The measure that matters to us is not how many jars we sell. It is how many people stayed.
Up here, leaving was the normal plan. You farmed corn until it was clear the year would not close, then someone in the family went south to a factory and sent money back. That was not a failure of effort. It was arithmetic.
Honey changed the arithmetic. A family working hives on their own slopes earns from land they already have, in the village they already live in, without clearing anything or going anywhere. It is not a fortune and we would not pretend otherwise. It is enough to make staying a reasonable choice, which it had not been for a long time.
Beekeepers we trained now train their neighbours. Someone who learned to split a hive three years ago is teaching it to two people this season. We did not build that, we just stopped being the only ones who knew.
We also work outside the hives, workshops in the villages, sessions in local schools, talking about why the native bee and the wild flower matter to this place beyond what they earn. Some of that is straightforward self-interest: our honey only exists if the plateau stays intact. Some of it is that the children in these schools will decide what this landscape looks like in thirty years.
We should be careful not to overstate any of this. The mint fields are still shrinking. Foreign bees are still being brought in. We have changed the arithmetic on a number of specific slopes for a number of specific families, and that is the honest size of it.
But it is the direction we want, and it is moving.