HoneyVeda recently appeared on Season 2 of the business show Shark Tank. The ‘sharks’ were impressed with the honey idea. The Pioneer connected with the founder of HoneyVeda, who shared his experience.
Shikha Duggal
It is the responsibility of the beekeeper to clean hives, harvest honey and royal jelly, and maintain the health of the hive. Little did the founder of HoneyVeda, Hardik Ajaybhai Joshi, know that his passion for beekeeping would land him on Shark Tank India for the way he used his extensive knowledge to make cruelty-free products out of it.
Along with their scientific beekeeping process, they follow the beehive-to-bottle policy. It makes sure you receive the best possible natural honey. Every time!
“To get into this business, it was important for me to learn beekeeping myself. The desire to work outdoors made me gain some information about animal science. Indeed, it’s a nightmare to even go near a bee hive, but accidentally I did, and here I am today with a newfound love for a bee. They are natural pollinators, and hardly anyone is aware of them! When different flowers produce different types of honey, the light bulb went off. None of our honey products mention the flora information; how is the taste always similar? This led me to introduce HoneyVeda,” said Hardik Ajaybhai Joshi.
The bee life cycle and hive social construct were so fascinating for him that they first carefully selected the site from which their little friends, the honeybees, would collect nectar. And that’s also the secret to why their monoflora honey sells out so fast! Then, honeybee colonies are a set of wooden houses where bees deposit nectar. The right placement and careful planning help bees stay healthy and efficient. He waits and lets the bees take their time converting nectar into honey. Any accelerated or pasteurised processing can effectively eliminate all of honey’s benefits!
Furthermore, he said, “The honeybees are so smart that anyone will fall in love with them. It’s a hobby best entered into with preparation. We have to save bees just like we do for humans! Without these pollinators, not only would our natural world look bleak, but our food supplies would collapse. The farmers are also in the loop with us; we lease their farms for the beekeeping process. Sometimes, there is colony collapse disorder too, which is a bit more mysterious. Almost all the worker bees disappear and leave behind a viable queen, brood, and food stores. Climate change is the cause of it.”
He pours his heart into bringing us the smooth goodness of raw honey—no heating, no processing. Before bottling and packing, HoneyVeda uses simple gravity filtering to remove unwanted particles. It’s a simple process that doesn’t change your honey at all! He explained, “It took me four years to establish myself as a “bee entrepreneur.” I wondered—the kind of information and revelations I know about, commoners do not know about them, so why don’t we turn this into a business? To do beekeeping, we even went to Spiti Valley. Yes, there is a chance to get stung all the time, but I always wear protection. The other aspect is the pain felt by farmers as our “main” pollinators become extinct as pesticide use increases. How will the ecosystem move forward? Furthermore, we have bees, and moving them is very disruptive to their work. As a commercial beekeeper that relies on honey harvest, I have to move them quite a few times a year, and that’s quite unfortunate for the bees.”
Beekeeping has to be about the bees and not humans! He continued, “The beekeeping process going by the market value is very manual. We had to migrate the bees at a certain height, hence, we chose Spiti Valley. But it was getting difficult for us to reach those heights along with the bee boxes. As a beekeeper, it was my responsibility to care for the welfare of my bees and do the best I could to make sure they thrive. I got stung a lot, but my main goal was to keep the bee alive. An unknown fact: if a bee stings a human, it will die there and then. I wasn’t afraid of getting stung; I just didn’t want my honeybees to die. I want to support pollination.”
