Souad A. Shairra

After the decline of the cotton crop, Egyptian beekeepers started to depend on two main crops, alfalfa and citrus, to produce honey. In Egypt, honeybees pollinate citrus flowers in March, and clover crops in May. But in recent years, hundreds of beekeepers in Egypt have suffered setbacks, and have had to deal with with large numbers of bees dying. They attribute those deaths to two main factors: the systemic use of pesticides in and around fields visited by bees, and the Nosema disease, a bacteria that feeds on bees’ fat and cannot be treated. High temperatures and humidity levels have been shown to be a problem by another study.

The other major issue in Egypt is the disappearance of resistant strains of Egyptian honeybees, such as the Lamarckii bee. Until now, neither the government nor research institutes have put in place a program to safeguard those bees. Dr. Yahya Al-Najjar, who is a researcher at the Faculty of Science at Tanta University, concluded that stress and insecticides (particularly neonicotinoids) increase the death rate of bees in a study published in Ecotoxicology in 2013.

The work we are currently doing looks at improving the sustainability and compatibility of the citrus-honey agroecosystem. We want to ramp up farm productivity while ensuring the system’s environmental, societal and economical sustainability across the Mediterranean basin. To do this, we are reviewing two distinct production systems, and will design and assess an innovative combined farming system that will include the sustainability features. We will enhance the biological control of pests and pollination ecosystem services, diminish fertilizer application on crops and honeybees’ pests, which will increase the overall quality of the food produced for humans as well. We will also increase the overall ecosystem diversity, sustainability and resilience to climate change, and establish food chains that will guarantee higher levels of quality and traceability of the hive products. In addition, PLANT-B will increase the flowering of citrus during the blooming season, and integrate medicinal and aromatic plants to improve honey production.

Egypt is the second largest honey producer in the Middle East after Algeria. During the year 2019, Egypt exported, according to an official numbers, over 2500 tons of honey to 7 countries, namely Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, Kuwait, Singapore and Indonesia. In 2017-2018, Egypt produced 1.2 million package bees (a wooden frame box with screen on two sides used to transport bees to a new hive) and about 900,000 in 2019. Because of COVID-19, we do not have data on the production in 2020.