With Fields Destroyed and Hives Lost, Gaza's Beekeepers Struggle to Start Over

In Gaza City, a beekeeper named Ibrahim al-Dabba stands on the roof of a damaged building and lifts a honeycomb frame while bees buzz around him. Below him, much of the city has been reduced to ruins by more than two years of war. Dabba and other beekeepers in Gaza are working hard to keep their trade alive, even as farmland has been destroyed and access to many growing areas has been cut off.

Before the war, beekeepers in Gaza kept about 30,000 hives. Honey production had already been falling — from around 400 metric tons per year to about half that amount — partly because climate change was affecting the seasons when flowers bloom. Bees depend on flowering plants to collect nectar, so fewer blooms means less honey.

The war made things much worse. Beekeeper and agricultural engineer Rateb Sammour estimates that only about 700 hives remain today. To keep bee populations from disappearing completely, some beekeepers have been splitting their hives into smaller ones. Sammour believes honey production is now just 10 percent of what it was before the war began.

Across Gaza, beekeepers are doing whatever they can to survive. Some have moved their hives to rooftops because fields and orchards are either destroyed or impossible to reach. Others are feeding their bees sugar supplements because there are not enough flowers or plants nearby for the bees to forage, or search for food.

After a ceasefire last October, Dabba, who is 49 years old, hoped to return to beekeeping — a trade his family had passed down for generations. But when he went back, he found almost nothing left to work with. He also explained that beekeepers are not allowed to enter many farming areas because of military boundaries set up under the ceasefire agreement.

Restarting has been very expensive. Dabba paid 10,000 shekels — about $3,245 — for just three hives, not counting the cost of equipment. That is a huge amount of money for someone trying to rebuild from nothing, and many beekeepers in Gaza face the same financial pressure.

In the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, 32-year-old beekeeper Fahd al-Dahdouh spends his days fixing broken hive boxes that he found in destroyed farming areas. He collects lids, wooden boxes, and even the floor panels of old hives, piecing them back together. 'I collected these beehives, as you can see, I brought them and put them together,' he said.

The effort to save Gaza's bees is about more than honey and money. Bees are one of nature's most important pollinators, meaning they help plants reproduce by carrying pollen from flower to flower. Without bees, many fruits, vegetables, and other crops cannot grow, making their survival critical for Gaza's future food supply.