Faced with climate change, Pakistani honey producers search for ‘plan bee’

PESHAWAR: Yasir Mehmood has been keeping honeybees since he was a young boy. When he turned 18, he decided to turn his hobby into a business.
He started out by setting up fifty beehive boxes in his hometown of Nowshehra, a city in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Now, two decades later, he has over 600 hives. 
Though business has boomed in past years, Mehmood says it has slowed down recently for a variety of reasons, not least climate change and deforestation. 
Around the world, global warming is changing the environmental cues that bees rely on to carry out the work of pollination. Spring now arrives earlier in many parts of the world and not all species are adjusting to this warming at the same rate, and some, like bees, are falling out of step.
“Our business has suffered due to climate change which has led to various diseases in bees,” Mehmood told Arab News. “The mortality rates of bees have become very high and that is affecting every aspect of our lives.”
Mehmood said sudden changes in weather and unseasonal rains had hampered his business and he was forced to relocate the bee boxes to an environment that better-suited honey production, thus raking up production costs. This year, he invested Rs.2 million in his business but earned only Rs.1.5 million.
Mehmood has tried to take various measures to improve his production. He has moved many of his boxes to Faisalabad to give the bees a more hospitable environment. Indeed, in the winter months that bring with them many new diseases that bees are susceptible to, Mehmood struggles to move his hives to the Punjab province. In summer, he tries to relocate them to places like Swat, Kalam, Chitral and Shandoor. He has also tried to place his beehives in fields of Arugula to help the bees survive the harsh cold and feed their offspring. Finally, he says, he has invested in modern medicine to heal bees hit by cold-related illnesses. But things have still remained tough.
“Previously we were generating honey for six seasons. Now it’s been limited to only two seasons,” said Noor Hasan, 55, who has worked as a bee specialist at the Tarnab Agriculture Research Institute since 1982.
Tarnab Farm in Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, is home to Pakistan’s biggest honey market, which exports about 4,000 tons of the commodity, worth nearly Rs 2.8 billion, to Arab countries every year. Berry and Acacia, commonly known as Palosa, are the most popular types of honey available in the market and commonly used by diabetics.
Pakistan used to export around Rs.15 billion worth of honey until 2004, which had sharply reduced to Rs.3 billion currently, according to Gul Badshah, senior vice president of the Bee Keepers, Exporters and Traders Honey Association.
At the moment Pakistan is only exporting honey to Gulf countries; European markets will remain at bay until Pakistan starts following international standards in honey production, Dr. Hussain Ali, a senior research scientist at Tarnab Farm, said: “And that can be achieved once we train our beekeepers and take precautionary measures to produce quality honey.”
Ali said Tarnab Farm was conducting research on the behavior, physiology and diseases of bees and how climate change was affecting them. He said deforestation was one of the major causes of reduction of honey in the country.
“That’s why we have lost some flavor of honey recently. Today we are seeing shortage of wild trees due to spraying on the fields, cutting of trees and urbanization. That’s why the business isn’t progressing,” Ali said. 
Honey business owners are optimistic that the government’s Billion Tree Tsunami scheme might help. The reforestation project has added 350,000 hectares of trees both by planting and natural regeneration, in an effort to fight the effects of climate change.
“Apart from the environment, this [reforestation] would be beneficial for the honey production where bees would work in modest temperature and be able to roam around more and more trees,” Mehmood said, adding that another step the government could take to help the honey business was training farmers about climate change and viral diseases prone to bees.