Remote weather stations give Kenyan farmers an edge in bee farming

Nolkireu Wuantai had always wanted to diversify from livestock herding to bee farming. But her hives in the Maasai Mara area in southern Kenya failed to sustain a colony.

During an extended drought, the bees desert the hives due to a lack of water and plants from which to collect pollen. Conversely, prolonged rains would attract honey badgers and other predators onto her bee farm.

Figuring out the right time of year to put up her hives was the biggest challenge for the 60-year-old farmer, as weather patterns have become erratic due to worsening climate change.

“When we expect rains, they either delay or fail completely,” said the mother of eight. “The dry season, on the other hand, lasts for many months, unlike in the past when it was easy to predict the seasonal cycle.”

But for the past two years, Wuantai has succeeded in managing a colony, thanks to alerts from a remote weather station in her village.

Installed in 2019 through a collaboration between farmers, IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, and the Trans-African Hydro-Meteorological Observatory, five remote weather stations in the Maasai Mara area collect data on temperature, humidity, and rainfall. The information can then help predict weather patterns for the months ahead.

Each station can gather weather data within a range of 50 square kilometers (19 square miles), and this is then shared with Wuantai and other bee farmers through text messages or farmer meetings.

“We look at the rainfall patterns for the last three years and build a trend on what is coming in the next couple of months in terms of rainfall and drought,” said David Kinanta, manager at southern Kenya’s Oloisukut Conservancy, where one of the stations is installed. He added that the changing weather confuses bees by altering plants’ flowering cycles, leading to harvest losses of about 17 kilograms (37 pounds) per hive.

Research from 2019 found that quality climate data is urgently needed in Africa to support the development and improvement of livelihoods for the communities most vulnerable to climate change.

In many parts of Africa, a lot of this data is collected through remote weather stations. But “station coverage is very sparse [and] has been declining,” the research found. “Where station records do exist, they are often of poor quality with many missing observations,” it added.

Before the partnership between farmers and NGOs, the Kenya Meteorological Department had difficulty providing weather forecasts to certain parts of the country due to poor infrastructure and a lack of funding.

The government agency has been scaling up data collection from surface- to space-based weather observation. But this information is disseminated through national media, which many marginalized communities cannot access.

The government has faced challenges in expanding remote weather services across rural Kenya due to funding shortfalls, according to Ali Ramtu, the senior acting director in charge of aeronautical and meteorological services at the agency.

David Sentero, a farmer with a beekeeper organization in southern Kenya’s Olderkesi village, said water scarcity and the lack of access to data from government agencies were some of the biggest challenges he faced before the remote weather station partnership.

“I had almost given up on bee farming,” he said. “But with the information I am getting through remote weather stations, I have learned how to avoid making bad investment decisions.”

Accurate weather information is also helping boost pollination services around the world, according to Subramanian Sevgan, the head of environmental health at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Nairobi.

Pollination services are worth $3 trillion globally, with an annual value of around $186 million in Kenya, Sevgan said during a recent meeting hosted by the Biodiversity and Biosafety Association of Kenya.

More than 75% of cropland that the world relies on for food depends on pollinators, and crop production would decline by 35% if honeybees and others were pushed out of the agricultural value chain, he said.

“Beyond the pollination services, the products that we get — like honey and propolis — have the potential to create employment among the youth and women in rural environments, and so this is an added benefit to this sector,” Sevgan said.

In addition to the data from the stations, farmers have also received modern beehives and training from the World Wide Fund for Nature Kenya and the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Through working with the two organizations, 160 women — including Wuantai — have invested in an apiary of 50 modern beehives in Maasai Mara.

The investment can fetch the farmers up to 50,000 Kenyan shillings ($400) per harvest, which takes place every four to five months. This income subsidizes livestock herding and keeps them from selling their goats and sheep when drought sets in.

“Bee farming has given me a voice as a woman from a marginalized community because it has earned me my independence,” Wuantai said. “With this income, I am able to continue paying school fees for my children and afford other basic needs like food all year round.”