Migrant beekeepers collect mustard honey beside Goalanda fields in Rajbari

In late January 2026, a group of young migrant beekeepers led by Pallab Roy, who come from the Bardi area of Narayanganj, were collecting honey from 110 bee boxes set beside a mustard field in Goalanda upazila of Rajbari district. According to a report by the Jagonews24 district correspondent in Rajbari, published on 26 January 2026, they said they earn about Tk 3 lakh to Tk 3.5 lakh a month from the work. For about six to eight months of the year they travel from one part of the country to another, setting up their boxes wherever a crop is in flower and collecting honey from each bloom in turn.

The report described two gains from the same field. The beekeepers profit from the honey, while the farmers whose mustard the bees visit get a better crop because the bees pollinate the flowers. The beekeepers told the paper that, apart from their own food and lodging and the care of the bees, box beekeeping involves little extra cost, and for that reason it has come to be known as a profitable occupation.

The boxes stood beside a mustard field in Nagar Roy Para, an area of Goalanda municipality. According to the report, the beekeepers make their first harvest within 12 to 15 days of setting up the boxes, using their own methods. In sunny weather they collect 20 to 25 maunds of honey a month in four to five harvests and sell it wholesale at Tk 14,000 a maund. The maund (mon) is the traditional unit of 40 seers in which Bangladeshi farmers still weigh much of their produce.

Mustard honey collection lasts about two months. After that, the beekeepers said, they move on to coriander, black cumin (kalojira) and other flowering crops, and in this way spend six to eight months of the year on the road.

Fog cut into the season. The report said that the beekeepers could not collect honey for some days because of fog, and the district agriculture office confirmed that collection had been somewhat disrupted at the start of the month. Cold weather is a familiar risk in the mustard season: a year earlier, in February 2025, The Daily Star reported that a beekeeper in Sirajganj who had taken 65 kg of honey from his boxes in one week got only 37 kg the next because of chilly weather.

Abu Hasnat, who looks after the bees in the Goalanda apiary, told Jagonews24: "If the weather is good we can collect honey four times a month and get more than about 20 maunds in those four harvests. We send this honey to Dhaka and sell it at Tk 13,000-14,000 a maund. We stay at the mustard fields for about two months, then go to black cumin and coriander fields. After about two months there we will go to the litchi orchards. After that there are no more fields, so we stay in one place for about six to seven months and look after the bees ourselves."

Pallab Roy gave the paper his own figures: "We have about 110 bee boxes here. We collect honey every seven to eight days, which gives about six to eight maunds. We send all our honey to Dhaka and sell it retail at Tk 600 a kg."

The income of Tk 3 lakh to Tk 3.5 lakh a month is the beekeepers' own account as the report gives it. The figures for harvests in the report differ in detail: the opening put the monthly yield at 20 to 25 maunds in four to five harvests, the caretaker spoke of more than about 20 maunds in four harvests, and Pallab Roy of six to eight maunds every seven to eight days. The wholesale price was given as Tk 14,000 a maund in the report and Tk 13,000 to Tk 14,000 by the caretaker, while the retail price was Tk 600 a kg.

Their route through the year matches what Bangladesh's own reference works say about where honey comes from. Banglapedia, the national encyclopedia, lists mustard, coriander, onion, sesame, radish and other field crops as the common honey plants of Bangladesh and says most of them blossom from December to March, while litchi, mango, coconut, citrus and guava blossom from March to May and make up the main spring flow of honey. In The Daily Star's February 2025 report, a Pabna beekeeping family described the same pattern: December to April is the prime time, mustard from December to February and litchi orchards from March to April, while in the rainy season there is no harvest and the work turns to nursing the bees and repairing boxes.

Mustard was grown in Goalanda and across Rajbari that season, and the report described fields covered in yellow flowers with bees moving over them. According to the district office of the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE), mustard was grown on 5,832 hectares in the district that year: 2,165 hectares in Goalanda, 1,835 in Rajbari Sadar, 957 in Baliakandi, 475 in Kalukhali and 400 in Pangsha. The office expected production of 7,873 tonnes. The report said mustard is a low-cost crop that returns several times its cost, so the area under it was growing.

Golam Rasul, training officer at the Rajbari district DAE office, told Jagonews24: "The district will produce 7,800 tonnes of mustard. It is grown to a greater or lesser extent in five upazilas, but most in Goalanda. In many places bees are being kept beside mustard fields. The bees raise output by pollinating the mustard flowers, and beekeepers profit from collecting honey. At the start of this month, honey collection was somewhat disrupted by fog."

The varieties grown in the district, according to the DAE, were Tori-7, BARI Sarisha-14, 15, 17 and 18, and BINA Sarisha-4, 9 and 11. BARI varieties are bred by the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute and BINA varieties by the Bangladesh Institute of Nuclear Agriculture. Earlier newspaper reports describe some of them. In February 2021, Prothom Alo quoted the DAE's Jashore office as saying that BARI Sarisha-14 can be harvested 75 to 80 days after sowing, yields about 1,500 kg a hectare, and leaves time for a Boro rice crop on the same land. In February 2025 the DAE deputy director in Sirajganj told The Daily Star that BARI 14 was the most common choice among farmers there. In January 2022, Bangla Tribune reported from neighbouring Faridpur that farmers there were growing BARI Sarisha-18, Sarisha-17, Sarisha-14 and Tori-7, and an official of the Bangladesh Agricultural Development Corporation's pulse and oilseed farm said BARI Sarisha-18 oil is very low in erucic acid.

Banglapedia describes mustard as an oil-yielding herb of the cabbage family, including Brassica napus (rape) and Brassica nigra (black mustard). Only a few decades ago mustard oil was the only cooking oil in Bangladesh, pressed in bullock-driven mills called ghani; today it is extracted in electric mills, and the country imports large quantities of soybean and sunflower oil because local mustard meets only a fraction of its needs.

Rajbari district in Dhaka division covers 1,092.28 square kilometres, and Banglapedia notes that most of it is made of the alluvial soil of the Padma. Its main rivers are the Padma, Gorai, Chandana and Chitra. The 2011 census counted 1,049,778 people in the district, and agriculture was the main source of income for 60.84 per cent of households. The area has a long administrative history: Goalanda subdivision was formed in 1871 with its headquarters at Rajbari, and in March 1984 Goalanda was upgraded to a district and renamed Rajbari District.

Goalanda upazila lies on the Padma and the Old Kumar rivers. Banglapedia records that Goalanda thana was formed in 1920 and became an upazila in 1984; it has one municipality and four unions, among them Daulatdia, and its important installations include the Goalanda ferry ghat and launch ghat. Paddy, jute, sugarcane, pulses and peanut are listed as its main crops. The Goalanda ferry ghat is also one of the district's listed tourist spots.

The beekeepers came from Bardi in Narayanganj district; Banglapedia lists Baradi as one of the ten unions of Sonargaon upazila, whose main rivers are the Meghna and the Shitalakshya. Rather than keeping their boxes near home, the group follows the bloom from district to district.

Banglapedia's entry on apiculture says that the honeybee's chief value lies in its ability to pollinate over 60 agricultural crops and so increase the production of fruits and seeds; foraging for nectar and pollen leads to cross-pollination of crop plants. Field research in Bangladesh has measured the effect on mustard. A study by researchers at Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University, carried out at Nagarpur in Tangail from November 2016 to February 2017 and published in the Journal of Biodiversity Conservation and Bioresource Management, found the honey bee Apis mellifera to be the main insect pollinator in the mustard flowering season. Working with the Tori-7 variety, which is also grown in Rajbari, they found that bees increased the number of pods per plant by 14 per cent and the number of seeds per pod by 11 per cent, and that netting with honey bees increased the mean seed yield per plant by 15 per cent, although the flowering period was shortened by six days.

Reports from the mustard belt say much the same. In January 2021, The Daily Star quoted a former head of a beekeeping project of the Bangladesh Small and Cottage Industries Corporation (BSCIC) as saying that beekeeping in mustard fields increases yields by 15 per cent per bigha, and that many farmers who used to refuse beekeepers had changed their minds. A Pabna farmer told the paper that his yield had risen from 4 to 4.5 maunds a bigha to 6.5 maunds after he leased land to beekeepers. In February 2025 an agricultural extension officer in Sirajganj told the same paper that many farmers still saw bees as a threat to their crops, although pollination can raise yields by 15 per cent.

The mustard flower suits beekeepers for a second reason. The president of a North Bengal beekeepers' association told The Daily Star in 2021 that mustard blooms for 40 to 60 days, longer than any other crop, so beekeepers can take more honey from mustard than from other fields, and most prefer to set their boxes there.

Banglapedia describes apiculture as the care of honeybee colonies so that they store more honey than they need themselves. It names Apis cerana indica as the most important domesticated species from the commercial standpoint in its account, and Apis dorsata, the giant rock bee, as a wild species that builds open combs in forests and on large trees and buildings; professional honey hunters in the Sundarbans and Madhupur collect from its colonies. The Tangail study found the European honey bee, Apis mellifera, to be the main pollinator in the mustard fields it examined.

The boxes used in the fields are wooden hives with removable frames of comb, spaced so that the bees can pass between them without joining two combs with wax. This spacing, the "bee space", is what allows a beekeeper to lift out a frame, examine the bees and take honey without destroying the colony. Banglapedia sets out the harvest in steps:

• frames are taken from the hive when the combs are filled with honey and capped over, and the bees are removed from them;
• the thin film of wax covering the cells is shaved off with a sharp knife;
• the uncapped combs are spun at high speed in a honey extractor, which throws the honey out by centrifugal force, and then turned to empty the other side;
• the combs are returned to the hive for the bees to fill again.

The same entry notes that some successful beekeepers move to areas where nectar plants abound, as the Goalanda group does, and that the best-known honey in Bangladesh is mustard honey. It lists the management problems beekeepers face: swarming in crowded or overheated hives, the serious American and European foulbrood diseases, and ants, wax moth, birds and mice that damage combs. When bees are short of honey in the lean months, they are fed sugar syrup. In The Daily Star's 2025 report, a Sirajganj beekeeper said each box needs one kilogram of sugar a week in the off-season, and that feeding through the lull costs him Tk 50,000 to Tk 75,000. Anyone starting out should take advice on colony health from the upazila agriculture office or a trained beekeeper.

Training is available. Banglapedia says the DAE periodically holds beekeeping training at upazila level and provides hives to trainees, and that BSCIC and the Bangladesh Institute of Apiculture also train commercial and amateur beekeepers and organise mobile beekeeping in the main mustard areas in winter. In February 2025 a BSCIC development manager told The Daily Star that the corporation trains 480 people every year and gives each trainee a couple of bee boxes to start with.

Local people quoted by Jagonews24 praised the honey but also raised a concern. Md Manik told the paper: "This mustard honey is very good. We have eaten it. When the sun comes out, the bees leave the boxes and spread over the fields with a humming sound. It is nice to watch, and many people come from far away to see it."

Abdul Halim, another local resident, said: "Beekeepers from other districts come to Goalanda and set up boxes to collect honey. The honey is genuine, but since farmers use too much pesticide in their fields, there are questions about how safe it is. The agriculture department should make farmers aware of this." The report did not carry a response from the agriculture office on this point, and no test of the Goalanda honey was reported.

Pesticide use in flowering crops is a known risk to bees. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, in its pesticide registration toolkit, notes that honeybees are generally active in daylight and stay in the hive at night, so moving spraying to the evening or night, when bees are not active, is one of the measures used to reduce harm. It adds limits: the measure suits only products that break down quickly on the crop, and evening spraying of systemic pesticides can still leave residues in pollen or nectar later on. Farmers who need to spray mustard in flower can ask the upazila agriculture officer which product and timing are suitable.

Estimates of the country's honey output vary widely. In January 2021 The Daily Star reported that Bangladesh had some 25,000 beekeepers collecting honey from mustard, coriander and black cumin fields, litchi gardens and the Sundarbans, and produced nearly 10,000 tonnes of honey a year, with the main season from November to April; a former BSCIC beekeeping project head said about 80 per cent of the honey was collected in the mustard season. In February 2025 the same paper cited reports and surveys estimating national output at 30,000 to 40,000 tonnes a year, most of it wild honey from the Sundarbans, while a BSCIC manager said beekeepers had harvested 7,449.40 tonnes the previous year against a projection of 7,000 tonnes. Banglapedia's honey entry names the Sundarbans as the major producer and mustard, mango and Indian jujube honey as the next most important single-flower types.

The Daily Star's 2025 report gave the DAE's mustard target for fiscal 2024-25 as 1,164,576 hectares, with around 125,171 hectares used for honey, and said 93,478 bee boxes had been installed that season, with experts estimating that more than 1.5 million kilograms of honey might be harvested. In Sirajganj, one of the main mustard-honey districts, the expected honey harvest in 2025 was 400 tonnes, against 382 tonnes the year before. The paper also reported that per capita honey consumption in Bangladesh was about 100 grams a year and that exports were limited to a few hundred tonnes, held back by quality and standardisation issues.

Reports from the same days as the Goalanda story show the season in full swing elsewhere. On 25 January 2026 the Dhaka Tribune reported from Rajshahi that the DAE expected about 646,000 tonnes of mustard from 389,000 hectares across the eight districts of the division in that Rabi season, and that the Rajshahi agricultural region had set a target of around seven tonnes of honey. A farmer in Godagari upazila told the paper that farmers there could collect 3 to 5 kilograms of honey a bigha by installing bee boxes, and the DAE's additional director for the region said honey harvesting was expanding into new areas every year.

Photo: Belayet2014 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Sources: Jagonews24, The Daily Star, Dhaka Tribune, Prothom Alo, Bangla Tribune, Journal of Biodiversity Conservation and Bioresource Management (Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University study), Banglapedia, FAO Pesticide Registration Toolkit