Beekeeping builds a sweet business, blazing a new trail to higher income

A striped shirt, a bee-proof hat, a pair of cracked palms - the beekeeper before us is Qiu Rumin, technical director of Changxing Italian Bee Apiary Technology Co., Ltd., who has won the National May 1 Labor Medal.

When spring warms and flowers bloom, it is once again the busiest season of the year for beekeepers. Recently, when the reporter arrived at the apiary in Nanquanqiao Village, Lincheng Town, Changxing County, Qiu Rumin was training 25 beekeepers from Beijing, Shandong and Fujian. After the training ended, he also specially set up a WeChat group to provide follow-up technical guidance for these beekeepers who had come from afar.

"Because I deeply understand beekeepers' thirst for technology." Recalling how more than 30 years ago he resolutely decided to put down his teaching stick, put on a beekeeping hat and become a beekeeper constantly on the move, Qiu Rumin says the most difficult problem he encountered was the difficulty of making a breakthrough in beekeeping technology. "A hive of bees can produce only 15 grams to 20 grams of royal jelly in 72 hours. Every day I thought the same as everyone else, pondering how to raise the yield."

At that time, whenever he encountered a technical problem he did not understand, he would run to bookstores or seek answers from technicians in the town. To make his beekeeping skills more solid, he traveled far and wide, wearing out who knows how many pairs of shoes.

In the end, through constant exploration, Qiu Rumin introduced Italian bee species to crossbreed with local bee species, and through isolated mating, selection and breeding of parental lines, establishment of breeding pedigree files and other innovative beekeeping techniques, he successfully bred the new "Changxing Italian Bee" strain. With the new bee strain he bred, royal jelly output per colony per 72 hours can increase by about 20 times, honey output increases by 10%, and the economic benefits for beekeepers are significantly improved.

In this seemingly most ordinary of posts, Qiu Rumin takes endless delight in innovating and researching beekeeping technology, breeding bee strains at the world's advanced level, filling technical gaps, and also helping beekeepers across the country increase production and efficiency. He breeds 10,000 queen bees a year, can improve 500,000 colonies of low-yield, poor-quality bee strains nationwide each year, and directly increases benefits for beekeepers across the country by 120 million yuan... The "Changxing Italian Bee" strain has gained recognition at home and abroad, and the queen bees he breeds have also been included in the scope of national germplasm resource protection.

People often say "life is as sweet as honey," but beekeeping is a technical job and even more a hard one. Yet Qiu Rumin has been infatuated with it for 33 years. As his fame grew, Qiu Rumin realized that to raise efficiency to another level, relying on his own strength alone was not enough. So he went to the Bee Research Institute of Zhejiang University to consult beekeeping experts and professors, set up trial sites in Anhui, Zhejiang, Shaanxi and other places, and conducted dozens or even hundreds of trials each year.

Driven by him, more and more local farmers in Changxing County joined the ranks of beekeepers, and batch after batch of beekeepers from all over the country came to attend beekeeping training classes. Qiu Rumin always enthusiastically passed on his experience to beekeepers. In order to let more people master beekeeping technology, with strong support from relevant units in Huzhou City, Qiu Rumin established a beekeeping teaching site of the city's Farmers College.

Over the years, at the invitation of agricultural departments across the province, Qiu Rumin has taught new beekeeping techniques, training more than 3,000 beekeeper visits, guiding beekeepers to keep bees scientifically, developing more than 100 beekeeping households and raising more than 20,000 bee colonies, opening a new path for increasing agricultural efficiency and farmers' income.

A bee's life never stops, and Qiu Rumin never rests either. At present, Qiu Rumin is planning to build a "Bee Culture Town": turning Changxing Italian Bee Apiary into China's first comprehensive town integrating bee culture popular science, Italian bee pollination demonstrations, bee therapy and wellness, education and training, and leisure sightseeing.

Toward evening, small, black, buzzing bees flutter beside the wooden hives lined up in a row. Not far away, black locust flowers are in full bloom, making quite a rural scene. Qiu Rumin checked all the hives once again. His wife, Peng Dingzhen, set up a small table in front of the house, brewed a pot of hot tea, and quietly waited for the sun to set. Qiu Rumin and his wife said they are willing to accompany their bees and grow old together slowly.