“T amil Nadu boasts of three climate - hot ,hotter and hottest”, goes a famous saying in the urban areas of Tamil Nadu. But a 4-hour drive from the busy lanes of Chennai can help you to land up at a height with a climate cold enough to dismiss the above anecdote.

Riding along the curves of the eastern ghats in Tiruvannamalai , with the canopy of trees as company along the way one can reach the great heights of Jawadhu Hills.

The name “Jawadhu” means Sandalwood and as the name suggests the hills were once famous for the Sandalwood trees. But that's not all.Jawadhu hills is also famous for “Honey”, The hill , hence is also called Princess of Honey.

90% of the population of the Jawadhu Hills practice rainfed agriculture with the yield so low that they are forced to migrate during summer. Hence,it is with this desire to create alternate livelihood opportunities for the villagers and to tap in the potential of the ‘princess of honey’ that Ms. Teja Ghorpade , a Botany Post-Graduate hailing from Kolhapur ,Maharashtra decided to camp in the hills of Jawadhu Hills for a year-long fellowship.

With her intervention, Teja plans to enhance the quantity and quality of honey by providing advanced techniques, technical know-how, value addition and marketing to the communities.

According to her ,the habitat of Jawadhu hills is suitable for indigenous honey bees who can survive on grassland, forest land and wetlands as long as they have sufficient food, water and Potential shelter. They can adapt to the extreme temperature of summer when there is dearth of nectar.

Teja with the Community of Jawadhu Hills

Teja with the Community of Jawadhu Hills

Her intervention would start from identifying and selecting potential beekeepers and performing capacity building of them. The capacity building would involve advanced training to improve quality & quantity of honey without harming the honey comb and environment.

She also believes that this can lead to value addition like flavoured honey, wax products etc. will be introduced with the help of training and exposure visit.

Finally she aims to focus on branding and marketing online, offline, collaboration, retail selling based on her market research.

She has an overall target to directly impact at least 80 households with more than 50 individuals to start their own beekeeping business.

She has performed her initial survey for information of community livelihood and scientific Bee Farming. Also she has been granted permission from CBRTI (Central Bee Research and Training Institute.) Pune for the short term Bee Farming certificate course.

She has also conducted pre-session of Beefarming for all DHAN Staff and BOD , also she has imparted basic information of Honeybee and their products with meetings in 16+ village Meetings.

She recently conducted 5 days’ certificate training programme with help of CBRTI with a total of 86 participants.

“The flow of activities will definitely impact the lives of communities in many ways. Their capacity building will provide techniques to improve their quality of harvest, no. of colonies, accessibility to market and additional income”, she explains.

”But indirectly due to pollination, agricultural yield and forest yield will increase. Also due to advanced training, there will be a significant increase in no. of honey bees, nectar. Also non burning methods of honeycomb will give them wax for value addition”, she said smilingly as she dipped her finger in what seemed to be a bowl of delicious honey.

“ The flow of activities for Bee-keeping will definitely impact the lives of communities in many ways. Their capacity building will provide techniques to improve their quality of harvest, no. of colonies, accessibility to market and additional income””

Ms. Teja Ghorpade