India's Bee Man Trains 200 Farmers to Save Local Pollinators

When Davinder Thakur's apples started looking misshapen and small, he remembered what his grandfather taught him: bring back the local bees.

The 34-year-old organic farmer from Himachal Pradesh's Kullu Valley grew up hearing stories about a time when Asian honey bees lived in hollowed tree trunks and house walls, treated like family. Back then, apple harvests were bountiful every year.

Then a massive viral outbreak in the 1960s wiped out local bee populations across India. Authorities introduced European bees to fill the gap, but these imports struggled against local predators and needed more flowers than the mountain seasons could provide. The native bees never fully recovered, squeezed by competition, deforestation, pesticides, and climate change.

Today, many Indian farmers have to rent bee boxes just to pollinate their orchards. But Thakur chose a different path.

He now maintains over 100 colonies of native Asian honey bees and has spent the past decade teaching other Himachali farmers to do the same. His organization, Mountain Honey Bee, offers free 25-day workshops to anyone who wants to learn. Nearly 200 farmers have completed the training, and the results speak for themselves: apple yields consistently double within just a few years.

Why This Inspires

Bees might weigh only 0.1 grams, but they're punching way above their weight class. Over three-quarters of India's crop plants depend on insect pollination, yet bee conservation barely makes headlines compared to tigers and rhinos.

The difference? You can actually help bees from your own home.

Apoorva B.V., known as the Bee Man of India, started his beekeeping journey 18 years ago with just two hives beside his bedroom window. The 40-year-old former engineer now manages 600 colonies and runs a thriving honey business while offering free training to urban beekeepers and tribal communities.

He receives about 200 calls daily from people wanting bee colonies removed. Instead of extermination, he spends eight minutes per call explaining how to coexist peacefully with these pollinators. In urban Bengaluru alone, up to 500 colonies get killed every day.

His workshops have become so popular he can barely keep up with demand. Parents bring children to learn empathy for nature, alternative schools incorporate beekeeping into their curriculum, and thirty-somethings discover it's a powerful stress reliever. Watching bees build combs and harvesting honey creates a dopamine hit that keeps people coming back.

"Bees have a very developed sense of smell and memory, and can recognize human faces," Apoorva explains. Some people are even setting up bee boxes on apartment balconies.

Organizations like Under The Mango Tree are also helping marginal farmers increase crop yields through sustainable beekeeping practices. The movement is spreading from mountain orchards to urban rooftops.

Unlike protecting 300-kilogram tigers, saving bees just requires a box, some knowledge, and maybe a few native flowering plants on your balcony.