Dal Bhadur Rai

Dal Bhadur Rai was the first beekeeper we worked with in Zitlang. He had been keeping bees in hollow log hives — the traditional Sikkim method — since he was a teenager, and was already known across his side of the valley as someone you went to when a neighbour's colony was failing. He was sceptical of us at first. Frame hives, removable supers, hygiene protocols — most of it sounded, in his words, like extra work for the same honey. He took six months to fully switch his apiary over. He took another year to start training the next generation of beekeepers in the village. Today Dal Bhadur runs the Zitlang collective and trains beekeepers across East Sikkim. He is the reason this whole project works.