Honey hunters
location : Chinnar kuth, Mankulam
Honey is sweet, but the process of getting the honey down from the tall trees is a labourious, risky and most dangerous job i have ever seen
The group of 4 Muthuvan community is from Urulanthanni, saw them in the morning, with machetes, and they cut few big & thinner bamboo reeds
Thicker ones are spliced and they began to make wooden nails, which is used to climb the trees, this nails are connected with thinner bamboo reeds so that the can climb the trees with ease
After 7 pm they started with the nailing work, the process was stopped because of the light from the moon was a hindrance. In pitch black at about 2.30am still hearing the noise of the wooden hammer hitting the nails, bamboo torches, slightly lit to ward of the bees was taken up
Collecting honey combs are done by 2 persons, one with a gunny bag on a long bamboo pole will hold this below the comb, supporting team on the ground with torch will guide them , and the other person with a pole will pull down the honey comb to the gunny bag, stings are common and they are not bothered about this
A this was a job entirely under darkness no videos
After collecting the comb the team will extract the honey, filter and store, got about 10 litres, took the same to Anakulam, but didn't got any buyers so returned to Mankulam
The cheeni tree had 4 bee hives 1st one was taken on day 1 and without any sleep these guys again made nails for the 2nd day collected honey combs from 2 more hives the last one was left behind as it was small, this ended at 5.30 am, so a 48 hours job without any sleep
