Beekeeping project start-up-hobby converts to a honey farming business

INDIGENOUS HONEY a producer of pure (adulteration free), natural (antibiotics free), raw and unfiltered honey. We have 10+ million customers today worldwide. A small-scale beekeeping business is now turned into a manufacturer of a honey brand only because of your support and trust. Today we have 17k+ positive reviews on Amazon from our purchasers. This helped us in building faith and belief in ourselves to expand more and grow more.

There’s a long story behind this brand and I Vimal Vadher would like to share this with you. It started with one of my nearest friends. On the advice of an Ayurvedic doctor, he was looking for genuinely raw honey, unprocessed, unpasteurized and unheated, and he found it surprisingly hard to get. He tried many expensive brands before he finally bought honey from a local honey hunter.

Watching his search made me curious. Where does real honey come from? Why is it so hard to find honey that has not been heated or processed? That question was the first time my interest stepped into the world of honey.

My second experience was my trip with my elder brother to a hilly location named Saputara in Gujarat. There I saw few boxes kept at few distance and wasn’t knowing that these boxes were the bee boxes. I asked a person nearby about the boxes and he gave me an idea about the beekeeping. This was the first when I knew about how honey is produced, making bees your friend and this forced me to step in the field of beekeeping. Before this I was aware of only one method of honey harvesting and that is the wild harvest, the folk method of harvesting honey. This is a very heart wrenching process where the men squeezes the comb to get the honey. In this, the bees lost their lives, their homes, their families, their babies, their eggs and much more. In front of this, the beekeeping method of conserving bees and getting honey is a cruelty-free way, which I chose to walk on. And yes, we humans are not made to take lives and benefit ourselves.

Considering this, without knowing and thinking of the difficulties and challenges I jumped in the world of beekeeping. I still remember my first day of training where my trainer asked me to hold a bee on my palm and I refused it like a child in a fear if she will bite me. Anyhow, my trainer convinced me to do so and asked me to remove my hand gloves and hold her. This was the first time I felt a little bee on my palm through my heart and all my fear for bees just got vanished. After completing the training, I started beekeeping in 2012 with my first 10 beehive boxes. During the training, I learned how to deal with the bees but, there was much more to deal with, which I had to learn in the future. My start with beekeeping was good but, it is not always everything good happens with you. I had to sleep in the farms itself without any facility between the mosquitos which was very hard for me to do in the beginning. Going further, my beekeeping helpers used to leave me because of the fear of bees. Sometimes, the owner of farm asks me to take my beehive boxes off their farms. In monsoon I don’t understand where to keep my bees. Among all these the worst was losing my bee when they die in summers because of lack of flowers. There was a time once, when I think of selling the beehive boxes and stop my journey there itself. But, till then I was attached to my bees and my work.

Looking over the bees, I drop the idea of selling them. These little bees gave me the courage of facing challenges and thus I continued my beekeeping for years. Slowly, my beekeeping business from 10 beehive boxes turned into 2000 beehive boxes. Here, I was now a beekeeper who started harvesting raw and pure honey in tonnes.

Now, as I was having plenty of stock, I thought of selling it by my own. Then, I started selling in 2018 and launched my first brand INDIGENOUS HONEY. As I started all this because of my friend's search for real honey, I wanted every family to be able to buy raw, unheated honey they can trust. My elder brother, who is an Ayurvedic doctor, taught me the place of honey in Indian tradition and how families have used it for generations. I continued the same principle and tried to share this through my honey. I received lots of appreciation, trust and support from all my customers and I heartly thank them all for bringing me here.

As I received a lots of love from everyone, I launched many more beekeeping and by products too. For this too I am receiving the same response and love from the people.

This is the beautiful journey of INDIGENOUS HONEY…...
A journey of a BEEKEEPER….