How a Turkish woman wants to save the world – one honey pot at a time

One day in June 2021, Nuran Eksi, sat in front of a few jars of honey. She sat there for hours – her hands folded, her demeanor relaxed, sea-shell beads around the right wrist and her curls resting on her shoulders.

The jars contained approximately 25 kilogrammes of chestnut honey, the fruit of her labour. It was the first time she had extracted honey from the honey hives she began harvesting a year before.

At the height of the pandemic, which had plunged the global economy into a cycle of lockdowns, and showed us how vulnerable we are to a spreading disease, Eksi, 53, took retirement from a cushy management job in the corporate sector.

She set up a new ‘office’ in a makeshift cottage along the Black Sea coast of Sile, a far-off district of Istanbul. And started on her journey to save the world.

“Harvesting honey means more than just extracting it from the combs. It is how I directly connect with nature, leaving my handprint on efforts to make our planet more livable,” she tells TRT World.

“This will help our whole ecosystem.”

Eksi is one of dozens of small-scale beekeepers who are benefiting from a Turkish government programme to boost honey production and help self-made entrepreneurs flourish.

Since 2006, apiculturists have been allowed to establish beehives on state land in the forested regions free of any charge.

Türkiye is the world's second largest honey producer. Last year, it exported 17,000 tonnes to 56 countries that brought home around $46 million.

For the love of nature

On a recent June afternoon with the sun blazing overhead, Eksi puts on a white protective suit and takes a stroll among lavender, rosemary , clover and sage plants - which she had planted herself.

“This little piece of land gives life to so many things.”

Beekeeping is a tedious job. Eksi does everything on the 2,500 sq meters of land allotted to her by the government. She spends on the average 12 hours every day tending to the hives and collecting honey.

When she gets tired she goes into the shelter of the little hut she built herself using corrugated steel sheets and wooden logs, which she had painted in yellow and red with the words “If there are bees, there’s life” written on the front. She sits on her sofa, inspects her hives and sips tea out of a cup made of walnut wood.

For anyone else used to normal 9 to 5 office work, beekeeping can be overwhelming. But Eksi has been a kind of outdoor person most of her life. Whenever time allowed, she would hit the dirt roads in the countryside and along rivers in her jeep - an experience that allowed her to be “close to nature.”

Her honey bee-farm has grown in the past two years and now she’s taking care of an estimated 2.7 million bees. Last year, she sold 800 kgs of honey.

“I have become very conscious about the flowers and plants we have around us. I don’t pluck out a flower from a plant anymore even if I like it because I know some bees might feed on its nectar.”

Swarms of bees buzz in and out of yellow wooden boxes perched on wooden logs in Eksi’s farm. She uses smoke to calm the bees in one of the boxes before removing the lid and pulling out the frames containing the honeycombs.

“I am in awe of the scene every time I look at it. It’s a meticulously organised society of thousands of bees working for a common goal. There are worker bees making honey, the queen laying eggs and hundreds of male drones on the job of mating with her.”

The wanderers

In Türkiye, beekeeping is something of a family legacy where one generation passes on the know-how to another.

The country, second largest in honey production after China, sells its honey to customers in the US, Spain and Germany and many other countries.

Come June and beekeepers from other provinces settle down in Sile, setting up their bee houses among the chestnut trees, which helps produce a special kind of honey popular for treatment of respiratory problems.

The head of the Sile Beekeepers Agricultural Development Cooperative, Ahmet Can, tells TRT World that 300 families live on proceeds from honey sale in Sile and take care of some 10,000 bee colonies.

Sile’s chestnut honey, known for its bitter flavour and darker colour, is just one of many types of honey produced in Türkiye thanks to Anatolia’s versatile climate and the many types of flora that flourish here.

Taken mostly at breakfasts with a spoonful of cream, flower honey, pine honey and highland honey is a staple on many Turkish dining tables.

When the weather begins to change in July, beekeepers like Eksi pile their beehive boxes onto trucks and move base to sunnier north-west Tekirdag province for two months.

Such colony migrations help the bees to pollinate other plants and prevent the colonies from collapsing. "They are calm and productive only in the sun," says Eksi.

The yearly migrations bring the bees in contact with different types of flowers and they are able to feed on a variety of sweet nectars - this allows Eksi and the others to produce honey with a distinct texture and aroma.

But the beekeepers are concerned now. Honeybees are sensitive to weather changes and Eksi says that climate crisis might be affecting the yield now.

“A single hive in my farm could previously produce as much as 30 kilograms of honey. Nowadays, the output has come down to a mere seven to eight kilograms mainly due to climate change,” she says.

The flying eco-warriors

A fact that often gets ignored about the bees is that these tiny insects are essential for the global food supply chain. Maybe imperative.

More than two-thirds of the most important crops are pollinated by the bees, as they carry pollen attached to their sticky legs from flower to flower in search of nectar, says the United Nations Environmental Programme.

Every one in three bites of food that we take in depends on them.

Eksi is deeply conscious of the impact her colonies have on the ecosystem and says this is one of the main driving forces that pushed her to become a beekeeper.

Besides helping balance the food chain, honey bees and other insect pollinators are responsible for naturally preserving almost 90 percent of wild-flowering plant species in the world.

But drastically changing weather patterns, which are bringing in heavier rains, more droughts, floods and wildfires and the widespread use of pesticides are threatening bee colonies, experts say.

“Bees play an important role in habitat-building because they support the growth of trees, flowers and other plants, which become a major source of food and shelter for loads of other animal species,” says Dr Becca Farnum, a political ecologist and geographer at the Syracuse University in New York.

“Besides, they are an integral part of the food chain since birds, racoons and critical species eat bees as a food source.”