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here are no flowers left for them to find,” says Gul Badshah, standing in a thick blanket of smog, on the barren land of Chamkani, a small village on the outskirts of Peshawar. His weathered hands hover over rows of wooden boxes, each buzzing faintly with life, or what’s left of it. Inside, tens of thousands of bees drift in and out, their movements sluggish, their purpose unclear. “They are lost,” Badshah says, his voice heavy with resignation. For decades, these bees have been his livelihood. Now, they’re fighting a losing battle against Pakistan’s escalating climate crisis; a crisis that threatens not just their survival, but also that of an entire ecosystem and all the species that depend on it.
Once the country’s bees produced 22 distinct varieties of honey; today, the number has plummeted to 11. Three of the four native honey bee species, Apis dorsata, Apis cerana, and Apis florea are now endangered, according to the Honey Bee Research Institute in Islamabad. Since 2022, honey production has dropped by 15 per cent, a stark indicator of the environmental upheaval reshaping the ecology.
For centuries, beekeepers in the region have followed a predictable rhythm. Summers were spent in the cooler, flower-rich highlands of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, while winters drew them to the fertile plains of the Punjab. That rhythm has been disrupted. Rising temperatures, unseasonal rains and crippling air pollution have shortened the flowering season and choked the landscapes bees once thrived in. “Thirty years ago, these fields were green, alive with blossoms,” says Sherzaman Momaan, a 52-year-old honey trader from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. “Now, we chase what little remains.”
This winter, the Punjab skies turned a hazy grey as smog levels soared to hazardous heights, prompting the government to declare a national disaster. For beekeepers like Malik Hussain Khan, the smog was a death sentence. “Almost half my bees died,” he recalls, standing amid orange groves whose blooms arrived weeks late and faded too soon. “They couldn’t fly. The air was too thick, and there was no rain to clear it.” Air pollution obscures the scents bees rely on to locate flowers, leaving them disoriented and starved.
Pakistan’s beekeepers soldier on, their trucks rumbling across a landscape that grows less hospitable by the day. But as the climate crisis tightens its grip, their fight, and the bees’, hangs in a delicate, buzzing balance.
The stakes are high. Bees pollinate a third of the world’s food crops, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation. Their decline in Pakistan threatens not just honey but food security as well. In the Hindu Kush-Himalayan region, where Pakistan’s wild bees once flourished, habitat loss, pesticide use and deforestation compound the climate’s toll. The berry-honey season, once spanning mid-August to mid-October, now lasts a mere month, if it isn’t washed away by untimely rains.
To survive, Pakistan’s 35,000 beekeeping families have become nomads, loading their hives onto trucks and traversing hundreds of kilometres in search of viable conditions. Khan, who once moved only between the Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, now ventures as far as Sindh, 1,000 kilometres south, chasing warmth and blooms. “If the heat is too much or the journey too long, the bees die,” he says. “It’s happened before.” The cost of fuel, soaring in recent years, adds another burden. Landlords often harass beekeepers who set up without permission.
Research by HBRI suggests that hive design must adapt to incorporate better ventilation, as seen in Turkey and Australia. Extreme heat leaves bees exhausted; instead of producing honey, they then expend precious energy trying to cool off. More spacious, compartmentalised hives could increase honey production by around 10 per cent; a modest gain, but a meaningful one. The crisis extends far beyond beekeeping. In a country where forests cover less than four per cent of the land and deforestation can accelerate quickly, the loss of bees signals a broader ecological collapse. For now, Pakistan’s beekeepers soldier on, their trucks rumbling across a landscape that grows less hospitable by the day. But as the climate crisis tightens its grip, their fight, and the bees, hangs in a delicate, buzzing balance. We should be deeply concerned if the bees disappear, humanity might not be far behind, especially in the face of today’s worsening climate crisis.
Salman Tahir is a writer, historian, researcher and actor with a bachelor’s degree in history from Government College University, Lahore.