Can Tho youth start a business from beekeeping

Desire to start a business

In early July 2025, Mr. Nguyen Kim Trong (34 years old, residing in Thoi An Dong ward, Can Tho city) was busy taking care of hundreds of honey bee boxes. his own in the garden. Mr. Trong said, his family was mainly farmers, after completing his military service and graduating as a medical doctor from the Western Secondary School, he went to work at a food processing company in Hau Giang . However, the young man always burned with the fire of starting a business on the land where he was born and raised.

Mr. Nguyen Kim Trong checks the bee colony. Photo: HH

In 2021, Mr. Trong started his entrepreneurial journey with a honey beekeeping model. Initially, he chose the traditional way, catching wild honey bee nests and domesticating them. However, this method is hard work, the results are not high, the amount of bees and honey for sugar is getting less and less, while it takes a lot of effort to domesticate wild bees. The initial failures became valuable lessons, motivating him to find more effective methods.

2022 marked an important turning point in Trong's entrepreneurial journey. Through the media, he learned about the Italian bee breed - a bee species with high honey productivity and easier to raise. Although he had to spend nearly 2 million VND for each beehive, he still decided to invest in buying the first 5 Italian beehives to raise. Not long after bringing them home, Trong encountered a big challenge when the bee colony was parasitized and sucked the blood of the pupae, causing a series of bees to die.

After the first failure, Mr. Trong was not discouraged and decided to "learn from the master". He constantly researched and learned and finally found a method of using essential oils to kill parasites and effectively protect the bee colony. His beekeeping experience was drawn from observing the habits of each bee colony. Thanks to his perseverance and constant learning, from the initial 5 bee hives, Trong has now successfully multiplied to nearly 300 bee hives.

To be successful in beekeeping, Trong shared, beekeepers need to understand the habits of bees, the weather, geography and flowering seasons. Each beehive is made of wood or iron, inside there are 8-10 beehives with a clear division of labor, including: queen bee to reproduce and create a colony, female worker bees to collect honey and male bees to mate.

During the dry months, bees will produce honey continuously. During the rainy season when bees cannot collect honey, it is also the time to regenerate the bee colony by creating a new queen. Because the old queen bee, weak reproduction will affect the number of colonies, so the honey collected is also less.

"To create a new queen, it is necessary to take the old queen out of the hive, then choose a strong bee box to select queen bee larvae under 3 days old and put them in fake buds in the box. When the queen is lost, worker bees will release royal jelly to feed the larvae and create a new queen. From there, a new queen will be created, reproduce to maintain the colony in large numbers, and produce the highest honey," Mr. Trong revealed.

Although beekeeping is not too difficult, beekeepers must be careful with pesticides. If bees are heavily poisoned, they will die en masse. “There are cases where bees with mild poisoning still fly back to the hive but do not go inside due to their instinct to protect the colony. In those cases, I use diluted lemon juice for the bees to suck to detoxify,” Trong shared his experience.

Mr. Trong placed the beehives under the fruit trees in the garden.

Ideas with different values

With nearly 300 honey boxes, to maintain a stable monthly income, Mr. Nguyen Kim Trong has a strategy of moving the beehives to many different provinces and cities so that the bees can collect natural honey from cajuput flowers, plums, rambutans, longans... On average, he collects about 2,000 liters of honey per month.

Not stopping there, Trong is also one of the pioneers in bringing bees to rice growing areas to collect nectar from rice flowers, a creative idea that brings different values. In addition, he also produces coffee pollen and raw honey to diversify his products.

Each type of honey from different flowers has its own flavor, such as coconut honey is dark, clear, and fatty; cajuput honey has the burnt sugary smell of cajuput flowers, with a sweet aftertaste; rambutan honey is light and sweet; longan honey is very sweet. In particular, coconut honey is not bitter, sweet, fatty, and fragrant, and is especially favored by customers.

Thanks to his success in starting a beekeeping business, in 2024, he won the first prize in the contest to find innovative start-up talents in Can Tho City. He was also honored as an Outstanding Youth of Binh Thuy District (old) for successfully starting a beekeeping business model.