Hong Kong Tastes Like Honey
I’ve always liked honey. Who doesn’t? But I never really understood it. Back in Canada, when I ventured into the supermarket and gazed at the various kinds of honey for sale, I was mystified by the clover honey and blueberry honey, which I bought and tried, only to find it had the same musty sweetness as any kind of honey.
That changed last month when I visited the Wing Wo Bee Farm in Hong Kong. To get there, my girlfriend Laine and I took the train to Shatin MTR station, trudged through the crowds heading to IKEA, and walked up the hilly paths that lead through the village of Pai Tau. After ten minutes, as houses gave way to thick woods, we found ourselves in front of a collection of wood boxes. Wind rustled through the leaves of the trees overhead. The warbly sound of a horn floated down from the monastery. I barely noticed the thousands of bees buzzing around.
We were greeted by the farm’s owner, Yip Ki-hok, a slight, ruddy-skinned man who spoke with the accent of his native Wai Yeung, a small town about 100 kilometres north of where we were standing. (Hong Kong, which is pronounced Heung Gong in standard Cantonese, came out as Hiong Gong when Yip spoke).
“These are Chinese bees — foreign bees need more space, they like big open fields, so they aren’t suitable for Hong Kong,” Yip said as he gestured towards the boxes, which each contain more than 10,000 bees. “They extract liquid from mountain trees. In the winter they go to ap geuk mok, these trees right above here. The flowers bloom after the winter solstice until mid-February.”
We stayed at the farm for a little over an hour as we chatted with Yip. Here is a portion of what Yip told us, in his own words, as translated by Laine.
Back in the day, in dai lok, the mainland, I lived in a village called Wai Dong near Wai Yeung. It was very tough because we were so poor. We didn’t even have sugar. My uncle had a beehive so he had honey. When I was seven, I realized this was a way to make food, so I went with a cousin all over the hills to look for bees.
By the time I was in my twenties, I had more than 100 hives. That was during the Cultural Revolution. At that time, if you had three ducks that laid some eggs, people would consider you bourgeois. When people saw that I had so many hives, they thought I was rich. They tried to denounce me, but luckily I knew a lot of people that could protect me, who argued that even though I had a lot of hives and made lots of honey, I was providing for the country. They tried to denounce me three times. Three times they failed. If they had succeeded they would have taken all my hives. If they said they wanted the hives but still allowed me to raise them, I would have been okay with that.
In 1983, when I was 28, I came to Hong Kong. My wife had come here first. As soon as we arrived I started raising bees again. When I first came, I lived in Tsu Koo Tsai [a squatter village] in Shek Kip Mei. I had to scout for a place to raise bees. The most important factor is the flower honey. I went to all the bee farms in Hong Kong to check them out. There was one real farm and two very small operations.
In the end, I decided that Shatin was the most suitable area, so I started looking for a house. I finally found a place at 172 Pai Tau Village. I went around gathering materials to make my own hive boxes, and in august I started to go into the hills to capture bees. By New Year I had 118 hives. But since nobody knew about my farm, I had to throw most of the first harvest away.
Wing Wo’s business is a lot better these days, though Yip doesn’t seem very aggressive in promoting his product. Most people find out about Wing Wo honey through word of mouth. Most honey available in local supermarkets in imported from overseas, with the notable exception of honey from Fanling’s Po Sang Yuen farm, which is known for its label featuring a man wearing a giant bee beard. Michael Leung, the product designer-cum-beekeeper I recently wrote about, tells me that he is working on new branding for Wing Wo.
Yip has a lot of visitors. Just as we were about to leave, a mother and her two daughters showed up. “We were visiting the monastery and we saw that a bee farm was nearby, and we thought that was very interesting,” said the mother. More curious than nervous, the trio watched with cameras drawn as Yip withdrew a frame from one of the hives, honeycomb visible under the bodies of hundreds of crawling bees.
I asked Yip why he doesn’t wear gloves or the special suits I’ve seen on TV, which make beekeepers look like medieval knights. “Chinese bees are actually very gentle,” he said. “They’ll only sting you if you hurt them. I don’t wear gloves because I like to feel the pressure of my hands on the bees, to make sure I’m not hurting them. If a worker bee dies it’s not that big of a problem, but if you kill the queen, the whole hive dies.”
Before we left, Yip invited us inside his tin-roofed house. As we sat on the sofa in the flourescent-lit, tile-floored living room, Yip’s wife mixed some of their spring honey with warm water and set it down on the coffee table in front of us. “In the spring, the bees get their honey from longan and lychee flowers,” Yip explained. I took a sip. It was a revelation: the flavours were so strong, so distinct, it tasted like fruit juice.
It occurred to me that no other foods allow you to taste the terroir of a particular place quite as clearly as honey. Sure, wine reflects the essence of the land in which it was made, but it takes a well-trained palate to taste the Tasmania in a chardonnay. But the spring honey I tasted at Wing Wo couldn’t have come from anywhere but Hong Kong, its flavour shaped entirely by the city’s unique mix of flora and micro-climates.
I said as much to Yip and his wife, but I’m assuming they get a lot of comments like that. Yip smiled and laughed softly and didn’t say anything back.
Tags: Apiculture, Beekeeping, Exploring the City, Hong Kong, New Territories
YTSL says:
Hi Chris –
Funny, have recently been thinking of honey in Hong Kong as I’ve come across beekeeping spots (won’t call them farms as at least one of them was on the small side) on a couple of recent hikes — one around Ma On Shan and another in Plover Cove Country Park. And yeah, the one time I saw a beekeeper in the vicinity, he wasn’t wearing any protective gear. Maybe Chinese bees really are very gentle after all! :)
February 18th, 2011 at 9:42 pm
Christopher DeWolf says:
Hi Yvonne! Yes, Chinese bees are very indifferent to humans. I’m also not surprised you’ve encountered some beekeepers on your hikes — Hong Kong has strong beekeeping roots in the New Territories.
February 22nd, 2011 at 11:48 am