Tikung boards
Shaped planks hung in seasonally flooded forest in West Kalimantan for giant honey bees to build on. The bees are entirely wild, the boards are owned and inherited, and the arrangement is neither hunting nor hive beekeeping.
Current status
Local living practice
Practised now, in a limited area or by a limited number of communities.
Currently practised, with cooperative and certification records providing direct present-tense documentation.
How it works
A tikung is a shaped plank, hung at an angle beneath a branch in the seasonally flooded forest of the Danau Sentarum region. Apis dorsata swarms arriving in the area build their open combs on the underside, which places the colony where a person can reach it from a boat or a short climb rather than forty metres up a tualang.
The boards are made, placed, maintained, owned and inherited. The bees are not: they arrive, build, are harvested and eventually migrate away. What is owned is the site and the structure, which is the same logic as owning a marked bee tree.
Ownership, cooperatives and certification
Tikung placement is governed by customary arrangements over locations in the flooded forest, held by families and passed on. Since the 1990s a cooperative structure has been built on top of that customary tenure, with harvesting protocols and organic certification aimed at export markets.
What a season looks like
Boards are checked and repaired before the swarms arrive, occupied boards are monitored, and harvesting is done at night from boats or short climbs when the combs are full. A family may maintain many boards across a stretch of flooded forest, and occupancy varies from year to year with the migration.
Because the colonies migrate away, the boards stand empty for part of the year. That rhythm — build, wait, harvest, empty — is what distinguishes the system from beekeeping in the ordinary sense, where the colony is the asset rather than the site.
Cultural significance
Customary rights over tikung locations are inherited property in a landscape that is under water for part of the year, which is an unusual form of tenure.
Pressures and conservation
The system depends on the flooded forest remaining intact and on the migratory bees continuing to arrive, so it is exposed to landscape change well outside the harvesters' control.
What this page does not claim
That tikung is ancient, or that certification means the honey is chemically distinctive. The customary tenure is documented and the cooperative and certification layer is recent, and the record separates the two.
In short
- Planks hung in flooded forest for wild giant honey bees to build on.
- The board and the site are owned and inherited; the bees are not.
- Neither hunting nor hive beekeeping, which is the point.
Sources
- Asian Honey Bees: Biology, Conservation, and Human Interactions — Harvard University Press (2006) · Monograph
- Bees and their role in forest livelihoods — Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2009) · Industry body
- The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting — Routledge (1999) · Historical text
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.