Bee keepers also feel the heat as weather continues to change

A Palestinian worker holds up a frame after removing it from a beehive to collect honeybee combs during the harvest at an apiary near Beit Hanun in the northern Gaza Strip on April 30, 2017. Jihad Abu Shamalah, the owner of the apiary from Gaza cultivates 450 hives, producing some 4000 kilos of honey every year which is only sold in the Gaza Strip. / AFP PHOTO / MOHAMMED ABED

In the middle of a seven-acre woodlot of indigenous trees in Chemare, a village in Rift Valley, Charles Ng’ong’oni keeps 164 hollow-log beehives, which in good years bring him a healthy income by producing thousands of litres of honey.

Ng’ong’oni, 63, has managed the hives since the 1970s. But these days he is being joined by a growing number of farmers in East Africa – and around the world – who are taking up beekeeping as a way of broadening their income in the face of wilder weather, including heat, droughts and floods that can decimate crops. But beekeeping, Kenyan experts now say, is not proving as climate hardy as farmers had hoped.

 Last year, amid widespread drought, Ng’ong’oni had almost nothing to sell after harvesting just 25 litres of honey, down from his usual average of 3,280 litres. Ninety-six per cent of his beehives had no honey at all, he said, with the bees unable to find enough nectar from his parched trees and nearby fields.

“There were no flowers to feed on and most of the bees migrated to where they would find nectar. It was a terrible year for me,” Ng’ong’oni told Reuters at his farm in the Kuresoi, Nakuru County, which this year has seen better rains.

Beekeeping is being widely introduced to communities in East Africa as an alternative way of making money as climate change brings harsher weather. But Ng’ong’oni said even the bees are struggling to deal with drought and worsening heat extremes, despite his having planted a woodlot of trees to help provide nectar.

Benedict Wambua, a researcher at South Eastern Kenya University’s school of agriculture and veterinary sciences, found in a 2016 study that recurrent droughts were among the factors limiting the use of beekeeping as a climate coping strategy, largely because honey production fell in drought periods.

The area he and colleagues studied in Kitui County, in eastern Kenya, “showed a notable decline in productivity attributed to drought, deforestation and inefficiency” by farmers, the study said.

Philip Kisoyan, a programe officer at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in Kenya, said he had also seen evidence of problems. “Extreme climatic effects lead to low or postponed plant flowering time, reduces pollen and nectar availability, increases water stress, (and) inhibits movements and bee communications”.

“During the prolonged dry spell, bees migrate ... leaving empty hives.”

Kenya’s bees are usually active from April to December, as plants flower. But last year, buzzing bees were a rare sight, Ng’ong’oni explained.