Taiwan beekeepers battle to cash in on pure honey buzz

ILAN, Taiwan, Oct 23 (AFP):  Under a shady starfruit tree Taiwanese beekeeper Jiang Hwan-bin tends his hives, pumping out pure honey for a rapidly growing market of health-conscious consumers.

Jiang's family has been keeping bees for 80 years and he now manages 500 hives in the northwest county of Hsinchu. In total his family run around 2,000 across northern Taiwan.

A string of food safety scandals in Taiwan has driven demand for clean, traceable produce, with pure honey seen as particularly beneficial-whether stirred into water as a summer thirst-quencher or used as a sugar substitute in desserts.

But although domestic appetite is voracious and outstrips supply, which keeps prices high, beekeepers say it is hard to fully capitalise as climate change and disease hamper expansion.

This year alone saw a series of typhoons and an unusually cold January affecting early blossoms.

Jiang, 54, who sells most of his produce through his shop in Hsinchu city under the name "Ah-bin Pure Honey", says his production fell 30 percent due to the adverse conditions.

The situation for the whole family is even worse: overall production across the thousands of hives they run has dropped by two thirds, he says.

The unpredictability of the seasons is reflected in islandwide honey output over the past five years.

Taiwan produced 11,726 tonnes of pure honey in 2015, more than doubling in a decade, with the number of bee farms going up by over a fifth to 860. The industry is worth Twd$2.7 billion ($85.9 million) annually.