Call my honey

Honey is a pretty expensive thing in Japan. I mean sure you can find like half a liter of it on sale for 6 bucks, but not the good stuff.

For whatever reason Japan has a sincere lack of honey bees which is rather odd due to how involved they are with their agriculture. And even then, the bees in Japan are just not your usual honey bee. There are no bee keepers with their little collection of traditional white box hives that go and maintain everything in their tan bee keeping suits. Rather there are every so often and in isolated locations these crappily assembled industrial looking cylindrical metal structures. Which probably haven't been checked since the day of their existence. And those, those are the bee hives of Japan. I can't claim to have ever seen a bee near them, but I suppose they must be some what functional since somehow things are getting pollinated. From what I have found, their locations are often somewhere on the mountain side. Not really any where near farms, but cedar trees, which are a whole other sort of farm.
The one pictured here is actually the best one I have ever happened upon. Well maintained, made of wood and more importantly, it doesn't look like someones junk that they just happened to trow away on the side of a mountain. The owners have a little home-grown kind of cafe that they use their spoils for. Really sweet place.

Supposedly in Kyushu there must have some semi successful beekeeper  or another since Japan's only widely publicized honey I know of comes from there. So I suppose it is possible there is an actual beekeeper of sorts in Japan, it is just pretty rare.
Well there is one other place, how famous is it or successful it is I cannot say, but it gained itself a bit of notoriety last year as it happens...these beehives of which I speak, happen to be near  a Hershey's factory. And last year, instead of pollinating flowers like good little bees, the Hershey's factory just smelled oh so much sweeter and the little bees went there to collect their sugar instead. They went home to their hive in droves and again returning like junkies to their dealer needing a fix. With so much manufactured sugar in the honey, it turned it green and needless to say super sweet. And like all other hard drugs, it killed its users.