Sargodha:

Under a dry, smoggy sky, a beekeeping in Pakistan’s Punjab Province cares carefully boxes filled with tens of thousands of bees on the back of a truck.

Together, they travel 500 kilometers (about 300 miles) in an increasingly desperate hunt to find flowering plants, clean air and moderate temperatures for honey production as climate change and pollution threaten the industry.

“We move the boxes according to where the weather is good and the flowers are blooming,” Malik Hussain Khan told AFP and stood in a field of orange trees whose flowers arrived weeks late in February and lasted only for a few weeks.

Pakistan’s beekeepers typically move seasonally to spare their charges that suffocate hot or freezing cold.

The summers are spent in northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province and winters in the Central Punjab Province.

But weather patterns that have been made unpredictable by climate change – combined with some of the worst pollution in the world – mean that beekeepers have to move more often and travel further.

This winter was characterized by soaring, dangerous smog levels that the government declared a national disaster. Research has found that air pollution can make it harder for bees to find flowers.

Meanwhile, diminished rainfall could not clear the suffocating air and triggered drought warnings for farmers.

“Almost half of my bees died when smog and fog hit this winter because they couldn’t fly. There was hardly any rain,” said Khan, who moved his bees as often as every few weeks in January and February.

The bees for Pakistan’s 27,000 beekeepers once had different foliage fed with reliable rainfall and offer a rich source of nectar.

Their honey is used in local influenza reserves, dripped over sweets and given as gifts.

Since 2022, however, Pakistan’s honey production has fallen 15 percent, according to the government’s Honey Bee Research Institute (HBRI) in the capital Islamabad.

“Heavy rain and hail storms can ruin the flowers, and erratic rainfall and high temperatures during the winter flowering season can prevent them from blooming,” said Muhammad Khalid, a researcher at the institute.

“When the flowers disappear, the BI -population falls because they cannot find nectar, resulting in reduced honey production.”

Bees are threatened globally by changing weather patterns, intensive agricultural practices, changing land use and pesticides.

Their losses not only threaten the honey trade, but food security in general, with one -third of the world’s food production depending on bipollination, according to Food and Agriculture Organization.

Pakistan’s bees once produced 22 varieties of honey, but it has dropped to 11 as flowering seasons abbreviated. Three of the country’s four honey bee species are threatened.

“The places that used to be green for our bees to fly 30 years ago are no longer,” says 52-year-old honey trader Sherzaman Momaan, who speaks with tenderness about his winged charges.

“We didn’t move as much as we do now.”

His hive was almost exclusively wiped out by floods in 2010 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, but he believes that deforestation is the most significant long -term change and threat.

Yousaf Khan and his brother, based in Islamabad, have produced honey for 30 years and moved short distances around neighboring Punjab to catch the best flowers. “Now we go as far as Sindh (province) for warmer temperatures and to escape extreme weather conditions,” Khan told AFP, referring to areas up to 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) away.

“Bees are like babies, they need a good environment, good environment and proper food to survive.”

Moving the bees comes with its own risks.

“If the weather is very hot or if the distance is too long, there is a chance that some bees could die. It has happened to my bees before,” Khan explained.

On long trips, they also have to be fed artificial food because they cannot produce honey while traveling.