Mint Honey Cooperative
02/11/2021
Mint is a wild plant that grows only in the Dong Van Plateau. When the weather is a bit cold, the mint trees release pungent mint aroma, blooming tenderly purple flowers that, mixing with other grasses, transform the whole mountains into a colourful painting. Since ancient times, local people have been making use of these flowers to keep bees, producing the honey of special medicinal properties.
The Dong Van UNESCO Global Geopark is not only famous for majestic landscapes, winding roads, or vast and colourful fields of buckwheat flowers etc. It is also well-known with unique local products, e.g. corn wine, “shan tuyet” tea (wild mountainous tea), honey etc., especially mint honey.
Mint is a wild plant that grows only in the Dong Van Plateau. When the weather is a bit cold, the mint trees release pungent mint aroma, blooming tenderly purple flowers that, mixing with other grasses, transform the whole mountains into a colourful painting. Since ancient times, local people have been making use of these flowers to keep bees, producing the honey of special medicinal properties.
Since the Dong Van Plateau has been recognized as a UNESCO Global Geopark new opportunities for local people arise, of which beekeeping provides a steady income and a number of people become rich from mint honey production.
The Tuan Dung Mint Honey Cooperative in Meo Vac Town was established in 2013. Taking the advantage of mint flowers, starting initially from 70 native colonies, by now it has expanded to 3,000 colonies, producing on the average 15,000 liters of mint honey per year. It also built a processing plant, a shop for marketing and selling the product, creating stable jobs for 24 regular workers and 60 other “satellite” households.
The honey product of the Cooperative has been granted the Geographical Indication Certificate by the National Office of Intellectual Property, the Ministry of Science and Technology - an evidence of its effective operation in the conservation and sustainable development of honey bees in the UNESCO Global Geopark.
Management Board of Dongvan Geopark