Honey Hunting in Palawan: The Tagbanua Knowledge Behind a Jar

Loreta Alsa remembers honey alongside cassava and banana. In her account of Tagbanua life in Sagpangan, Aborlan, it was food gathered for the household, squeezed by hand and kept in available containers, including palm and bamboo. Her 2026 interview for the Non-Timber Forest Products Exchange Programme Philippines begins a jar’s history somewhere more intimate than the shop: with foods eaten together, materials at hand, and people who knew how to bring sweetness home. Source 1

Alsa belongs to Samahan ng mga Katutubong Tagbanua sa Sagpangan, known as SAKTAS. Following this named community alongside earlier field research reveals connections among bee life cycles, forest access, family meals and the value of skilled work. Source 1

First, understand the nest

The giant honey bee, Apis dorsata, builds a single exposed comb, often suspended beneath a large branch or a cliff. A protective curtain of workers covers that comb. University of Florida entomologists describe colonies that can migrate seasonally in response to changing food resources. This is a very different working setting from opening a managed wooden hive beside a house. The location, timing and defensiveness of the colony are part of the labour that precedes a bottle of honey. Source 2

The distinction matters at the table too. The 2018 Sagpangan study in Ambio describes an older practice of taking the whole comb and eating the larvae, alongside enterprise-supported efforts to leave brood and take the honey-bearing portion. Participants could understand that leaving brood might permit another harvest while still valuing brood as food. A change in harvesting therefore involved an actual food preference and an immediate meal, as well as a conservation argument. Source 5

Calling one part “the product” can hide the significance of everything left behind. A buyer mainly encounters honey. A household may understand the same nest through several uses and obligations. A thoughtful history needs room for that difference, without turning a past practice into a rule that every present-day harvester must follow.

Learning to find sweetness

A Forest Products Research and Development Institute study, presented at a 2012 conference and published the following year, documented gathering in Kayasan, Campung Ulay and Punta Baja. Its interview-based account describes learning by accompanying experienced gatherers. Small teams followed flowering-tree locations and seasons, watched flight directions, and looked for traces of bees around river rocks. These observations belong to the report’s named sites; they should not be converted into a single method for all Indigenous people of Palawan. Source 3

The same account describes a division of physical work: a climber handled the honey-bearing comb, while companions below received it in a container lowered by rope. Processing could take place back in the village or away from the nest. Remembering those waiting below restores part of the hunt that the dramatic image of a lone climber can obscure. The journey home and the handling of the harvest are also skilled work. Source 3

In Alsa’s 2026 account, tutub refers to the mature, sealed honey portion that harvesters watch for. Ripeness is something to judge at the comb, before anyone begins processing it. Source 1

There is a useful lesson here for how we describe expertise. Knowing a forest does not mean possessing an unchanging map with guaranteed honey marked on it. It means making judgments during a particular visit: interpreting signs, deciding whether a find is ready, and knowing when a return will be more worthwhile than an immediate harvest. That combination of attention and restraint is easily lost when the finished food is described simply as “wild.”

Honey and the cultivated field belonged together

Wolfram Dressler’s 2005 study drew on fourteen months of fieldwork and oral histories between 2001 and 2004 in Cabayugan, near Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park. He described relationships between swidden fields, forest honey and cultural life, and argued that restrictive park management had treated connected activities as separate problems. In the food world he documented, rice, root crops and vegetables cultivated in clearings existed alongside gathering in adjacent forests. A forest product did not imply a household without farming. Source 4

Cabayugan elders also recounted collecting honey in a bamboo shaft called pendag and allowing it to ferment for people working in the fields. This is an attributed historical recollection, not a standard recipe or a procedure to reproduce. Its importance is the social setting: honey could travel into agricultural work and collective consumption, with meanings that a modern retail bottle would not explain. Source 4

A food becomes an enterprise product

By 2008, a paper by J. F. Pontillas and J. H. Primavera was discussing how the United Tribes of Palawan, or NATRIPAL, linked wild-honey gathering to wider markets. Their account placed customary knowledge, technology and enterprise management in the same conversation. Honey previously gathered for household consumption and limited local sale was being developed as a specialty product. The organisation’s wider work included education, health, organising and advocacy: the enterprise was situated within collective efforts concerning community life, rather than appearing as an isolated shop. Source 7

Anthropologist Sarah Webb followed the material passage of honey during her own fieldwork. In her 2013 account, honey moved from large plastic gallon jugs into smaller resale containers, acquiring labels and different presentations. Her Tagbanua collaborators called expert harvesters manlalbet. Webb brought honey and beeswax products, prices and provenance information together in workshops; participants handled and tasted them and discussed how value changed along their journeys. She later gave the collection to NATRIPAL. It offered harvesters a way to examine products encountered far beyond the place where their own work began. Source 8

Those container changes deserve attention. A large harvest vessel and a small labelled jar tell different stories to the person holding them. The first suggests transport and a volume of work; the second may suggest a place, a flavour or a gift. Neither container automatically tells us who performed the processing, how the price was divided, or how much honey remained for household use. Following the handovers makes those questions visible.

The 2018 value-chain analysis by Denise Margaret Matias and colleagues found a large gap between honey hunters’ gross margins and those of downstream actors in the studied enterprise. Most community members in that study still used honey, but reported small amounts, below one litre a year. These findings do not give a current price list or prove that trade caused a decline in consumption. They do show why a successful sale is insufficient evidence that the food’s producers receive a fair share or regularly enjoy it themselves. Source 6

Tradition does not have one fixed public version

The same value-chain study reported that the hunters it examined did not perform hunting rituals previously practised by their ancestors. It is a dated finding about the study participants, not a declaration that Tagbanua ritual life had ended. Source 6

In the 2026 interview, Alsa described prayers connected with entering forest spaces and harvesting, while explicitly keeping their words private. Her account preserves the existence of that practice without offering its content for reproduction. Source 1

These reports should remain visible together. Different speakers, dates, questions and definitions can produce different accounts; the evidence does not establish which factor explains the difference here. We do not need to invent a story of complete disappearance followed by revival. A food history can acknowledge what was said, by whom and when, while leaving a community’s private knowledge private.

The forest can become harder to read when access changes

Matias and her colleagues’ Ambio research combined a community survey with ecological analysis. In its identification task, 24% of 251 surveyed people correctly identified the giant honey bee. People who identified it correctly tended to live in areas with greater vegetation cover. The authors did not establish causality. The result is therefore evidence for a relationship worth investigating, not a score for the value of a culture or proof that schooling destroys knowledge. One identification exercise cannot represent everything a person knows about food. Source 5

More encouragingly, another project connected hunters’ existing knowledge with global positioning system equipment. During April–June 2015, Sagpangan hunters recorded 31 nests on their normal gathering trips. Consultation and training preceded the mapping, and a solar charging system supported the devices and cameras. Equipment stayed with the community. The published account makes the partnership concrete: the people who knew how to locate nests were also able to contribute the records from which a map was made. Source 9

A map can help pose future questions about changes in a food landscape. It cannot make bees stay, settle who controls a forest, or replace the knowledge needed on the next trip. Its value grows when the people collecting the information can use and interpret it themselves. The point is to add a useful tool to their work, rather than assume the coordinates contain all that work.

Restoring habitat, sustaining meals

Yale’s Environmental Leadership & Training Initiative records a further Sagpangan project developed through community consultation with Matias: planting native species suitable for bee habitat. It reports 33 people planting 6,024 seedlings across 1.5 hectares, with payment linked to seedlings still alive after two months. Matias and Alsa presented the work at Yale in 2018. These figures describe planting activity, not an independently measured increase in bee colonies or honey production. The important design choice was to make care after planting part of the agreement. Source 10

Alsa’s 2020 profile for the World Intellectual Property Organization gives another perspective on continuity. Pandemic travel restrictions interrupted the ability to bring crops to town for sale. She described families planting rice and other crops and saving seed for the next season. Her enterprise project also sought a brand that distinguished honey by its bee source and protected Tagbanua knowledge from exploitation. A household’s ability to feed itself and its wish to market a distinctive food appear in the same account. Source 11

For a food lover, the most rewarding way to understand Palawan honey is to keep the meal and the makers within view. Sweetness is the beginning of the story. Its depth comes from the judgment at the comb, the shared work of carrying and processing, the foods beside which honey is eaten, and the choices communities make about their knowledge and land. A jar becomes more interesting when those people remain present in how we describe it.