Words by Emilie Cresp

Camili, Turkey

Camili is a village of I81 inhab-itants, located in the Black Sea Mountains in the northeast of Turkey at the border with Georgia.

It is also the only UNESCO biosphere reserve — defined as a "learning place for sustainable development" — in Turkey. What literally means "the place with the mosque", is home to one of the most important bee species in the world: the Caucasian bee. Known for its calm nature and unusually long proboscis (feeding tube, it can extract nectar from the deepest nectar tissues, where no other honey bees can. This, along with the untouched quality of the endemic plant species and the local forest ecosystem, makes the honey produced in this region some of the best in the world.

https://theplantmagazine.com/magazine/issue-21/