Traditional honey picking

Nowadays, among the Lisu people in Yunnan Province, less than 100 people continue to insist on cliff honey gathering, and cliff honey gathering will disappear completely in the near future. However, this is not a pity, because it is too dangerous to collect honey on the cliff. Collecting honey is a complete joke on their lives. Picking honey on cliffs not only faces the challenges of cliffs and falling rocks, but also meets thousands of people. Killer bees? Fighting, this scene is terrible just to think about it.

Lisu is one of the smallest ethnic minorities in China, which many people may not know. Lisu people generally live in the mountainous areas in southwest Yunnan Province, which not only borders Myanmar, but also lies in the deepest part of southwest China, so the development there has been poor. Due to the influence of the environment, Lisu people are very good at activities in mountainous areas. Collecting honey from cliffs has always been the economic source of Lisu people and a cultural tradition. But now, due to the change of environment, there are fewer and fewer bees, so basically not many people continue to engage in this work.

Generally, Lisu people collect honey from Himalayan bees on the cliff. Himalayan bees are the largest existing bee species in the world. An adult Himalayan bee can reach 3 cm in length, but this kind of bee is only distributed in Nepal, Tibet and Yunnan, and people in inland areas may not know it. These Himalayan bees collect flowers in the deep mountains and nest on cliffs that people seldom go to, so if they want to collect honey, they must go to the cliffs.

Because the hives of Himalayan bees are all on the cliffs, honey collectors not only have to travel long distances to the mountains, but also tie themselves up with ropes and hang them on the cliffs to collect honey slowly. There are many Himalayan bees and they are big, so honey collectors are often influenced by bees? Group fight? If the situation is serious, it will endanger life, so collecting honey from the cliff is indeed a job that challenges life.