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Beekeeping helps villagers tend coastal forests in Thai mangrove hotspot

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BAN NAI NANG, Thailand — Carefully prying open the lid of a wooden bee box, Ali Madwang gazes intently into the cavity as sunlight illuminates the scene within. A hubbub of tiny bustling black bees hover and crawl over scores of thumb-sized, bulbous cells, each glistening with dark treacle-like honey.  “I have seen how bees collaborate as a unified group, helping each other take care of the hive,” Ali tells Mongabay during a visit to the village of Ban Nai Nang in southern Thailand’s Krabi province. As the secretary of the Ban Nai Nang community enterprise group, Ali helps to manage bee hives in the village of 1,700 inhabitants nestled on a mangrove-lined backwater at the edge of the Andaman Sea’s picturesque Phang Nga Bay. The village fishing pier overlooks dense mangrove forests that sustain local fish and shellfish harvesting, and provide habitat for threatened species, including otters, marine turtles, dugongs and sharks, not to mention their vital carbon storage capacity. Artisanal fishing boats putter up and down the sun-dappled waterway, while white egrets stalk brown-camouflaged mudskippers that slip and slide across the mangrove flats. For Ali, growing up in the coastal village meant mangroves were always part of his life. But he says he truly began to appreciate the interconnected relationship between village life and the surrounding natural ecosystems when his community developed a close relationship with bees as a way of galvanizing support for mangrove conservation. “Mangrove forests and bees are the way of life of the Ban…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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