To take the honey, the bees are killed or driven off with smoke at night while they rest.
• Drawbacks, which make it unfit for large-scale production:
  • The honey is impure, because larvae, pupae and pollen cells come out with it.
  • Future yield suffers, since the colony is destroyed and bees spend much energy building a new hive.
  • Bees may not rebuild in the same place.
  • Natural hives face rats, monkeys and ants, and damage from weather.
  • Scientific intervention is difficult, so the bee race cannot be improved.

Modern Method

• Bees are reared in movable-frame artificial hives.
• The American clergyman Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth patented his movable-frame hive in 1852, with frames spaced so that bees leave a working gap, the bee space.
  • European work led the way: Jan Dzierzon had found the same gap in 1848.
• A hive of this kind can be opened and each frame lifted out, so honey can be taken without destroying the colony.
• It turned apiculture into a cottage industry and has given work to lakhs of people.
• Top-bar hives are a cheaper frameless option, used in many developing countries.
• The equipment and how it works:

• Yields rise sharply with method. An average Indian hive was long put at about 5 kg of honey a year, less in the south than in the north, against a possible 50 kg with modern management.

Uses of Honey and Other Bee Products

• Honey is a nutritious, energy-rich food. The body readily absorbs its sugars, minerals and vitamins.
• Its main uses:
  • Food: cakes and bread. Candles are made from the beeswax of the same combs.
  • Medicine: used as a laxative, antiseptic and sedative in Ayurvedic and Unani systems, and traditionally for ulcers of the tongue and alimentary canal and against typhoid germs.
  • Industry: as a preservative, and in brewing, poultry and fishing.
  • Science and farming: to stimulate plant growth, in bacterial culture and in insect diets.
• Honey has been the main aim of the industry, but modern beekeeping also yields beeswax, bee-collected pollen, bee venom, royal jelly and propolis, along with package bees, queen bees and nucleus colonies.
• Pollination may be the greatest gain. Cross-pollination by bees raises the quantity and quality of crops, including plantation crops, so beekeeping supports more than the beekeeper’s own income.

Production and Policy

Honey Production in the World

• China is the largest producer and exporter of honey.
• The older ranking after China ran Turkey, USA, Iran, Russia, Ukraine, India, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, followed by Malaysia, Germany, Bulgaria, New Zealand and Spain.
• Current position: world output reached about 1.89 million tonnes in 2023 (FAO). China still leads by a wide margin, with Turkiye second.
• India stood eighth in 2017-18, at 64.9 thousand tonnes against China’s 551 thousand tonnes, on FAO’s count.

• This map gives 2014 production on FAO’s count.

Honey Production in India

• The Khadi and Village Industries Commission, set up under an Act of 1956 and at work from April 1957, revived traditional village industries. Its work helped beekeeping grow through the 1980s.
• Output rose sharply towards the late 1990s. About 70% of honey comes from informal collection, much of it by tribal people, and about 30% through the Khadi network and commercial beekeepers.

• Leading States:
  • Older share: West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Bihar gave about 61%.
  • Recent share: Uttar Pradesh 17%, West Bengal 16%, Punjab 14%, Bihar 12%, Rajasthan 9% (reported 2025).
  • Himachal Pradesh, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Keralam, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh also produce honey.
• Forest honey comes to about 10,000 tonnes a year.
• The honey market earned about INR 15,579 million in 2018.
• Exports:
  • India once trailed China, Argentina, Germany, Hungary, Mexico and Spain.
  • 29.6 thousand tonnes in 2014-15, rising to 51.5 thousand tonnes in 2017-18.
  • 61,333.88 tonnes in 2018-19, worth Rs 732.16 crore or USD 105.48 million. Chief buyers: the USA, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Qatar.
  • 59,999 tonnes in 2020-21, worth USD 96.77 million.
  • About 1.07 lakh tonnes in 2023-24, worth USD 177.55 million, making India the second-largest exporter, up from ninth in 2020. Chief buyers: the USA, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Libya.
  • 1,14,570 tonnes in 2025-26.
• Colonies:
  • The potential is about 200 million colonies against 3.4 million in 2019.
  • More colonies would mean more bee products and higher farm and horticultural productivity.
  • By August 2026, 16,788 beekeepers and entities had registered 24.94 lakh colonies on the Madhu Kranti portal.

• This table counts only the Khadi Commission’s figures for 2005-06, which add up to about 11,400 tonnes against the national 35,000 tonnes.

Beekeeping Development Committee

• The Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister set up this committee under Bibek Debroy. It reported on 26 June 2019, with the target of doubling farm incomes by 2022 in view.
• Its brief was to advance beekeeping for agricultural productivity, employment, nutritional security and biodiversity.
• Key recommendations:
  • Institutionalise the National Bee Board and rename it the Honey and Pollinators Board of India under the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare. It would:
    • Set up new Integrated Bee Development Centres and strengthen existing ones.
    • Create a honey price stabilisation fund.
    • Collect data on apiculture.
  • Simplify procedures and set clear standards for exporting honey and bee products.
  • Market more than honey and wax: pollen, propolis, royal jelly and bee venom can add to farm incomes.
  • Treat honey bees as farm inputs and landless beekeepers as farmers.
  • Let State governments train and develop beekeepers.
  • Build national and regional infrastructure for storage, processing and marketing.
  • Plant bee-friendly flora, with women’s self-help groups managing the plantations.
  • Recognise apiculture as a subject for advanced research under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research.

National Bee Board

• The National Bee Board (NBB) was registered by the Small Farmers’ Agri-Business Consortium (SFAC) under the Societies Registration Act, 1860, on 19 July 2000.
• It was reconstituted in June 2006 with the Secretary of the department as chairman.
• Aim: develop scientific beekeeping, so as to raise crop productivity through pollination, raise honey output and lift beekeepers’ incomes.
• It has worked through the National Horticulture Mission (NHM) and the Horticulture Mission for North East and Himalayan States (HMNEH), and pollination support remains part of horticulture development.

National Beekeeping and Honey Mission

• The National Beekeeping and Honey Mission is a Central Sector Scheme run through the National Bee Board, launched under Atmanirbhar Bharat, with an outlay of Rs 500 crore.
• It first ran for 2020-21 to 2022-23, then was extended to 2025-26 with the remaining Rs 370 crore.
• It works through three Mini Missions:
  • Mini Mission I: production and productivity.
  • Mini Mission II: post-harvest management, including collection, processing, storage and marketing.
  • Mini Mission III: research and technology.
• The Madhu Kranti portal handles online registration and traces honey to its source.
• Sanctioned by March 2025: 6 honey testing laboratories, 47 mini laboratories, 26 processing units. A National Centre of Excellence in Beekeeping has been sanctioned at IIT Roorkee.
• 100 Farmer Producer Organisations of beekeepers were allotted to TRIFED, NAFED and NDDB, and 97 had been formed by March 2025.