Huang Dong-ming, Lord of the Bees

"My grandfather was the first beekeeper in our family, and we're now into our fourth generation of beekeepers." These are the words of Huang Dong-ming, director of the Feng-cai Museum and chairman of Hua-sia Bee Co., Ltd.

The Huang family got into beekeeping by force of circumstance during the Japanese colonial period. One day grandpa Huang was planting his rice fields in Tunghsiao Township, Miaoli County when he discovered that a swarm of wild bees had hived in his orchard. Grandpa Huang captured the colony by clapping a bamboo basket over the hive.

In addition to harvesting honey and selling it, Grandpa Huang later discovered that having bees around made his trees produce more fruit, so he decided to get serious about beekeeping. Whenever his kids got bad grades at school or caused mischief around home, their punishment was always the same-to go out in the orchard and gather honey. "The wild bees back in those days were really mean," recalls Huang with a chuckle. "It hurt like crazy when they stung."

Eventually the entire Huang clan got into beekeeping, but they had an unwritten rule-any girl who could test into a public high school could stay in school (one of Huang Dong-ming's older sisters got a university degree in education and became a school principal), but all the boys had to leave school once their compulsory education was completed and devote themselves to farming. Each and every one of them became an expert beekeeper. Huang Dong-ming had been an excellent student and tested at age 15 into Hsinchu Senior High School, but he accepted his preordained fate and went into beekeeping instead.

Huang explains, without any hint of regret, how it is that he never got beyond ninth grade: "In my grandpa's day, a catty of pork sold for half a yuan, but a catty of honey would bring five yuan! Our family needed lots of hands to raise bees, so we didn't have a choice."

There's more to sales than product quality. Huang Dong-ming also puts great effort into developing new types of honey. This honey-plus-red-yeast vinegar is one of Bee Family's biggest sellers.

More bees than nectar

In the early post-war years after Japan handed Taiwan over to KMT rule, Tunghsiao Township had the densest concentration of beekeepers in Taiwan, with a total of some 5,000 hives located there. In the Huang clan alone, over 30 males were involved in beekeeping. Neighbors engaged in acrimonious disputes over access to nectar-producing flora, and even relatives sometimes fell out with each other over bee wars and market share. According to Huang Dong-ming, "A beekeeper is locked in struggle with the weather, with time, and with his own relatives."

The clan started looking for greener pastures. In 1975, they were delighted to find that Ilan County was abundant with tankan citrus, oval kumquat, and honeydew melon, and had almost no big beekeeping operations, either. Huang Dong-ming's father, Huang Chao-chi, moved his whole family and more than 500 hives of bees to Ilan to get a fresh start. But people didn't have ready access to information in those days, and the Huang clan was surprised to find the fruit farmers in Ilan worried that the bees might "carry off all the pollen" and make their fruit trees less productive. The locals drove the bees away and sprayed pesticide on their trees. The sensitive bees died in droves after ingesting pesticide-laden nectar, and 500 beehives were soon reduced to fewer than 30. The Huangs beat a retreat back to their old home in Tunghsiao.

But there were still too many beekeepers in Miaoli County. Old man Huang and his sons debated back and forth over their options, and after three years decided to give it another go in Ilan. But this time they were better prepared. After arriving, they first visited with local borough chiefs and farmer cooperatives before stopping at individual farms bearing gifts of honey. They then invited over a hundred fruit farmers to a meeting, gave away honey, offered to pay rent, and handed out studies from Japan to assure the farmers that the relationship between bees and fruit trees is mutually beneficial. They sealed the deal by signing agreements with the fruit farmers, whereby the Huangs pledged to pay compensation if the fruit trees did not bear fruit that year while the farmers promised not to spray pesticides when the bees were collecting nectar.

The partnership scored a big success in the very first year. The Huang clan collected some NT$800,000 worth of honey, reaping a profit eight times higher than they had ever made before. They were able to buy property with the proceeds. The fruit farmers, in the meantime, had a bumper harvest, and the problem of deformed fruit due to pollination failures was greatly reduced. Suddenly the Huangs were very popular with the fruit farmers, who stopped collecting rent and fell over themselves to get the Huangs to set out the bees in their orchards.

At the Feng-cai Museum, Huang Dong-ming picks up a piece of honeycomb and gives visitors a detailed account of a bee's life.

The royal jelly craze

In the mid-1970s the Japanese discovered the anti-aging properties of royal jelly and sent experts to Taiwan to show beekeepers here how to collect it. One kilo of royal jelly sold for NT$12,000 in those days, and Taiwanese apiaries once exported NT$400 million worth of royal jelly a year, making it Taiwan's second largest agricultural export after bananas. It was a golden era for Taiwan's apiaries, with more than 2,000 beekeeping households and some 260,000 beehives.

In 1981, Huang Dong-ming finished his military service and returned to Ilan only to find that low-priced competitors in mainland China had run Taiwanese producers out of the royal jelly market. Gazing at his family's hives upon hives of honeybees, he felt determined to find some new way to succeed with beekeeping. But how to make his family's honey a name brand?

An idea occurred: "How about taking part in contests?" In 1984, Huang entered the first honey judging contest organized by the Council of Agriculture, but his entry didn't even get a nomination, much less a prize. Huang was perplexed. His family didn't feed sugar to the bees or mix water into the honey, so why didn't the judges like it? Young, energetic, and determined, Huang took a hive of bees to National Taiwan University and had a talk with Professor Ho Kai-kuang, a leading honeybee expert.

"You silly kid," exclaimed Professor Ho, "there's too much water in your honey, it's not concentrated enough, so of course it didn't win a prize." Having learned the reason, Huang began thinking about how to reduce the water content of the honey.

Huang Dong-ming spent three years raising his drones separately from the queens, recording their characteristics, and allowing only bees with the most desirable traits to mate. This selective breeding yielded calm-tempered bees that you can hold in your hand without getting stung.

Tinkering and tweaking

Huang heated jars of honey in a wok full of hot water and stirred the honey, but all that did was turn the honey into a black, tarry substance. He had seen other beekeepers put their beehives out in the sun before collecting the honey in order to lower the water content, but that method wasn't very good because it killed off a lot of bees and ran the risk of denaturing the honey.

After much thought, Huang decided just to takes his cues from the bees themselves. Upon close observation, he found that after worker bees return from nectar gathering they hover over the honey for a time, beating their wings over 200 times per second to concentrate the honey. Huang set about copying their approach. He designed a machine in which a thin film covered with honey was conveyed through a current of fan-blown air. The machine turned out to be a safe and sanitary way to reduce the water content of the honey. In the 20-plus years since Huang completed his invention, the clan has been a perennial contest winner.

The inventive Huang followed up on his honey concentrator by devising a split-level beehive.

Conventional beehives featured a single-level design that placed the queen, drones, workers, and larvae all in the same space. The honey chamber and the brood chamber shared a common enclosure.

To give worker bees more space to store honey during peak flowering season, Huang designed a split-level hive. The trick was to put a grate between the two levels so that the queen bee on the first level was too big to pass through to the second level, which left the second level free to be used strictly as a honey chamber. The smaller worker bees were able to go right through the grate and get their work done on both levels. Using the split-level beehive, the Huang clan was able to collect 30 catties of honey every six days, whereas before they only collected ten catties every three days. The invention thus cut their work in half while also raising production by half.

Huang Dong-ming and his wife have together built a honeymaking dynasty. Mrs. Huang is the first woman in Taiwan to "wear a suit of bees."

The clothes make the honey

Huang was quite proud of his top-notch product, and began going with his wife to sell it at the big weekend flower market below the Chienkuo viaduct in Taipei. In the earnest manner of a country boy born and bred, Huang would eagerly tell stall visitors all about the virtues of his honey, and show them the awards he had won, but sales nevertheless remained anemic. One day a young woman listened to Huang's spiel, found it convincing, and was thinking of buying a few extra jars to give as gifts, but then complained: "Your honey has got no clothes on. How can I give it as a gift?"

Her comment was a revelation. Huang suddenly realized that "the clothes make the honey." He would have to work out more attractive packaging, and the labeling would have to give a clearer indication of the guaranteed quality. "Quality is just the first step," says Huang. "You also need a distinctive image if you want to become a name brand."

As a perennial winner in honey judging contests, Huang was no longer content to be just a run-of-the-mill beekeeper. Up to that point, most beekeepers simply hawked nameless products along the shoulders of provincial highways, while ordinary grocery stores and teashops usually stocked cheaper imports from Thailand or mainland China, or sold low-quality honey with fructose mixed in. Huang felt he would have to move toward higher quality and branding if he was to distinguish his honey from the low-priced competition and build up an image for Taiwan as a source of the best honey.

In 1987, Huang established Hua-sia Bee Co., Ltd., then followed up with a food processing plant in an effort to ensure safety and hygiene at every step from production to packaging. To fend off copycats, Hua-sia was the first company of its type to promote a food traceability system, whereby every single honey jar was stamped with a code to identify the beekeeper who produced it. In the event that quality came under question, the system made it possible to find out where the problem had arisen.

Museum visitors sample spoonfuls of rich, golden honey that they've scooped out themselves. The museum is a popular destination for school outings.

Band of beekeepers

In 1995, a number of unscrupulous merchants roiled the market by selling adulterated honey, and many consumers stopped buying the product altogether. Beekeepers suddenly found themselves with inventory they couldn't move, but Huang saw opportunity in the crisis. He decided it was time to emulate the cooperative ways of his honeybees and expand his distribution network by joining forces with fellow beekeepers. Huang and eight others formed Taiwan's first honey production and marketing group.

The group was ineffectual at first, for it was tough to get a bunch of fiercely competitive beekeepers to share resources and commit to a common brand name. The others twiddled their thumbs and adopted a wait-and-see attitude. As head of the group, Huang had to spend his own money to convene meetings and get everyone to learn how to use computers.

The first task that the group accomplished was to divvy up the rights to different nectar gathering areas. Up to that time, the beekeepers always rushed en masse to the same areas at the same times. Wherever the flowers were most abundant, that's where they headed with their hives. Battles ensued between bees from different colonies, which limited the amount of honey that could be gathered, and it was a labor-intensive task to transport beehives around all the time. In a typical day they would totally exhaust themselves by moving 100 hives weighing 30 kilos apiece. Once boundaries were drawn between different nectar areas, however, they drew lots each year to decide who would have access to which areas. Keeping the bees in a single location enabled them to keep the bees healthier and develop improved strains.

In just the second year after its establishment, the group was awarded a prize as the second best among over 2,000 agricultural production and marketing groups of all different types throughout the country. The honor was a big boost to cohesiveness among the nine partners, who voted to adopt "Bee Family" as their shared brand name, to file for a trademark registration, and to hire a professional designer from the Taiwan External Trade Development Council to create a clear system for grading and packaging which enabled them to sell for more than NT$100 per catty what had once gone for NT$30-40.

"Back in those days," recalls Huang, "we could sell NT$500,000 in a single day at SOGO Department Store in Taipei, and at the Lanyang Product Fair held by the Ilan County Government we sold over NT$2 million in half a month."

But the farsighted Huang was always one step ahead of the pack. Noting the excellent sales at several promotional fairs, he came to feel that the time was ripe for Bee Family to set up permanent storefront operations, but the other partners were taken aback on hearing that it would require an investment of over NT$20 million. They hemmed and hawed while Huang chomped at the bit. Finally he just decided to take the entire investment upon himself, while the others agreed to sell honey to Huang at a guaranteed price. In return, they agreed to have their honey inspected to guarantee that it was completely safe and free of chemical residues.

Burdened with a loan for NT$20 million, Huang could not afford to fail. He furiously studied retail management, and even enrolled in university courses. It took less than four years to break even on his investment. He now has four direct outlets and franchise stores around Taiwan.

By founding the Feng-cai Museum, sole owner Huang Dong-ming has branched out with his beekeeping operations into the quaternary economy, where value is generated by recreation and learning.

Puttin' on the bees

Huang has become an agricultural "Renaissance man" of sorts. As a third-generation beekeeper, he started out in primary agriculture, but from there the force of his ideas has carried him into secondary, tertiary, and quaternary agricultural activities. Says Huang: "We are living in the age of the knowledge economy and the experience economy. Bees, too, have to use knowledge and service to win people over." Armed with that understanding, he was ready when opportunity knocked.

Because beekeeping is an environmentally friendly economic activity, the Ilan County Government hired Huang to build a theme pavilion focused on honeybees for the 2nd Ilan Green Expo in 2001. Huang named his exhibit the Bee Ecology Pavilion.

Huang knew just the thing that would amaze visitors. He had his wife, Hsu Chin-lian, wear a "coat of bees" at the exposition's opening ceremony. It was a first for this type of performance by a woman in Taiwan. She put on a swimming suit and hung a little queen bee cage from her neck to attract a swarm of over 200,000 bees onto her body. It was a feat of no little endurance, for the critters crawled with barbed feet over her bare skin as she roasted in their body heat. She recalls the ordeal vividly even now, some years later: "Throngs of noisy people were milling about, which made the bees a bit jittery. Whenever I accidentally put pressure on a bee with a body movement, it would sting me. I got stung more than ten times, which really hurt!"

But pain had its payoff. Media coverage was extensive, and their attractively designed pavilion was widely acknowledged to be the most popular at the expo that year. After the expo came to an end, the county government asked Huang to turn the pavilion into a permanent museum at a location of his choosing.

A museum would require land, facilities, and ongoing payroll and overhead expenses. Another outlay of millions was staring him in the face, but Huang jumped at the chance to take his honeybees into recreational agriculture and the knowledge economy. The place he had in mind was a warehouse facility he owned in Yuanshan Township on the upper reaches of the Ilan River. There were orchards all around the facility, and thus no lack of places to set out his beehives. Just four months after the close of the Ilan Green Expo, Huang opened the Feng-cai Museum amidst the rumbling of conveyor belts and clouds of dust from a neighboring gravel pit.

Bees work busily away in the sun. If there were suddenly no bees to pollinate flowers, many of the fruits and vegetables eaten by humans would disappear.

School kids go bats over bees

The Feng-cai Museum attracted a lot of tour buses right from the start because of its location along the way to Fushan Botanical Garden and Mt. Taiping. However, many tour bus drivers only treated it as a quick rest stop, staying just long enough for passengers to use the bathrooms, yet they would still demand NT$1,000 to 3,000 for "bringing visitors in." With this kind of "tour-bus culture," Huang had no chance to show the travelers anything at all about honeybees. This was not at all what he had in mind when he opened the museum.

Visitors were so few in the museum's first month that the four employees often had nothing to do for long stretches at a time, then when the occasional tour group showed up for a scheduled visit Huang and his wife would have to hustle in from beekeeping chores miles away to help show the visitors around. To increase the number of visitors, Huang arranged a tie-up with Fushan Botanical Garden and several area guesthouses, but that only made a difference on weekends. How to make money from his beekeeping expertise? Huang hired experts from Ilan University to conduct a three-month questionnaire survey at the museum, and discovered that his bees were most popular with visitors aged 12 and under.

"So elementary students are the biggest fans!" Huang opened a phone book and started mailing out brochures to all the elementary schools in Ilan to invite them in for free field trips. That did the trick, as busloads of kids started rolling in on the weekdays. But the cheapest products at the museum sold for at least NT$250. Wasn't he going to lose his shirt by bringing in penniless children to see the exhibits and eat goodies for free?

"No," says Huang, "I felt certain that the kids would be like seeds. If they liked the place, they would come back later with their parents and grandparents."

The power of the seeds became apparent within less than three months. During the year in which he brought school groups in for free, the Feng-cai Museum hosted some 130,000 elementary school visitors, but today the museum takes in over 700,000 visitors a year, and the ratio of elementary school student visitors has plunged from 70% to 10%.

Each jar of Huang Dong-ming's honey comes stamped with a code to identify the beekeeper who produced it. By building up brand power and consistently reliable quality, he has been able to abandon the old sales pitches-"may I be struck dead if it's not 100% pure"-that traditional honey makers have long employed.

Industriousness begins at home

Huang then set about solving the tour bus problem. Once a measure of fame had been gained, he was able to pitch the museum more forcefully. He called on tour operators and asked them to include the museum on itineraries as a main attraction and not just a rest stop. The tour operators were only too happy to discover an exciting new travel destination, and arranged for buses to stop longer. Curious visitors learned the ins and outs of beekeeping and tried out delicious honey tea and honey cakes. The share of visitors leaving the building with purchases rose to over 25%.

A visitor exclaims: "The museum is not just about passive learning. You also get to look around in beehives for the queen bee, and eat honey that you've collected yourself. It's really something!" Visitors clamor for the opportunity to hold a buzzing mass of bees in their hands, and you can tell from the mixture of thrill and fright on their faces that the memory is one they'll carry around for life.

Taiwanese beekeepers have moved away in droves to mainland China and Thailand in recent years in response to rising operating costs, but Huang has stayed put, explaining: "Rather than grow your business in China or Southeast Asia, it makes more sense to do it right here at home." He continually develops new honey products, taking advantage of different seasons and different types of flowers to make "limited edition" products, such as pinstripe ginger honey, muskmelon honey, sesbania honey, broom stick honey, and cajuput honey. He has also invented bee pollen cookies (baked at low temperature), pure honey cakes, bee-glue cough drops, and honey-plus-red-yeast vinegar, all of which have been hot sellers. And because Huang insists on using only fresh local ingredients, his business was not affected at all by the recent toxic milk powder coming out of mainland China.

This deeply rooted "love of the local" grows out of the experience of four generations of beekeeping. Holding over 100 bees as he speaks to a group of museum visitors, Huang notes affectionately that Bee Family is spread out across Taiwan like a nomadic tribe; they must understand the natural environment and know precisely when and where the nectar is flowing. The hardworking bees, in the meantime, play the part of matchmakers to the flowers. Beekeepers and bees are nature's frontline workers and protectors. Mankind could do worse than emulate honeybees, which in addition to being industrious and living in solidarity, must also live in harmony with nature.

Flavorless, oil-rich beeswax from the abdomens of worker bees is used as a natural ingredient in lipsticks and other cosmetics.