Mukah stingless bee farm keen to help others take up the trade
SARIKEI: Trigona Enterprise Mukah Stingless Bee Farm is willing to share the secrets of the stingless bee honey trade with anyone interested to undertake it for their own consumption or as an additional source of income.
Farm operator Manuchir Smith said he welcomes anybody to his farm, whether to buy his products or for other purposes such as to see the farm layout or to learn farming techniques.
A group of former Three Rivers School students had a taste of Manuchir’s generosity when they visited his farm in Kampung Ulu Tellian along Penakub Road in Mukah recently and happily returned loaded with valuable knowledge shared by him.
He started off by showing the entourage the general layout of the some 600 stingless bee beehives on his farm located in the backyard of his house.
Not all the hives were ready to be harvested as some were newly cultivated, he said, adding it normally took about six months for the insects to build their hives and produce honey.
He also planted various types of flowering plants meant for the bees to pollinate and hence, encourage the bee colonies to remain close to the farm, he said.
He later brought the visitors to a ready to-harvest beehive and showed them how to extract the honey from the beehive with a mini battery- operated sucking device.
Every visitor had the opportunity to taste authentic stingless bee honey by sipping it with drinking straws directly from the beehive.
Minus the few drops sipped by the visitors, Manuchir still managed to harvest slightly more than half a kilogramme of honey from the beehive.
According to him, a kilogramme of unprocessed honey can fetch RM500 while the market price for processed honey — honey which has had some water content removed— was in the region of RM1,000 per kilogramme.
Apart from honey, he harvests bee bread which is more expensive, he said, adding that
bee bread directly harvested from beehives could be sold at RM1,000 per kilogramme.
Despite the high prices, demand for stingless bee honey is high and current production is still too small to meet market demand, especially from the cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries, Manuchir added.
Although he had shared openly about many of the ins and outs of stingless beekeeping, Manuchir kept some information to himself such as the techniques he applied for separating water from honey before it was processed and packed to be marketed.
He said the best time to harvest the honey is during the dry season when the honey’s water content is as low as two per cent.