Busybee's Buzz is to Bee or Not to Bee

How one man's encounter with bees sparked a lifelong mission

- TANISHA SAXENA

On any given day in Pune, Amit Godse fields up to 20 calls—not from colleagues in a boardroom, but from strangers desperate to save a swarm: from a hive on a high-rise balcony to a queen clinging to a café awning.

At 40, Godse has become an unlikely guardian of India's most overlooked pollinators—a former software engineer who traded code for colonies and office cubicles for buzzing balconies.

It didn't start as a mission. It started with smoke, a burning hive, and a moment that refused to let go. It was late 2012 when Godse first witnessed a beehive being torched in his apartment complex in Pune. “It shook me,” says the founder of Bee Basket, an initiative devoted to rescuing and relocating wild bees across India. “I kept thinking—why were they killed? Was there really no alternative? Why do we want the honey but not the bees?”