Cho Seong-hoan’s father liked to say that the honeybees on his farm were lucky. Unlike typical South Koreans, they could cross into North Korea, as he had done before war divided the peninsula.
"I also really envy them,” Cho, 59, said over the drone of bees on a searing summer morning at the family farm he took over when his father died in 2022. He was sitting about half a mile from the Demilitarized Zone, the 155-mile-long strip of land separating the Koreas that is littered with land mines and sealed by razor-wire fences.
Cho is one of roughly two dozen South Korean honeybee farmers working in a 6-mile-wide patchwork of rice paddies, forests, graveyards and firing ranges beside the 71-year-old DMZ. The area is known as the Civilian Control Zone and is heavily militarized and closed to most civilians.