Village wealth-building leader Li Liping: The beekeeper woman at the foot of the Liupan Mountains
In Guyuan, there is a woman who leads beekeepers in raising bees and producing honey. What sets her apart is that she can "direct" bees to collect nectar according to need. She has now developed 6 types of honey, among which peony honey is a first in Ningxia, priced at up to 780 yuan per kilogram. This has not only solved the problem of beekeepers having to roam around to keep bees, but also increased honey output and quality. Right now, as buckwheat flowers are blooming, she has once again organized beekeepers to bring their bees to a ten-thousand-mu buckwheat planting base to collect pollen and make honey. She is Li Liping.
Li Liping, 38 years old this year, is a woman of legendary character - bold and daring, willing to take risks and act. Li Liping's father was a top student at Tsinghua University. In order to support 8 children through school, her father opened the first electric welding and machinery repair shop in Sanying Town, Yuanzhou District. When Li Liping was in junior high school and lived at the school, her father would deliver dry rations to her every week. Li Liping recalls that money was tight then, and the family ate coarse grains, but what her father brought her each time was always white flour steamed buns.
"Every time my father brought me dry rations, he would always urge me to study hard, and then hurry off to the welding shop," Li Liping said. Each time she watched her father's receding figure on his bicycle, she could not help but burst into tears, wanting to help ease his burden as soon as possible.
After graduating from junior high school, Li Liping decided not to continue her studies and to leave the opportunity to her older brothers and sisters. This decision met with strong opposition from her parents, but under Li Liping's insistence, her parents eventually gave in, and her father even cried bitterly over it.
At just 15 years old, Li Liping began learning the trade from her father. Electric welding and machinery repair is dirty and exhausting work. Li Liping's face was often burned by electric welding, but she never complained of hardship or fatigue. Three years passed in a flash. Under her father's influence and guidance, she not only mastered electric welding and machinery repair skills, but also developed a character that refused to admit defeat.
In order to carve out a career, Li Liping decided to go out on her own to start a business. She successively engaged in commercial marketing, steel structure processing and other businesses. In 2002, Li Liping married, and her husband's family was a well-known local beekeeping family. The observant Li Liping noticed that her mother-in-law's family kept nearly a hundred hives, but there was only one type of honey.
"How can we increase the variety of honey while also raising output?" Li Liping began to ponder. It happened that in Li Liping's hometown, someone had planted Astragalus membranaceus over a large area through land transfer, and whenever the astragalus flowers bloomed, the color of the honey produced by her family changed. Through many days of observation, Li Liping found that the change in honey color was caused by bees collecting astragalus flowers.
"If bees can collect astragalus flowers, they can also collect other flowers." At this thought, a flash of inspiration came to Li Liping's mind, and she decided to find a way to make the bees collect different flower nectars. Starting each June, based on the flowering periods of wolfberry, alfalfa and other plants, Li Liping and her family brought bees to the edges of fields to collect nectar. During this period, Li Liping found that honey output increased markedly, and the purity of the honey was improved. After solving the previous drawback of "waiting idly by a tree stump for a hare" in nectar collection and honey making, a new problem emerged: there was no fixed large-area flower source, so the bees had to be taken out frequently to find flowers, which was not only mentally and physically exhausting, but also made output and quality impossible to guarantee. So Li Liping set about figuring out how to make bees collect flowers and produce honey according to her wishes.
In order to give the bees a fixed flower source and guarantee bee product quality from the source, after Li Liping established a bee products company in the Yuande Charity Industrial Park in Yuanzhou District in 2014, she traveled to Gansu, Qinghai, Shaanxi, Sichuan and other places to look for flower sources. At the same time, she invested locally in Guyuan and helped establish a peony planting base, an astragalus planting base, a buckwheat planting base, an alfalfa base and a wolfberry base.
With nectar-collection bases in place, Li Liping contacted beekeepers everywhere and established a beekeeping cooperative, investing to help villagers raise bees. To relieve beekeepers of worries, Li Liping also signed honey purchase contracts with villagers to solve the problem of selling bee products. Li Liping did a calculation for the reporter: the cost of one hive is 1000 yuan to 1800 yuan; based on one hive producing 240 kg of honey and 1 kg of honey selling for 40 yuan, after deducting costs, one can earn 7800 yuan a year. "Beekeeping can be said to be an industry with huge returns from a small investment - low investment, quick results, high income," Li Liping said.
"With fixed nectar-collection bases and a large number of beekeepers, you can make the bees produce honey according to your needs," Li Liping said. Of the 12 months in a year, 4 months are the nectar-collection period. From June to September each year, according to the different flowering periods of plants such as alfalfa, astragalus, wolfberry, peony and buckwheat, she organizes beekeepers to take bees to the bases to collect nectar. This organized nectar collection not only solves the problem of bees having to search everywhere for nectar because there is no fixed flower source, but also increases honey output and guarantees the purity and quality of each type of honey. By "directing" bees to produce honey, Li Liping successfully developed 6 major categories of honey.
As Guyuan's ecological environment improves year by year, together with land transfer and large-scale planting of medicinal herbs and crops, favorable conditions have been created for beekeeping. This year, after Guyuan made beekeeping an industry for local farmers to escape poverty and become prosperous, through government support and enterprise-led development, the bee industry has grown rapidly in Guyuan, and Li Liping's practice of "directing" bees to produce honey can be said to be unique in driving villagers to prosperity.