Saving Syria’s war-ravaged bees

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Nature and Environment Syria https://p.dw.com/p/5JUOm

Subscribe to the podcast here: Living Planet Podlink

Reporters: Javier Jennings Mozo, Alejandro Matrán

Editor: Kathleen Schuster

TRANSCRIPT

It’s 2011. A man named Emad Abdel Raheem, who you just heard, has just driven dozens and dozens of beehives to northern Syria.

It’s the time of year for Emad’s honey bees to get to work in that that particular region, because what they need to do there is something called “annual foraging,” which means the honeybees are collecting pollen and nectar, and then pollinating flowering plants so that they can grow fruits and vegetables.

So, after Emad drops off the honeybees he goes back to the capital city Damascus, which is abuzz with a very different type of activity.

Meanwhile, Emad is back in in the capital city Damascus which is abuzz with a different type of activity.

The military is cracking down on Arab Spring protesters, and soon the clashes erupt into civil war.

The roads are closed off and Emad starts to get worried about his 160 beehives.

They’re part of a large network of bees, incidentally some of the most important in the Middle East, that keep Syria’s agricultural sector going.

And now Emad is stuck in Damascus with no way to drive the five hours to retrieve them.

Finally, a few months later Emad and his partners can’t wait any longer. So, they drive up north,

Load up the bees and brace themselves for what will be a difficult journey back to Damascus.

Emad says the drive back is dangerous. Checkpoint guards make them unload the beehives to rule out security threats, but the guards have no idea what they’re looking at.

It takes Emad and his partners nearly all night to get home.

By the time they can finally check on their beehives, they discover that most of them haven’t survived.

They started with 160 beehives, and now there are only 30 left.

And as it turns out, this is only the beginning of their troubles.

In this episode, we’re going to hear from Emad about how Syria’s bee population survived years of war, pollution and drought, and what’s helping them finally revive a damaged ecosystem.

This is Living Planet, I’m Kathleen Schuster.

We’re going to hear more from Emad in a moment. But before we do, let’s take a minute to just marvel at the complexity of bees.

Beehives function like societies, where every member has a defined role that’s essential to the colony’s survival.

A single hive can contain tens of thousands of bees. There are workers that clean cells, care for larvae, and gather food. And there are also guards stationed at the entrance, checking who comes in and who goes out, defending the colony from intruders.

It also turns out that bees are big into dancing. They communicate through what’s known as the famous “waggle dance,” a kind of abdominal wiggle that signals to other bees where to find flowers, water, or a new nest.

And together, these tiny pollinators operate as a single, highly coordinated superorganism.

Emad: When you understand the language of bees, and how bees live, you become attached to them. A relationship develops between you and them, almost parental.

… which is something that absolutely fascinates Emad, who comes from Syria, which has a long history of beekeeping.

In fact, some scholars think beekeeping might have even originated in ancient Mesopotamia, which included land that spans present-day Syria and Iraq.

Archaeologists have also discovered clay beehives farther south in the Jordan Valley dating back 3,000 years. They bear a striking resemblance to the simple beehives made from mud and straw that many Syrian beekeepers continue to use today.

So, before the war, starting in around 2004, Emad spent his days traveling around Syria.

He’d actually originally set out to become an engineer, but one thing led to another and he eventually found himself working different jobs that brought him closer to nature. So, when a friend of his was about to abandon a beekeeping operation that was struggling, Emad helped prop up the business along with another friend.

And soon they were traveling the country, following the bloom…

Emad says they have a saying in beekeeping: “The beekeeper is a traveler. The beekeeper must keep moving.”

Every few weeks, Emad and his partners would load up their hives and head out.

Sometimes, they would stay out up to five days, travelling in a pickup truck with a small refrigerator filled with basic kitchen supplies.

Before the war, Syria had about 700,000 beehives. It was considered one of the largest populations of honeybees in the Middle East. And even though Emad’s 160 beehives sounds like a very small part of that, his bees definitely played their part in keeping the ecosystem going.

In the spring Emad and his partners would head to the citrus groves on Syria’s Mediterranean coast.

Then, as the seasons changed, they would move inland in search of new flowers.

As he puts it: “It’s like tourism combined with work.”

This practice of systematically moving beehives for pollination is relatively new one and started to be implemented on a large scale in the 20th century thanks to modern transportation, commercial agriculture and an increased demand for pollination services.

Most of the moves happened at night, when the bees had returned to their hives which were then safely sealed.

As exhausting as it was, he says he and his partners loved the job so much that they forgot about all the things about it that were hard.

As Emad puts it …

Emad: Bees only love beautiful natural places full of flowers, so wherever there are flowers, that’s where you go…

By 2010, the business was thriving. But then, a year later, the war began.

The civil war quickly spread across Syria, and as it did, its prized beekeeping sector got hit hard, and so did its rural economy.

The number of beehives, which the FAO estimates were around 700,000, plummeted fast. This quickly became a problem for the crops that rely on bees for pollination, like the citrus groves along the Mediterranean coast, the apple, almond and thyme orchards in the mountains, and the fields of anise, black cumin and sunflowers in Syria’s interior and north.

To make matters worse, farmers were displaced by years of fighting between the regime’s forces, the Syrian Free Army and the Islamic State. In many places, fields and orchards were abandoned all together.

Pollution was also a huge problem. Emad was forced to flee Damascus and live with his beehives in the countryside, but it was difficult to move the bees between the seasonal pastures because the land was heavily polluted by chemicals from explosions.

Within just a few years, Syria had lost around 80% of its beehives.

And then came the periods of drought. Wells that once watered orchards and fed bees had to be rationed because, even though Syria had suffered recurrent droughts for years, these periods without rain started to become more frequent and lasted longer. For beekeepers, it meant fewer blossoms, less nectar and colonies that were simply struggling to survive.

Satellite data from 2024-2025 showed the vegetation health had dropped by as much as 32 percent in some regions of Syria.

And the challenges didn’t end there. Since 2019, Syria has also faced a prolonged drought. Rainfall declined, vegetation cover shrank, and many of the plants that bees depend on struggled to survive.

Eyad Daaboul is the former president of the Arab Beekeepers Union in Syria. For the past 10 years, he has been working with UN agencies like the World Food Program and the Food and Agriculture Organization, where he monitors and develops the beekeeping landscape in the country.

He’s also a beekeeper himself and witnessed first-hand how the war affected his sector.

Eyad Daaboul: In fact, I lost a lot of beehives when the revolution started the beehives close to me here, it’s safe, but I have more than 300 beehives lost. Some beehives stolen, some beehives destroyed to be fire, to get fire …

Like many across the country, Eyad saw not only his own production decline, but the wider collapse of a system that depended on movement, access to land, and seasonal stability.

Eyad: When the war started, the beekeepers lost a lot of beehives and also some beekeepers go outside Syria because it’s not safe. And 2015, and 2014, all crops, so bad, because there’s no bees.

During the war, beekeepers also observed a strange phenomenon no one has entirely been able to explain.

Around 2015, Emad says that beekeepers would open their hives only to find that all the bees inside had completely vanished.

Emad: We don’t know why.

He says there was still honey inside, which is the food the bees feed on during the winter, but the hive itself had been completely abandoned. There weren’t even any signs of dead bees.

Emad calls it “bee abandonment.”

He says there were efforts to figure out what had happened, but no one could ever fully explain it.

Some beekeepers thought that maybe the bees had left because of the stress caused by the war, environmental disruption, or disease. Others speculated about electromagnetic interference from modern technologies.

But to this day, no one knows for sure what happened to those bees.

When beekeepers talk about the decline of honeybees, they’re rarely talking only about a lack of honey. For Emad, the real concern lies elsewhere. Honey can be replaced. Pollination cannot.

The relationship between bees and agriculture is one of the oldest and most important partnerships in nature.

Emad says that awareness of the role traveling beekeepers and their beehives play in this has increased significantly among farmers in recent years. What was once considered a side benefit is now increasingly recognized as an essential agricultural service.

Emad: A lack of bees has a huge impact on agriculture, because bees are, first and foremost, (responsible for the pollination of trees and crops. In Europe, for example, farmers book appointments with beekeepers. They ask the beekeeper, ‘When will you come place your apiary in my farm?’ Why? Because both the quantity and the quality of pollination and fruiting is excellent.

The effects can be surprisingly visible. Pollinated trees often produce larger harvests. Fruit can be more abundant, more uniform and of better quality. Those improvements matter to farmers already struggling with rising costs and weather that’s becoming less and less predictable.

He says when you place beehives in citrus orchards orange trees, for example, produce larger fruit and higher yields because of the bees.

So, when bee populations decline, the consequences spread far beyond the hive.

The loss ripples through entire agricultural systems. Those consequences can be profound in a country like Syria where farming remains an essential source of income and food security.

If war and drought threatened Syria’s bee populations from the outside, economics continue to pressure them from the inside. Keeping bees has never been a passive activity. A hive can’t simply be left alone and expected to thrive.

Beekeepers monitor colonies for disease. They replace old wax. They provide water. They treat parasites. They move hives to areas with better forage. And when flowers are unavailable, they feed the bees themselves. All of those interventions cost money, though. And according to Eyad those costs have risen dramatically over the past decade.

For migratory beekeepers, transportation is another major expense. Moving hundreds of hives across long distances requires fuel, vehicles and labor. Syria’s still facing severe economic challenges after years of war, and those costs have become more and more difficult to absorb.

Eyad Daaboul: I went to Ukrainia to get some bees. It’s the bees over there is more suitable to our area. They agreed to give me bees, but we didn’t find any way to ship the bees from Ukrainia to Lebanon or to Syria. Because the American sanction airflights if they work to Syria. So that’s why we get, we said, okay, we need bees for Lebanon. So I imported to Lebanon and then get it from Lebanon border to Damascus.

Some people can’t remove their beehives from area to area because there’s no oil. A lot of problems, not just one problem. There are a lot of problems, you see.

Even the basic materials needed to maintain a hive are harder to get. Wax foundations, which help bees build their combs more efficiently, are increasingly imported rather than produced locally. But imported products do not always meet the standards beekeepers expect.

Eyad: No, it’s not enough, because the beekeepers need a lot of things, a lot of beekeepers stay here in Syria, not go around, not seeing what happened at the beekeeping technology sector. So, they have lose their knowledge, their knowledge is maybe before 10 years, 15 years, and now there are many, many new things, new scientific programs for beekeeping. So, they need supporting technology, supporting scientific supporting program about pollination, about bees, about bee technology, about bee health.

The irony is that bees can produce wax themselves. In the wild, they do exactly that. But producing wax requires energy. Energy that could otherwise be spent gathering nectar and making honey. So, beekeepers provide ready-made foundations to help colonies focus on foraging instead. It’s yet another example of the delicate balance between supporting bees and making a living from them.

For now, the wax they use mainly comes from China, but some beekeepers in Syria are trying to help their own sector recover by producing their own local wax, which is cheaper.

So how did Emad and his one remaining partner rebuild their hives after the war?

Well, it wasn’t easy, and Emad, despite all of the setbacks to his sector and the collapse of entire bees populations, never gave up.

He actually lost most of his bee colonies during the war, but after it was over he rebuilt his apiary little by little. He divided the healthy colonies into new ones and expanded again whenever he could.

These days, most of his optimism comes from something else, though: rain.

After years of drought, Syria finally started seeing above-average rainfall starting last winter.

The water has replenished some of the groundwater and is helping crops and the flowering landscapes bees need to survive.

Emad: Honestly, the most important thing for us now is increasing the number of bees we have, multiplying the colonies so they can generate more income. But the most important thing in all of this is having good years, years with rain. If the rain comes, all the problems are solved. But if there’s drought, then losses are guaranteed. No rain means no plants, no flowers, no grazing areas. But when there’s rain, heavy rainfall, snow, the snow feeds the wells, and the wells let you irrigate and plant. Then the problem is solved.

Emad says the most important task right now is increasing the number of bees… and he can’t do that without rain.

But even though he and others are benefiting in the short term from sudden, intense rainfall, experts warn that climate change has destabilized Syria’s rain patterns. And they also stress that intense bursts of rainfall don’t ultimately replenish the groundwater.

Still, Emad is optimistic, because another trend he’s seeing is that the number of beekeepers appears to be growing. He says some of the newcomers are farmers looking for additional income. Others are drawn by curiosity, or by the chance to reconnect with the countryside.

Emad’s become an informal mentor to many of them. He teaches beginners how to identify queen bees, inspect colonies and understand the complex social world inside a hive.

This season alone, he’s heard from nine people who want to buy bees.

Emad says beekeeping requires hands-on learning, not just ownership. Beginners have to actively participate in hive management, because understanding bees only comes through direct experience and repeated observation.

Eyad, who we heard from earlier, is also optimistic after years of working with international partners to develop Syria’s beekeeping sector.

Eyad: At 2016 maybe, we have not more than 150,000 beehives colony, but it start from 2016 till now, and I think now we have around 400,000 beehives.

Over the years, beekeepers spend thousands of hours observing bees; watching them defend their colonies, raise new generations, share resources, work collectively toward a common goal. For Emad, beekeeping became more than just his profession. It became a way of understanding society itself.

The hive offers a lesson in cooperation, one that feels particularly meaningful in a country that has spent years fractured by war and displacement. Again and again, Emad returns to the same idea: no individual can survive alone.

Emad: The bees taught me that I must be someone who cooperates with the group. If I don’t cooperate with others, then I’m nothing.

Bees are an extremely cooperative society, a collective society. Collective work always gives very good results, while individual work is not as effective.

Bees sacrifice themselves for others. A bee defends the hive knowing it will die in order for the hive and life to continue. Even the male bee, when it mates with the queen, it dies afterward. See? Anyone who understands the language of bees becomes deeply attached to them.

Those values shaped not only the way Emad works with bees, but also the relationships he built through beekeeping. For years, he and his partners travelled together across Syria. They shared the labor, the risks and the rewards. The friendships forged through those journeys remain among the most important parts of his story.

Emad and his fellow beekeepers organized their work collectively. Tasks, rewards, meals, and even social life were shared without strict division. This created strong bonds of solidarity, where personal relationships were shaped by cooperation and mutual dependence.

Emad: When I see bees, I feel that the year will be prosperous. I become optimistic that vegetables and fruits will become more abundant and cheaper. It makes me happy.

Emad says seeing the bees makes him feel hopeful about the coming season, because every bee returning to a flower is a reminder that the landscape is still capable of renewal.

That’s all we have for this episode of Living Planet.

It was produced by Javier Jennings Mozo and Alejandro Matran, and edited by me, Kathleen Schuster.

Our sound engineer was Ziad Abou Sleiman.