Created by a group of nature-loving friends in early 2018, Tenacious Bee Collective is a passion-driven initiative with a mission to bring raw, unpasteurised Himalayan honey to honey lovers everywhere; while simultaneously working with scientists, apiarists, beekeepers and farmers to revive the dwindling bee population in Himachal Pradesh.

In recent years, the century-long traditional practices of beekeeping and honey gathering in Himachal Pradesh have faced ever-increasing challenges. The widespread use of pesticides in the state, coupled with the low minimum support price given to bee-keepers for their produce, has led to a sharp decline in both the population of bees, and the number of beekeepers pursuing the profession within the state. Tenacious Bee Collective addresses these twin problems at a grass-root level, beginning with the community, by developing a sustainable Eco-system of Knowledge, Innovation, Production, and Creativity around Bees and the indispensable value they bring to our ecology and environment.

Our Mission is to develop a blueprint for a Community Driven, Self-Sustaining model of economic, social, and environmental development around bees & beekeeping, to revive dwindling bee populations of Himachal Pradesh & to create awareness about the health benefits of raw honey and other bee produce.

Tenacious aims to develop an ecosystem at the scale of the community, that allows for local bee populations and their natural habitats to thrive, while concurrently providing these communities with a wide range of opportunities for economic and social development:

• By training small scale farmers to use proven scientific practices of bee-keeping.
• By providing skill-driven workshops to their extended communities that enable them to research, develop, and produce a wide range of high quality end-user products utilising the many byproducts of bee-keeping, including beeswax.
• By facilitating the small scale cultivation of local herbs and flora in conjunction with the annual harvests through encouragement and demonstration. This creates new avenues for participating farmers to increase local biodiversity and sources of nutrition for bees, while also adding a source of income by infusing these herbs and flowers in our range of hive based end user products.
• By conducting workshops and residencies for Artists, Social Scientists, Technologists and other experts on-site, therefore fostering the cross-pollination of skills and knowledge.

Tenacious Bee is working with communities in Himachal to support local beekeepers in developing sustainable, non-exploitative methods of honey production. Our goal is the development of a robust local industry that brings ecological benefits to the area, financial benefits to local producers, and pure, high quality, unprocessed honey to consumers.

Tenacious Bee’s ambitious plans were graciously adopted in 2018 by the then Sarpanch of Badsar Village, Ms. Kirna Devi, who has been instrumental in helping us with our preliminary research and in introducing our project to the larger community. Additionally, we have received tremendous support from numerous residents of the village who have enthusiastically participated in the workings of our collective since early 2019.

Tenacious Bee has initiated the work to revive the lost knowledge surrounding bees and beekeeping. We are developing an action plan in collaboration with local beekeepers and apiarists, to revive the traditional beekeeping practice of maintaining ‘Dhalooni’ in the walls of vernacular homes of the region. This ancient tradition has begun to be buried quickly under the brick and concrete construction that is replacing the thick, stone and mud walled homes typical of the region.

Tenacious Bee has leased a small piece of farmland in Badsar village with the aim of setting up a knowledge exchange facility around bees, bee flora, and beekeeping. Our plan is to cultivate local herbs and bee flora at a small scale, and foster beeboxes alongside, as a first step towards demonstrating the many ecological and economical benefits that these practices can bring to the village community.

Tenacious Bee has started collating a knowledge base of local bee flora and herbs that can help bees produce a range of distinct and medicinal honey varietals. Starting with gaining an understanding of the seasonal cycles of specific flowers and herbs, we are building collaborations with local apiary institutions and herbal scientists to revive traditional knowledge around different varietals of Honey native to this part of the Himalaya, while simultaneously finding creative ways to disseminate this knowledge across rural and urban demographics.

To know more about a few of the Honey Varietals we have discovered till now, Click Here