Deforestation Brings Hardship For Cambodia’s Wild Honeybee Hunters
Every morning at 5:30, Yang Phorn and some of his neighbors from a village west of Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh, climb on motorbikes to go honeybee hunting in a forest far from home.
Before the 47-year-old and the others set, they prepare bags of rice and other food and tie them to their motorbikes — enough provisions to keep them nourished for a long ride, followed by a trek deep into the forest of next-door Koh Kong province to hunt for honey-filled hives until 5 p.m. when they return home.
As he collected honeycombs full of beeswax in his baskets, Phorn said many families from Ampe Phnom, a poor village in Kampong Speu province, have hunted for bees for generations because it does not require any capital investment.
But bee hunting is hit or miss. Sometimes the group finds five or six huge honeycombs full of bees; other times they return home empty-handed, he said.
Those who come across large honeycombs with three to four liters of honey can expect to sell each liter for about 100,000 riels (U.S. $20) — a significant sum in the underdeveloped Southeast Asian nation where the annual per capita income was less than U.S. $1,650 in 2019.
RFA’s Khmer Service. Translated by Sovannarith Keo. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
