Honeykart- only about honey in India.
It’s Simple
Honeykart is completely different from regular e-commerce websites, both in terms of business operations and honey products.
We don’t have a sales target as most e-commerce businesses do.
We just concentrate on advanced beekeeping practices and apply new ideas to produce the best honey in India from our own bee hive
The rest will be taken care of by the customers who are in search of pure raw honey in India. That’s it, we keep it simple.
Founder
I was born in Karur-district, which is centre of Tamilnadu state in India. Did Engineering in communication & was offered job in Wipro Technologies, Bangalore as a software programmer. I worked in Wipro for 2 years both in Bangalore and Chennai branch.
Unfortunately I was not able to cope up with city lifestyle. I always love simplicity in all fields, whether lifestyle, education, business or work. But I couldn’t find city lifestyle simple, so quit my job and returned to home town for a simple lifestyle.
I explored a lot of business, failed in around 7 startups and finally succeeded in Beekeeping. For more details about my carrier shifting, you can read it in rediff.com news article about honeykart. Complete details on news and media articles about honey kart are found on the Media page.
Friends are the pillars
- As I did lots of experiments in scope of starting various businesses, almost all my savings were finished.
- I didn’t have sufficient funds to start beekeeping.
- Coming to know this, three of my friends, who are still working in software industry, provided me financial support without any conditions.
- It was a big boost during my financial instability.
Beekeeping- Wasn't a Cakewalk:
I started beekeeping in 80 acres of bee floral regions. After six months bees started to die. I never thought of such things & wasn’t experienced to handle it.
I contacted many beekeepers both traditional and doctorates in beekeeping. All of them suggested me to use antibiotics. But I wasn’t interested in using antibiotics as it would contaminate honey.
Each problem in beekeeping will be unique based on location of beekeeping. Information’s found on the internet will not be sufficient to solve the issues, I tried many ideas found in internet but no sign of recovery.
The only option I had was, to first study the behavior of honey bees in my location and then find solution based on case study. In my analysis, I found that none of the naturally built beehives in trees were affected with diseases and honey bees were subjected to diseases only after man handling it.
So I reversed to natural conditions for bees, shifted my bee hives to pesticide free zones, near river beds, fresh air without industrial pollutions, also re-designing the beehives, so that bees feel comfortable to my locations climate which was always sunny and hot.
It took almost 2 years to solve all problems faced by bees and to produce honey without antibiotic contamination.
Floral honey; Not Flavoured honey:
Based on floral sources, honey can be classified as floral honey and extra floral honey.
Floral honey is produced by the bees by collecting the nectar excreted in flowers. Eg: sunflower.
Extra floral honey is produced by bees from the nectar excreted in petioles of the leaves and not from the flowers. Eg: Rubber tree honey.
Floral honey has high demand in international market. So we decided to produce floral honey only.
Flavoured honey is different from floral honey.
Flavoured honey is prepared by adding flavours (natural or artificial) to honey.
Honeykart produces only floral honey. We NEVER produce or sell flavoured only.
Guest lectures on Honey usage & benefits
I was invited to provide guest lectures on honey. I have given many such lectures in Bangalore, Chennai and various towns in Tamilnadu.
People from cities who attended seminar were surprised by information on how I produced honey and how they should select the right honey.
Based on their usage purpose, I would suggest them the right honey.
Now those details are provided in home page and blog of honeykart site
Advanced Beekeeping Practices:
We practice our own way of beekeeping. Based on climatic and seasonal changes, we change our beekeeping practices. The practice followed in summer will be different during the winter and spring seasons. Details about honeykart beekeeping practices can be found on the Beehive page.
Starting from the design of the stand for bee boxes, to harvesting honey we follow our own standards. You would have never seen a beehive stand like ours in any Indian beekeeping farms or elsewhere. It took 2 months to successfully design this beehive stand.
Our bee boxes are designed based on bee floral availability and climatic conditions. These beehives are completely different from regular 10 frame bee hive boxes practiced in India. We found that 7 frame bee boxes are best suitable for our climatic conditions and use only 7 frame beehive boxes. We use a super chamber in beekeeping. Super chamber beekeeping is not followed by most of the beekeepers in India.
Honey quality and Price
There is no fixed price for honey in the world. Honey prices vary based on beekeeping cost and price offered by popular honey brands in India.
Honey kart never fixes price based on other popular honey brands in India. Based on our production cost, we fix the honey price.
Using advanced beekeeping practices, we extract honey only from super chamber.
But most of the beekeepers in India don’t keep super chambers. They harvest honey from brood chambers itself.
Brood chamber is where bees breeding takes place, bees use brood chamber honey for feeding larvae and young bees.
Brood chamber consists of egg, and developing larvae.
If honey is extracted from brood chamber, the eggs and larvae will be mixed with extracted honey. Quality of honey will be affected.
Honey bees first fill the brood chamber with honey, and then the surplus honey collected by bees is stored in super chamber.
No breeding of bees takes place in super chamber. So we harvest surplus honey from super chamber which if free of eggs and larvae.
By this practice, it’s possible to produce only less honey but of high quality. Hence cost of our honey is higher and so does the quality.
Guest lecture in Colleges:
Looking at my passion and success in beekeeping, many colleges invited me to provide guest lecture on entrepreneurship to students.
One thing which I noticed in my lecture was, students were very interested to listen speech from an entrepreneur himself.
Honeykart Awards
While working as software programmer in Wipro Technologies, I have received awards for quickly solving issues. I was happy with those awards. But those awards were limited within a project and within a company.
How bout receiving an award from an open society. It’s that nice. Yes, I was surprised when awarded as “Outstanding Youth” having nominees from open society. This was for my social entrepreneurship in beekeeping. I never though beekeeping will get me an award. It’s very special.