Tunisian beekeepers battle extreme heat to keep the buzz alive

Tunisian beekeeper Hela Boubaker keeps a firm smile as she inspects an empty hive box, the 20th hive she has lost due to heat or wildfires this year.

Hives are carefully placed in the shade on this farm 40 miles north of the capital, Tunis. At 10 a.m. on a late-August Tuesday, it is already 95 degrees.

Thirsty bees dive-bomb a bucket of water, drowning for a drink before she can place a sponge as a landing pad.

“It’s not easy,” she says as she slides an empty honeycomb frame back into its box, “but at the same time, we are not easy. We won’t give up.”

In this North African country, where nearly 40% of citizens and entire communities rely on farming for their livelihoods, bees are a big business.

And to protect their beehives against extreme weather, the nation’s apiarists are turning to innovative solutions – from phone apps to herb gardens to genetics – to keep the buzz alive in Tunisia.

Record-setting heat

In recent years, more young Tunisians and many female entrepreneurs are turning to beekeeping as a climate-friendly, sustainable form of self-employment in a country where jobs are few and far between.

Some 13,000 Tunisians work as full-time beekeepers, according to local farming unions, in addition to thousands more who rely on apiary work as another source of income, producing a combined 280,000 metric tons of honey per year.

Yet for those new to beekeeping in Tunisia, the past two years have been no honeymoon.

Tunisia has seen record-setting scorching temperatures, including dayslong 115-plus-degree heat waves and record 120-degree temperatures in its tree-lined temperate north – the nation’s beekeeping hub – that sparked devastating wildfires in 2022 and again this July. This year the country has also struggled with a record drought, leaving regions without water for weeks at a time.

According to researchers and apiarists, the extreme weather has nearly halved honey production, from an average of 8 kilos (17 pounds) of honey per hive to 4 to 5 kilos per hive in 2023.

Ms. Boubaker, an entrepreneur in her late 20s, is finding ways to keep her bees alive.

She has developed a patented device and nonlethal method to extract bee venom from her honeybees, drawing exactly 0.01 grams of apitoxin per bee to be used in medical treatments and beauty products.

“These are precious insects whose lives we depend on for our ecosystem and food,” she says. “We need to save every bee life we can.”

To adapt to a changing climate, Ms. Boubaker is working with other apiarists to better cultivate the rented or borrowed plots of farmers’ land where they place their hives. Increasingly, they rely on drought-resistant and hearty plants such as lemon trees, thyme, and marjoram to ensure year-round nectar and food sources for hives, as more delicate flowers and plants wilt in increasingly hot temperatures.

Like many apiarists, she rotates her beehives through geographic locations with varying topographies – the mountainous pine-treed north, the more arid south, and the rich fertile farmland around Bizerte.

Ms. Boubaker’s commute to check on her dispersed 82 colonies is a six-hour, 200-mile round trip that she takes every two days.

Yet the geographic dispersal of apiarists’ beehives has led to another, emerging threat to Tunisia’s honey-makers: crime. Specifically, theft.

Devastated by the sudden loss of entire colonies to heat and fire, and desperate to start over again quickly, some less scrupulous beekeepers have begun stealing the unattended hive boxes of other apiarists.

It is a phenomenon reported on by beekeepers across Tunisia, who have gone to fields to discover that their hive boxes have disappeared.

“Only a beekeeper would have the knowledge and equipment to be able to pick up hives and transport them,” says Ms. Boubaker, who rents fields in gated farms to minimize theft.

“Unfortunately, people are desperate. When you lose the source of your livelihood, you are desperate to rebuild it. Some may be tempted to steal money. Others steal bees.”

SmartBee app takes flight

To help Tunisian beekeepers confront 21st-century challenges, innovators are putting constantly updated apiary data in an app.

“Beekeepers can feel the impact of climate change, but they don’t know how to adapt,” says Khaled Bouchoucha, a Tunisian engineer who has grappled with solving Tunisia’s plummeting bee numbers. “All the knowledge beekeepers have accumulated for decades and generations is no longer applicable” in a rapidly changing climate.

In 2021, Mr. Bouchoucha developed and launched SmartBee, a device and app that provides beekeepers with real-time data on hive temperature, humidity, weight, and mortality rates.

“We give beekeepers real-time information in order to act,” he adds.

With the data, advance warnings, and advice sent to beekeepers’ phones, apiarists are informed when to move overheated hives to cooler areas and when isolated hives have become too cold, or they’re alerted to provide sugar solutions to boost weak bees – a critical service when hives are often dozens of miles away.

SmartBee is also an anti-theft device. Its GPS locator and warning system sense if boxes are moved. This summer several beekeepers have been able to locate and reclaim stolen hives.  

But in the face of global warming, early warning is not enough, beekeepers say.  

Mr. Bouchoucha’s Beekeeper Tech company is using data sets from customers to single out the most productive bee queens in the past few years of higher temperatures and lower food sources, helping beekeepers select the most climate-resilient and adaptable bees for breeding in their specific region.

“Genetics and adaptation are the future of beekeeping,” says Mr. Bouchoucha, whose SmartBee is now being exported to Middle East and North African countries including Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

“With North Africa on the front lines of climate change,” he says, “we need to be on the front lines of solutions.”