CIVIL CONTROL ZONE, South Korea — Cho Seong-hoan’s father liked to say that the bees on his farm were lucky. Unlike typical South Koreans, they were able to cross into North Korea, as he had done before war divided the peninsula.
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“I envy them a lot, too,” said Cho, 59, at the family farm she took over when her father died in 2022. He was sitting less than a kilometer from the Demilitarized Zone, the 250-kilometer-long strip of land separating the Koreas that is riddled with landmines and sealed with razor-wire fences.
Cho is one of about two dozen South Korean bee farmers working in a 10-kilometer-wide patchwork of rice paddies, forests, graveyards and firing ranges next to the 71-year-old ZDC. The area is known as the Civil Control Zone and is heavily militarized and closed to most civilians.
Their work has not made them rich, but the honey tastes delicious, thanks mainly to the exceptional biodiversity of the area.
Some of the farmers are motivated by something beyond business. a land where a 1953 armistice divided many Korean families for generations, they seek closure for the traumas of war.
Cho’s ancestral village in the western part of the area was evacuated during the war and abandoned. “There are many people who still miss their hometown,” he said.
Cho’s father was allowed to return to the area to farm in the 1970s. Other beekeepers have arrived more recently.
One of them, Park Jung-sun, said he was drawn to the border area because his father, who moved to South Korea during the war, was born in the North. Park, 45, said he planned to bury half of his father’s ashes in the controlled area. He is saving the other half to bury in his father’s home village if the two Koreas are ever reunited.
The border area, about an hour’s drive from Seoul, is not a normal place to work. Farmers enter via a military checkpoint along the Imjin River, where they present special IDs that allow them to work inside.
Because many parts of the controlled zone and the ZDC have been allowed to grow naturally for decades, the area is bursting with flowers that provide a diverse mix of nectar and pollen.
Cho said his farm is close enough to the 4-kilometer-wide DCZ that his bees can easily fly inside — perhaps even into North Korean territory — several times a day.
Beekeepers in the border area represent a fraction of the nearly 40,000 in South Korea, said Pak Se-yeong, who He maintains hives in the controlled area and is the general secretary of a branch of the Korean Beekeeping Association.
Each year, Cho sells about 1,000 liters of her ZDC Flower Honey, which she packages in half-liter glass bottles that retail for about $33.
When Cho inherited the farm, deciding to keep it running was an easy decision.
““People told me, ‘It’s too hard and you’ll give up right away,’” she said. “But I’m still here.”
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