Zambia's eco-friendly beekeeping helps combat deforestation

In Zambia’s rural Copper Belt region, beekeeper Paison Nkunkwilwa and his staff suit up, ready to collect honey.

He owns several box beehives in the area that are harvested three times a year and are relatively new to the country.

In the past, traditional beekeepers used destructive practices including cutting down trees to get to the honey in hives made by bees.

Now, several NGOs and businesses have introduced these wooden hives to increase honey production in an environmentally-friendly way and protect the forests.

The product is sold commercially, providing beekeepers with an alternative livelihood to charcoal production or clearing forests for agriculture.

According to a 2023 study carried out in the region by Bees For Development, sustainable beekeeping incentivises boosted local forest conservation.

Bees need intact forests to pollinate flowers, and when beekeepers make an income from trees, they become conservationists, as Nkunkwilwa explains.

“Our parents made local traditional beehives. There weren’t many people doing it and at that time there was a lot of trees -- no one was burning charcoal then. These days we’ve been encouraged to stop burning charcoal,” he says.

Deforestation is a serious concern in Zambia. The country lost 11 per cent of  its tree cover between 2001 and 2024, according to Global Forest Watch.

While traditional beekeeping played a relatively small role, clearing forests for agriculture and burning trees to make charcoal have been significant drivers of this forest loss.

Timber production has been a further issue.

Cabson Lilanda is another beekeeper in Zambia’s Copper Belt region who has become a forest conservationist.

Like Nkunkwilwa, he was given free beehives by the Mama Buci, one of the three main honey businesses in Zambia.

The company usually gives out 10 to 20 box beehives to each family, and have handed out around 120,000 since 2010, paying cash for the honey from these approximately 10,000 beekeepers.

“We used to be involved in traditional beekeeping, and we cut down trees. The difference now is that we are preserving trees. Bees now continue to get the flowers they need to make honey. So we have seen that by conserving trees, bees have plenty of trees to make honey," says Lilanda.

Beekeepers like Nkunkwilwa and Lilanda bring their raw honey to Treetop Honey in Ndola. Each hive produces about eight kilogrammes of honey per year, and they get paid about $1 per kilogramme.

Treetop Honey works together with Mama Buci whose founder, Martin Zuch, says that forest destruction is a real problem in Zambia.

“When I first came here the forest cover was 67% of the country, now I think we’re down to 60%, and our beekeeping and our model is fighting against that,” he says.

“The more beehives we hand out to local communities, the education that we give them, they begin to understand that chopping the trees down, making charcoal is really not great for the forest at all."

Ecologists say the impact modern beekeeping is making on forest conservation is being felt, and keeping them intact is also a key way to help mitigate climate change as trees absorb carbon dioxide.

By becoming guardians of their forests, beekeepers in Zambia are helping a national and global heritage.