How we make honey

Pure rainforest goodness from the Drawa Forest Project

By Nakau

April 27^th, 2025

The Drawa Forest Project on Vanua Levu in Fiji is well known for its community-owned honey business. Here, we share the origins of some of the best honey in Fiji and the challenges that come with bee-keeping in the Pacific.

Photos by Rob Rickman

When eight Drawa mataqalis banded together in 2015 to kick-start their forest carbon project, five mataqali also took the opportunity to co-develop a community enterprise: Rainforest honey.

Some community members had already a little training from the Fiji Government on beekeeping. They felt a honey business would help bring alternative income streams into their communities and families alongside the carbon income. Meanwhile, the nearby Drawa rainforest would be protected from logging and land-clearing.

Ten years on — and there have been some challenges along the way — but the honey coming out of Drawa is as pure as ever, fed by rainforest and garden fruit flowers. Now, the project owners are ready to reinvigorate and grow their honey business once more.

A community enterprise

The Drawa Honey Project and business is run by the Drawa Block Forest Community Cooperative (DBFCC), the community-owned entity that also manages the Drawa forest carbon project.

As the carbon project was still developing back in 2015, a start-up grant from the New Zealand Government helped the cooperative set up hives in five mataqali, build a storage facility and purchase honey processing equipment.

When the carbon project was verified and carbon income started to flow in 2018, the cooperative was then able to use carbon income to buy raw honey from the mataqali honey producers. An approach that continues today.

The DBFCC are also responsible for processing, bottling, marketing and selling the honey — proceeds feeding back into the cooperative to help pay the land lease for the storage facility and ongoing payments to honey farmers for the raw honey each season.

Sometimes, honey farmers like Ani Matamosi and Vilomena Tagiteci (below) from Batiri are employed by the cooperative to extract and process the honey, especially in years where there is abundance.

When the honey flows

The honey harvesting season starts in June and can run all the way until December. DBFCC's Business Manager, Waita Curuvale (below), says that while the mile-a-minute flower is not the main food for bees, it is the primary indicator for honey farmers that there is honey flowing in the hives.

"When the mile-a-minute starts flowering, the honey flow starts,” says Waita. “The bees also feed on all the fruit trees [in gardens] and on the flowering fruit trees in the rainforest.”

Drawa forest Head Ranger Jerry Lotawa names some of the rainforest plants that are important to sustain the bees, and which help make this honey so special.

“There are plenty of fruit trees in the forest that flower that the bees love,” says Jerry. These include the locally named Dawa (Pometia pinnata), Makosoi (Canga ordorata or ylang-ylang), cassava, coconut, Kavika (Malay apple) and palms.

Once the frames of raw honey have been carefully removed from the hives using smoke to keep the bees at bay, honey farmers take their honey to the processing facility which is in the cooperative headquarters just outside Batiri village.

It's a short walk from the Batiri hives to the honey processing facility. But other mataqali — which stretch all the way up to Drawa village — must transport their honey by truck.

Processing the honey

Extracting honey from the hive frames and the waxy honeycomb is the first step in making the Drawa rainforest honey product. Waita explains the process:

“For one hive, if it is full of honey, we can produce 20kg of honey but if not full, it will be around 10kg," she says.

"After the farmers harvest it, the cooperative members will extract the honey. The women do that because they are perfect enough to do it ... and sometimes, if the season is good, we will hire women from the mataqali to help.”

"We leave it for two weeks to settle and for the moisture to come up, then we wipe the moisture away. When there is no more white foam on top of the honey and when the moisture percentage is less than 20 percent, that is a good time to bottle the honey."

"Our customers go for it because it’s pure honey. Once they try it, they go after the Drawa honey."

The Drawa cooperative have a small but established market through the Live and Learn network in Fiji, The Pacific Community (SPC) and a wholesaler from Suva who always buys by the bucket.

“Our customers go for it because it’s pure honey. Once they try it, they go after the Drawa honey,” says Waita.

Once the honey is bottled, labelled and sent to market it can fetch $10 for 250ml, $20 for 750ml or $18 per kilo when bought by the bucket.

But, Waita explains, some is also reserved and sold in small 50 cent packets to the communities and other nearby villages on Vanua Levu.

Challenges along the way

The Drawa honey is among the best in Fiji but producing honey in a tropical climate comes with challenges — the biggest for Drawa has been cyclones.

The honey project started out with five participating mataqali and around 25 hives in each village, but two devastating tropical cyclones and invasive varroa mite have recently destroyed many of the hives and, in 2024, only two mataqali were able to provide honey to sell — Batiri and Lutukina — both with reduced hives.

“[Hives] were spoiled by Yasa and Ana, in 2020 and 2021," says Waita. "Another thing was varroa mite. The biosecurity were going and checking it out and they burnt boxes themselves. Not just ours, but other [honey] farmers’ hives too.”

It's a challenge the DBFCC are keen to solve and the cooperative are now seeking ways they can support the reinvigoration of the honey business and bring keen honey farmers who lost hives back into the project.

“They already have the knowledge, the manpower is there," says Jerry (below). "Its just the hives that were destroyed by Yasa."

What's next

Rainforest honey as an additional and alternative income source is important to the mataqali participating in the Drawa Forest Carbon project. Currently the Drawa Block Forest Community Cooperative are seeking support and grant opportunities that will allow them to rebuild the honey business and continue to provide their customers with the Drawa famous honey.

The Drawa Forest Project uses the Nakau Methodology and an expansion of the project is currently supported by Climate Resilient by Nature, an initiative of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Aid and WWF-Australia and implemented by Nakau and Live and Learn.