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,” Mr. 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.

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       Cho Seong-hoan at his honeybee farm in the Civilian Control Zone, an area closed to most civilians.

       Mr. Cho is one of roughly two dozen South Korean honeybee farmers working in a six-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.

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       The work hasn’t made them rich, but the honey tastes great, thanks largely to the area’s exceptional biodiversity.

       Some of the farmers are motivated by something that transcends business. In a land where a 1953 armistice divided many Korean families for generations, they are seeking closure for wartime traumas that have never quite healed.

       The Civilian Control Zone, about an hour’s drive from Seoul, is not a normal place to work. Farmers enter it at a military checkpoint along the Imjin River, where they present special IDs that allow them to work, but not sleep, inside.

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