Punjab is among India's largest honey-producing states. Beekeeping with the Italian bee, Apis mellifera, was introduced in the 1960s and 1970s and became a substantial rural enterprise.
Beekeepers migrate with their boxes: mustard in Punjab and Rajasthan in winter, then litchi in Bihar, then eucalyptus and sunflower, moving the hives by truck through the year.
It is one of the few agricultural enterprises in Punjab that a landless household can enter, because it needs boxes and knowledge rather than land.
Adulteration has damaged the market repeatedly, with imported syrups blended into honey and sold, and testing has been an ongoing scandal in the Indian honey trade.
Pesticide use in the surrounding fields kills colonies. Beekeepers in Punjab have documented losses after spraying and have no remedy at all.
A colony pollinates whatever is flowering around it, and what that is worth to the mustard, sunflower and fruit growers nearby is larger than the value of the honey taken off the hive. Nobody in Punjab pays for it. Pollination is a service the beekeeper gives away because there is no contract here that would let him sell it.
The Italian bee was introduced to India in the 1960s and displaced the native Apis cerana in commercial keeping because it produces more and swarms less. The native species is still kept in wall hives in the Kandi and the hills.
Punjab Agricultural University runs the beekeeping training that most keepers in the state have been through, and the growth of the sector here in the 1970s and 1980s came largely out of that programme.