India exported over a lakh metric tonnes of honey last year. It has climbed from the ninth to the second-largest exporter in the world in just five years, a significant rise that makes it one of India’s quieter agricultural success stories. India’s Sweet Revolution is backed by Rs 500 crore of investment through the National Beekeeping and Honey Mission (NBHM). However, there is another number that the export dashboard does not carry. Native bee populations across India are visibly in retreat — a decline documented by field researchers and beekeepers alike, even as the export numbers climb. These two facts belong in the same sentence.
The global backdrop makes India’s moment look even more opportune. The United States, the world’s largest honey importer, has seen its honeybee colony numbers collapse by over 60 per cent in 2024-25, driven by varroa mite infestations, pesticide resistance, and climate-driven disruption to flowering seasons. Similar stresses are thinning output in Turkey, Ethiopia, and Iran. The result is a growing ‘honey gap’ that is pushing up import prices across America and Europe and creating strategic openings for reliable suppliers. India, with stable production growth of around 5 per cent annually and a Minimum Export Price anchored at US$ 1,400 per metric tonne, is being positioned to fill that gap. The opportunity is genuine. The question is on the sustainability of the existing model.
Walk into a thoughtful small farm in Maharashtra’s Raigad district, the kind that produces Jamun honey harvested by tribal foragers from wild Indian Honey Bee colonies, and the contradictions sharpen. That Jamun honey retails domestically at the equivalent of US$ 4,500 to $6,000 per metric tonne while India’s export floor is set at US$ 1,400. Even the retail prices of famous honey such as Himalayan White Honey, Sunderban Honey on e-commerce platforms overshadows the existing minimum export price cap. The finest honey India produces stays home, priced far above the minimum worth exporting, while bulk floral honey is largely produced by non-native European bees.
The native bee question sits at the centre of this situation and rarely receives the policy attention it deserves. India’s forests and farmlands host a rich diversity of pollinators: the Asian rock bee, a key pollinator of forest trees; the Indian honey bee, a versatile native species supporting diverse crops and traditional agroecosystems; and stingless bees, which play an important role in pollinating tropical plant communities, especially in Western Ghats. Each occupies an irreplaceable ecological niche. None produces honey at the volumes that the European (Apis mellifera) does. The yield logic is defensible. The ecological cost is not. When native pollinator populations thin, the agricultural productivity that depends on them across crops from litchi and mustard to sunflower faces risks that no managed hive can fully substitute for.
Climate change is compressing the window in which any of this can be managed. The Indian monsoon is growing more erratic — longer dry spells, more extreme rainfall events, more intense heat waves mid-season. Flowering periods are shortening. Then there is the pesticide problem, which sits uncomfortably close to the heart of India’s honey export story. Southern states like Tamil Nadu have been laggard in exports due to the traces of pesticides. The mustard fields of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, the sunflower belts of Karnataka, the litchi orchards of Bihar, the landscapes that produce the bulk honeys filling Indian export containers, are also among the country’s most pesticide-intensive agricultural zones. The European Union banned the outdoor use of three major neonicotinoid insecticides in 2018. In India, the regulation of systemic insecticide use during flowering seasons in key beekeeping regions remains limited.
None of this requires abandoning the export ambition. It requires maturing it. A tiered policy framework one that maintains the current MEP as a floor for bulk honey while creating premium export incentives for certified organic, GI-registered, or single-origin traceable varieties is required. It would begin to close the gap between what India earns per tonne and what Brazil, Ukraine, or New Zealand commands. Pesticide regulation needs to be integrated into apiculture policy: mandatory notification to beekeepers before crop spraying in flowering seasons, restrictions on neonicotinoid use during bloom, and residue monitoring within the Madhukranti traceability portal would be the vital steps ahead.
India’s bees are doing something remarkable: sustaining an export surge while facing pressures that have devastated apiaries across the Western world. World Bee Day is a prompt to ask whether we are building that performance on solid ecological ground, or drawing down on natural capital which we cannot replenish easily. The Sweet Revolution has earned its first chapter. It must now earn its second.
Mohit Sharma is Assistant Professor, RPCAU, Pusa, Bihar
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth