BAGUIO CITY—It was 1992. The Balatoc Mines in Itogon, Benguet, had closed and gold miners were out of work.
On the other side of the mountain, Toby Tamayo, a known environmentalist, already had then a long-running love affair with bees and a gold mine of his own—the mountain sunflowers.
From November to February the hills blaze golden yellow with radiant sunflowers springing back to life season after season, through storms and gales and hailstorms, and bees have a feast of a time through these months.
The Saint Louis University-Extension Institute for Small Scale Industries Foundation Inc. (SLU-EISSIF), with its commitment to community development, turned to Tamayo to train the retrenched miners on cultured beekeeping.
The buzz of bees quickly swarmed the region, so to speak, and today many towns have set up either backyard or commercial scale apiaries. After all, gusty winds have blown the seeds of sunflowers from Mexico, perhaps, a century ago to almost every mountain of the Cordillera region assuring the flow of golden honey every sunflower season.
‘Honey thieves’
It was also in 1992 that Romeo Kimbungan arrived home from an overseas job in Taiwan, eager to start a livelihood of his own. He started hanging around with Tamayo and started to learn the rudiments of beekeeping.
But his fascination with bees goes a long way back to his childhood in the town of Atok in Benguet. As a child, he ran free with the wind in wide pasturelands and forests surrounding their neighborhood. When he would see bees flying, loaded with nectar or pollen after the first heat of the morning, he would trail them to their beehives and gather honey.
“It’s easy to follow the bees because, by then, they are slow in-flight,” he said. He would then burn leaves at the entrance of the hive—some in rocks, up a tree or gnarled roots of old trees—and take the honey.
This is old knowledge among villagers and forest dwellers that bees are alarmed when they sense a threat of forest fire, making them, therefore, flee, leaving the honey to the delight of “honey thieves,” as the villager amusingly termed.
Kimbungan knew about the trick because his parents gathered honey regularly using lighted tobacco or burning leaves or palay stalks they called darami to emit smoke where bees are.
Kimbungan remembers that his wild stints with bees used to give him swollen eyes and arms from their stings, but he believes that having been stung many times, he has developed an immunity to the allergy, as he no longer reacts to bee stings in his apiaries.
Throughout the Cordillera, honey gathering is as ancient and seasonal as the time to hunt or do swidden farming, except that the season depends on the flowering of forest flowers.
Kerobee farm
What used to be a home treat is now quite a trade in an age where organic and natural foods are a health trend. Raw honey from the forest is brought to the city for as much as P400 or more in so-called cuatro cantos (four-by-four) gin bottles.
Inspired by the success of Tamayo’s Tobee apiaries, Kimbungan bought two boxes or colonies of bees from Plan International, a development and humanitarian organization, at P1,800 each. A colony consists of a laying queen, several adult workers and worker brood.
But seeing that he needed a bigger capital, Kimbungan returned to Taiwan in December 1993 to raise enough capital to get into the serious business of beekeeping.
By 1995 he sent P25,000 to his wife for the purchase of five boxes of Apis millefera, or European bees, from Plan International based in Baguio City, and came home shortly after. The small European bees are considered best for commercial propagation because they keep a prolific queen, swarms less frequently and produce honey efficiently.
Soon the couple registered the now well-known Kerobee brand of honey, the name being a combination of his name Kimbungan, his wife Evelyn and his first name Romeo—then a play on the name of his son, Kerovyn, and the word bee.
The first boxes of honeybees were placed just in his backyard. When the sunflowers started to bloom, each box gave some 5 kilograms of honey around the third week of November. But by the third week of December, after days of sunflowers blooming at their peak, the same boxes would yield about 20 kg to 25 kg each and on to February, when the sunflowers begin to fade away.
“I was very much encouraged with about 150 kg of honey gathered from that first season,” Kimbungan said. Back then, he said, a kilogram was selling from P130 to P180. Today he sells that for P600 a kilogram.
Kimbungan, a civil engineer who designs his own farm implements and is a multiawarded farmer, never had any formal training in beekeeping, but his passion exceeded what can be gathered in a few-days seminar. He pored over bee journals he subscribed from the Unites States, New Zealand, Canada and as far as Scotland, and learned from hands-on management of his hives.
After the first season, Kimbungan invested in new queens, and by the second year his apiary had 60 colonies.
From his backyard at Home Sweet Home Barangay, his apiaries spread to some five or six sites in Baguio City and Benguet province wherever he found sunflowers planted in valleys and hills. In 2001 he harvested 2.5 tons of honey from 12 of his apiaries, although between 1998 and 2005 he harvested an average of 1.8 tons to 2 tons a year.
Climate change
Then trouble started with climate change. And Kimbungan was not alone. All sunflower beekeepers shared the same problem.
From tons of honey flow, the volume slowly declined to an average of about 800 kg.
Last year Kimbungan said he harvested only about 300 kg. His colonies also declined, from 250 at its peak to about 150 at present.
Kimbungan, who also grows herbs and citrus fruits, said the bees are also useful for pollinating his crops. The SLU-EISSIF keeps an apiary of about 80 to 100 colonies at the outskirts of the city and has been a popular and steady source of sunflower honey, branded as Goldwell Sunflower Honey.
However, Amelia Gas-ib, marketing officer of SLU-EISSIF, said they limit to only two bottles each buyer can purchase this year owing to sparse supply.
“Typhoon Lando last year struck at the height of sunflower blossoming,” Gas-ib explained. Rains also brought the dearth period when there is no honey flow.
“The rain calendar is all in shambles,” Kimbungan said in the vernacular. It was one reason that many bee colonies collapsed last year due to varroosis, a disease caused by the Varroa mites. Kimbungan himself lost 40 colonies.
Kimbungan said applying miticides is a must, as the Varroa mites are notorious in wiping out whole honeybee colonies. But applications are scheduled, and can be dependent on weather patterns.
In October last year, just when the sunflowers were about to bloom, a typhoon came. With the rains, bees become vulnerable to mites that surely attacked before the scheduled application of miticides. It also caused the first blooms to wilt with the rains and less honey to harvest.
Climate change is also telling on the sunflowers. In a strange phenomenon, the sunflowers bloomed in late November. And even more strange, scattered clusters blossomed in May and June.
Bird migration is another problem. When the Siberain winds start to blow, swift birds from China’s wintry weather are seen by the thousands in the Cordillera region. And they love bees that they quickly swallow while on flight.
Dispelling rumors
Kimbungan dispels the rumor that cultured honey is sugar, because beekeepers carefully calculate the period of sugar feeding as technically equivalent to the bees’ having taken the honey stored for food during the rainy months.
Gas-ib also belied talks that honey that granulates is not pure honey. Based on studies, sunflower honey has a high dextrose content that granulates at temperatures between 14 degrees Celsius to 22°C.
Trainer
Kimbungan is a sought-after trainer in beekeeping, what with his farm being well-known abroad and his certificates practically are ticket to employment. He trains where his honeybees are—a quiet sanctuary of herbal gardens surrounded by misty mountains and a panoramic view of Baguio City below.
Christopher Sonabul, 25, has been working in Saudi Arabia as a barrister for two years. Some of his friends have left last December for Australia, carrying a certificate from Kimbungan. They were easily hired with a starting salary of P125,000. It was enough for him to exit his Middle East job and start a beekeeping venture.
Brian Balangitan, 25, tells of a similar story. He worked as a sushi chef in Eastern Europe but is undergoing training with 11 others at the moment with the same aspiration. In Canada the earnings go higher because of overtime pay.
“Our 5 p.m. here is 10 o’clock in the evening there, so they have longer working hours,” Kimbungan said. The training is mostly hands-on, but the lectures bring one to the delightful world of insects and outdoor creatures.
Kimbungan, telling his trainees why they have to outsmart the predators, shared an anecdote from Pangasinan province.
“Bullfrogs attacked the bees at night with just a hollow block elevation from the ground. The following night the beekeeper placed the boxes several feet higher, but the bullfrogs still won. They formed a kind of totem pole to reach the box opening and took turns on who would be on top.”
Image credits: Jenver Esnara Kimbungan, Marilou Guieb