#burnsteem25 - Cultivating Trigona Honey as a Community Economic Improvement

Trigona honey cultivation is one type of business that has very promising potential to be developed into a business sector in rural areas, in contrast to the type of honey in general which has a larger production amount, but Trigona honey is easy to cultivate and has a fairly high selling value.

Some time ago, together with the World Smile Project Team, we visited a village in East Aceh Regency, where we planned to build 1 unit of a free education building, but my team and I prior to conducting an initial survey of the location visited one of the trigona honey cultivation sites.

Things to prepare

To run a Trigona honey cultivation business does not require large capital, what is needed is:

1. Wood that already has a trigona beehive
   The wood that has been inhabited by trigina bees is usually found in the forest and based on interviews with business owners, it is logs that have been inhabited by trigona honey from woodcutters with a price range of IDR.80.000/ 24 STEEM.
2. Creating Production Box
   This rectangular box has various sizes, ranging from 30 cm to 40 cm, its purpose is as a place for honey production. Trigona bees will naturally make honey-producing bags in boxes connected to wooden sticks.

The picture on the right shows a log that has been inhabited by trigona bees and has been fitted with a production box. The box and blocks are given holes with a diameter of 5 to 10 cm so that the bees can connect the bees to the box to store honey.

In the picture on the right, it can be seen how the bees make honey storage bags in the media that was made earlier, each bee will try to fill the bag until it is full and then close it, after the first bag is full, then the trigona bee forms another bag to store honey.

At the top of the wooden box is given a plastic cover so that during the rainy season, water does not enter the honey storage media so that the honey bags will not be damaged and remain safe until the harvest period.

this picture is a block that has been inhabited by trigona bees, it appears on the surface of the wooden block filled with holes as a place for bees to enter and exit. Every day the bees will go in and out to find food from the flowers that are around the cultivation area.

Usually this trigona honey harvest period has a time span of 3 to 4 months, for the quality of honey is closely related to the food available in the culture area and the weather, so it is possible that the harvested honey has good quality and sometimes has a sour taste.

The bottle usually sells for IDR 200,000 with a content of 250 ml. When viewed from the cost required to cultivate honey, it is much smaller than the income obtained when the harvest season arrives.

We as guests get this honey dish by tasting it directly from the hive and honey that has been packaged in a 250 ml bottle. In the picture below, it looks like @klen.civil is trying trigona honey in the courtyard of the trigona honey cultivator's house

Thus the potential for businesses that can be run by the community to increase family economic income during the covid-19 pandemic, presumably can encourage new entrepreneurs among steemians.