What's Special About Sikkim's Wild Bees?

FRANK KRISHNER

Sitting here on an early Saturday morning, virtually buzzing on Orange Pekoe intoxication, I have a bee in my bonnet.

Up here in our cardamom patches, butterfly sanctuaries, and diminishing but still virgin forests, something small and easily overlooked has been holding Sikkim together: bees. Not the ones we humans keep in wooden boxes, but wild ones — bumblebees, dwarf honeybees, and a giant cliff-dwelling species that has been buzzing about since long before we hack writers were born.

Sikkim's bee population isn't something you and I think about day to day. Nevertheless, it plays a bigger role than it gets credit for:  from pollinating the cardamom crop many households depend on, to serving as an unofficial report card on Sikkim’s organic farming policy.

100 years of Buzzing Around

Here’s my showstopper: Apislaboriosa, the Himalayan giant honey bee, the largest true honey bee species on Earth. These bees build enormous, exposed combs on sheer cliff overhangs, often 2,500 to 3,000 metres up, and sometimes forage as high as 4,100 metres.Most insects can’t survive the cold and thin air at such heights.

Scientists confirmed the species' presence in Sikkim through a curious bit of detective work: recent citizen-science photographs uploaded to the naturalist platform iNaturalist matched museum specimens collected way back in 1924 and 1938. This spectacular bee has persisted on Sikkim's cliffs for at least a century, largely unnoticed by the wider world.

It’s a rare tradition, but I was fascinated to learn that intrepid   honey hunters  climbedup handmade rope ladders to harvest its honey. There are tales of a rare "mad honey" made intoxicating by grayanotoxins in rhododendron nectar, which this special bee alone can safely process. A tradition wrapped in ritual and respect, I say.

A crowded, colourful family tree

Sikkim isn't  home to one remarkable bee.We sit  at a genuine crossroads of bee diversity. Researchers studying bumblebees (the fuzzy, round genus Bombus) across the Himalaya have found that the  highest bumblebee diversity occurs in the Central Himalaya, spanning Nepal and Sikkim.Herethe species territories from the eastern and western halves of the mountain chain overlap. Two species in particular, Bombus breviceps and Bombus haemorrhoidalis, do much of the heavy lifting pollinating Sikkim's fields.

Then there's Apisandreniformis, the black dwarf honey bee. It’s a small, delicate species whose entire global range begins right at the foothills of Sikkim and Bhutan, before stretching southeast through Myanmar and China. Sikkim isn't incidental to this bee's story; it's the western edge of its whole world.

The bees behind the spice rack

Now, Sikkim produces roughly 80% of India's large cardamom, central to household incomes across the state. Large cardamom flowers,  are almost entirely dependent on bees for pollination.

Field studies in Sikkim's Mamlay watershed measured this directly.As bumblebee visits to cardamom flowers increased, so did yield — by as much as 41 grams per plant. Honey bees also play a supporting role, though researchers have had to carefully untangle whether the indigenous Apis cerana, (commonly kept by beekeepers)  is a true pollinator or occasionally just a "pollen robber," taking nectar without doing the pollinating work. Either way, the conclusion is the same: no wild bees, less cardamom!

The Buzz around ‘Organic’

The most telling chapter in Sikkim's bee story may not be about  a species at all . It might be about a policy. In 2003, Sikkim began phasing out chemical pesticides and fertilisers entirely, becoming, by 2016, the world's first fully organic state. It was a bold, unprecedented move for agriculture.

The payoff has shown up in the bees themselves. Local authorities and researchers have reported rising bee and wildlife populations since the transition, alongside a documented surge in butterfly numbers in cultivated areas. In a strange way, Sikkim's bees have become a kind of living scoreboard — a buzzing, visible measure of whether an entire state's gamble on chemical-free farming actually worked.

So, What’s the Buzz?

None of this means Sikkim's bees are safe.

Climate change, cliffside habitat disruption, hydropower construction along the Teesta river, and the aftershocks of disasters like the 2023 glacial flood all bear down on the same fragile slopes these bees call home.

Sikkim's wild bees aren’t special because of their variety or their record-breaking size. Their fate is tightly woven into our forests, our spice trade, and our identity as a place that chose, deliberately, to farm differently.

Protecting them shouldn’t be a side project. Bees are central to what Sikkim already decided it wanted to be.