They have to climb
those towering trees of Agusan forests in order to provide for their families
back home. They travelled all the way from the neighboring province in order to
harvest sweet honey and combs from wild bees that built their clinging wax
colonies on the many remaining forests trees of Northern Mindanao. Such a risky
source of livelihood indeed, there are dangers of falling from old tall trees,
of being stung by these wild bees, and of being apprehended and suspected as
government’s intel by some ragtag armed
groups of the historic proletarian struggle that are also lurking in the
forest. If Joshua Piven, the author of bestselling book The Escape Artists had only knew about this
nerve-wracking job of climbing forests trees unharnessed and removing stored
honeys from wax combs without protective suits, and risking oneself from bees’ sting attacks, Piven could have added this Pinoy's odd job on his list of stories on his
book.
This odd work is their only known means of fighting poverty back home. Unmindful of the dangers that go with such work which is familiarly known as “pamuhag”, they have become experts of this trade, though it was not an overnight mastery of skills, it took them years of death-defying climbs with flaming torch in one hand and an uncertain fate inside their souls, fogging the wax sanctuary with smokes from burnt coco leaves. The bees retaliated by attacking the intruders with painful stung. After these Mamuhagays have succeeded in clearing the bees’ sanctuary from combatant drones, the wax can be broken, and the oozing honeys are caught by a funnel placed in the mouth of plastic gallon containers pulled up by a rope from below. The same rope is used to bring down filled- up gallon containers and the honeys are being transferred to bigger containers that are waiting below. These Mamuhagays could fill as many as 5 to 10 twenty –gallon- containers, depending on the sizes of bee colonies they have literally conquered and destroyed. This tribe of Mamuhagays must be regarded as valiant colonizers because they can subdue colonies, the colonies of bees for that matter.
They have to make an estimate of their harvested honeys in order to cope with the expenses of travel, food and lodging while away from home, or else it could be a bad business or just plain break even. Their group composed of 5 to 10 persons, and each person must set to bring 20 gallons of honey back home enough for a month long sustenance of their families. The honeys are being bottled and sold at P150 per bottle (375ml) in the city by their spouses and able dependents. The city dwellers have rather preferred to buy honeys sourced out from the wild than those coming from artificially cultured Korean bees, maybe because the sterile urban settlers are still hoping to find products that are pure and undiluted and directly mined from the primitive wild forest. And the city dwellers must be grateful to this band of Mamuhagays; they had risk their lives and limbs just to provide the urban settlers with honeys coming from a thousand -years -old bees, whose colonies are much older than our present metropolis, and less complicated than this human settlements that we know. As the wise counsel from King Solomon aptly pronounced:
“It is not good to eat too much honey, nor is it honorable to seek one’s own honor.”
(Prov. 25:27)