We can thank Apis mellifera, better known as the honeybee, for one in every three mouthfuls of food we eat. Across the world, billions of honeybees pollinate crops. They are the unsung, unpaid laborers of the global agricultural system, and the glue that holds it together. May 20 is United Nations World Bee Day, designated to raise awareness of the importance of pollinators, the threats they face, and their contribution to sustainable development. His Excellency Dr Thani bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi, Minister of Climate Change and Environment, examines new research on the strong connection of the founding father of the UAE, late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, with bees, and the continuation of this legacy through His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces.

“If the bee disappears from the surface of the globe, man would have no more than four years to live,” said Albert Einstein allegedly. This apparent truism is familiar to Abdul Satar. Around Rahim Yar Khan in Pakistan, he is known as ‘Śahida inasāna’ — the Bee Man. It is a moniker that he attributes to an Arab sheikh he himself never actually met.

This is an airborne story that buzzes across half a century and across several continents. Its most contemporary telling brings us from Abdul Satar in Pakistan to the sedate region of Cornwall on the southwest tip of Britain. In January 2019, it was announced that a scheme to conserve populations of one of Europe’s rarest bees had been able to achieve considerable success thanks to support provided by the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund (MBZ Fund). Focused on the long-horned bee, Eucera longicornis, a species that was once widespread, the MBZ Fund has helped spark something of a revival. Not many people may know of the crisis enveloping Eucera longicornis in Britain, but there is increasing understanding of the key role that bees play in our world. The MBZ Fund has supported numerous programs around the world that aim to protect our great pollinating species.

Back in Pakistan, Abdul Satar walks slowly among bee boxes that resemble office filing cabinets, if filing cabinets hummed and vibrated. The Punjabi apiarist carefully opens each and removes a few frames — the narrowly spaced scaffolds on which the bees build their honeycombs — checking to see how a population is doing. Most frames are choked with crawling bees, flowing honey, and healthy brood cells. He thinks that his hives contain some 250,000 bees. In addition to his own sweet honey business, his insects fan out across the region — they can fly as far as eight kilometers in search of forage — and serve as pollinators for hundreds of subsistence farming families and commercial fruit producers.

“Uha jīvana didē hana,” says Satar in his native Punjabi — “They give life”.

This link between bees in the Punjab region of Pakistan and Abu Dhabi also brings together Egypt, Bangladesh, Tunisia, Jordan, Morocco, and others. The common thread is Sheikh Zayed — a leader who had embraced the tiny insect as a partner on the road to socio-economic change. He spread both the practice of beekeeping and bees themselves around the world.

The people of the UAE have always had a taste for honey — literally. For as long as anyone could remember, the remote areas of the Arabian Peninsula had represented something of a natural apiary. Across the territory that is today the UAE, gathering honey from bee colonies had traditionally been done by subduing the bees with smoke, and then harvesting the sweet substance with as little disturbance to the insects as possible. Particularly across mountainous enclaves, there were thousands of wild sidr and simr trees, lots of flowering bushes, and an abundance of nooks and crannies that bees would adopt as home. In Sheikh Zayed’s Al Ain — where he served as Ruler’s Representative from 1946 to 1966 — bees were understood to be important pollinators.

Perhaps it can be considered a natural progression, therefore, that as the world’s greatest philanthropist with a US$50 billion legacy that encompasses thousands of projects across the developing world, Sheikh Zayed would also champion the use of bees to improve lives. Beginning in the 1970s, he became an apiculturist-president in order to underpin his extraordinary philanthropy.

The best indication of the size of his ambitions is reflected in a 1977 letter produced by Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office. This illustrates a series of exports from Britain to Abu Dhabi, and how many of these found their way across the developing world. Arriving at Abu Dhabi International Airport, millions of bees would be re-exported to support some of Sheikh Zayed’s remarkable activities.

In most cases, as in Rahim Yar Khan, these programs would explore how to expand bee populations and to increase honey and wax production by cooperating with existing master growers. Often working in tandem with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), cultivation of bee-attracting plant species was encouraged, and commercial honey supply chains were built into domestic markets and for export.

According to former FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf, the Abu Dhabi model came to be viewed as a gold standard, and the Rome-based organization backed the UAE capital’s bee projects across a range of Sheikh Zayed’s most ambitious agricultural programs.

Spreading and improving the beekeeping industry across the developing world made sound economic sense, just as it had in Al Ain and Buraimi two decades earlier. More than a dozen colonies were sent from Abu Dhabi to Egypt in order to support what was arguably the UAE President’s most ambitious undertaking. Today in Egypt, Nubaria spans some 5,670 square kilometers — accounting for 2.5 per cent of the country’s total area — and the now fertile region is one of the nation’s breadbaskets, almost as big as the US state of Delaware and approximately the size of Brunei. Nubaria’s stunning success would be pollinated by bees sent to Egypt by Sheikh Zayed. Humans built the infrastructure, the canals, and irrigation systems, but it was the bees that fertilized Nubaria.

Egypt was one success story, but there were many others. As that 1977 document attests, even by then, Abu Dhabi had sent bees to “Bangladesh, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan and other nations on the Indian subcontinent, Middle East and in North Africa”. In the West African country of Côte d'Ivoire, Sheikh Zayed launched a dramatic program to build a cocoa-growing industry. Today, the nation is responsible for one-third of global production. Cocoa trees are pollinated by honeybees and wild pollinators. In tandem with other initiatives to develop the industry, Abu Dhabi introduced colonies of bees in order to support expansion of cocoa plantations.

“Three out of four crops across the globe producing fruits or seeds for human use as food depend, at least in part, on pollinators. The price tag of global crops directly relying on pollinators is estimated to be between US$235 billion and US$577 billion a year. And their quantity is on the rise. The volume of agricultural production dependent on pollinators has increased by 300 percent in the last 50 years,” says Margaret Murdin, former President of the British Beekeepers Association. “Today, we see bees being transported across the world, including to the UAE, in order to enhance growing agricultural sectors. Sheikh Zayed was one of the first to pioneer this on such a scale.”

Managed honeybees remain a critical resource for world agricultural and food security. If the quintessential ecological battle cry of the 70s was ‘Save The Whales’, today it is ‘Save The Bees’. People are finally waking up to the value of bees. Some have known longer than others.