The Better India · 12 hours ago

Traditional Beekeeping in Himachal Pradesh: How Women Are Building Livelihoods

In the Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh, a quiet restoration is underway - one measured not in profit margins but in the return of bees to village walls and women to meaningful work. Tenacious Bee Collective, founded in 2018, has trained more than 250 farmers in ethical beekeeping, many of them rural women who had long been sidelined from formal economic life, by reviving practices like the 'dhalooni,' the small niches built into traditional mud-and-stone homes where bees once lived alongside people. Their approach is unhurried by design: "harvesting only 20 to 30 per cent of the honey while leaving the rest for the bees as winter sustenance," as Operations Manager Aditya Singh explains, a discipline that treats restraint as a form of respect. For Sheena, who stepped away from formal work to raise her children and found her way back through beeswax, or Sunita, a former homemaker who now says "it feels meaningful to know that others find inspiration in the work we do," the collective has offered something harder to quantify than income - a place to belong and to matter. What Tenacious Bee makes visible is that ecological healing and human dignity are not competing priorities; tended carefully, each one feeds the other.