Bee keepers also feel the heat as weather continues to change

A Palestinian worker holds up a frame after removing it from a beehive to collect honeybee combs during the harvest at an apiary near Beit Hanun in the northern Gaza Strip on April 30, 2017. Jihad Abu Shamalah, the owner of the apiary from Gaza cultivates 450 hives, producing some 4000 kilos of honey every year which is only sold in the Gaza Strip. / AFP PHOTO / MOHAMMED ABED

In the middle of a seven-acre woodlot of indigenous trees in Chemare, a village in Rift Valley, Charles Ng’ong’oni keeps 164 hollow-log beehives, which in good years bring him a healthy income by producing thousands of litres of honey.

Ng’ong’oni, 63, has managed the hives since the 1970s. But these days he is being joined by a growing number of farmers in East Africa – and around the world – who are taking up beekeeping as a way of broadening their income in the face of wilder weather, including heat, droughts and floods that can decimate crops. But beekeeping, Kenyan experts now say, is not proving as climate hardy as farmers had hoped.