The Gurung are mountain peoples distributed in central Nepal. According to 2006 statistics, the population was about 690,000, accounting for 0.5% of the total population of Nepal. The Gurung people honored the rulers as "Hiccups". Their "Rosal" festival, "Rodicar" club organization and Rodi dance are highly valued in Nepalese cultural life. After death, people are cremated and buried in the earth. The Gurung people call themselves "Tam".
Twice a year, the Gurung people collect bees in the foothills of the Himalayas. Honey pickers will search for hives in the cliffs to collect honey. This honey is very expensive due to its very small yield and is called liquid gold.
The experience and knowledge of obtaining honey from dangerous cliffs handed down by the ancestors of the Gurung tribe helped the clan to collect honey smoothly. Brave honey pickers use soft ladders made of rope and bamboo to climb cliffs nearly 100 meters high to find the hives of large black bees on the cliffs.
They hang high in the air, without any safety measures, only use a bamboo pole to poke the hive, if they are not careful, they will be besieged by hundreds of thousands of bees, and after getting the hive, they also need to spend hours to remove the original honey inside, and the price paid can be seen.
Andrew Newey, a photographer from the UK, recently went to the Gurung people to shoot, spent two weeks with the locals, and documented the local precious and ancient honey collection process.
The methods of honey handed down by these ancestors are rarely known to the world. The income from picking honey can reach tens of thousands of yuan every year, and the people who collect honey live a solid life.
Due to the hard and dangerous honey picking, and the fact that these methods are ancestral, they are rarely passed on. Only a very small number of people in the entire Gurung clan are still doing this. Most young people can't bear to suffer, and this ancestral skill is gradually abandoned.
Honey harvesting in the Himalayas is more of a belief for the Gurung people, who collect honey not only for honey, but also as a special social and religious activity, a traditional custom passed down from generation to generation. This ancient, traditional custom and even many similar historical cultures are contradictory to social development, and we are not one of them, and we are not qualified to comment on the value of both. Fortunately, there are precious documentary photos preserved for viewing and thinking. Copyright notice: If it involves copyright issues, please contact the author with proof of ownership ( Article source: Global Anecdotes)