“Without bees, we cannot survive”: How Dubai schools are helping protect our food future

Dubai: Did you know that there are about 20,000 species of bees in the world? Just seven of them make honey. The rest are primarily pollinators – making sure you get food on your table.

“When we think about bees, we think about honey. But just seven out of the 20,000 bee species make honey,” Dr Meriem Hammal, manager of the Pollinator Programme at Terra Expo City, told Emirates 24|7.

“All the others are there purely for the pollination process. Even though we have other pollinators, like bats, butterflies, wasps and lady bugs. But bees pollinate 75-80 per cent of the food we consume as humans. So basically, without them, we cannot survive,” she added.

She was speaking as part of the Hundred Hives Initiative, where the first beehive was installed at a school in Dubai – the Deira International School.

Terra, the Sustainability Hub at Expo City Dubai, has launched the initiative as a school-focused pollinator programme, designed to help students develop a deeper connection with nature through hands-on learning and environmental stewardship.

At the event, held at the school on June 26, a partnership agreement was signed by Marjan Faraidooni, Chief of Education and Culture at Expo City Dubai, and Mira Al Futtaim, Chief Future Education Officer, Al-Futtaim Education Foundation, marking the school's official entry into the Hundred Hives initiative.

As part of the initiative, not only were teachers trained to become professional beekeepers, but students, too, got the opportunity to understand the critical role bees play, how they function and why preserving the bee population is important.

As part of the activities, students got a chance to name the Queen Bee of their school hive (they chose Beyoncé) and take part in a beeswax candle-making workshop.

Bees play a critical role in global food production, with pollinators like the honey bees, native bees and flies contributing between $235 billion and $577 billion annually to global food production. Approximately 35% of global crop production by volume relies on pollinators, making them the backbone of global food security.

But the pollinators are under threat, and that has a direct impact on food security.

Dr Meriem spoke about the ‘Colony Collapse Disorder’, first discovered in 2015, with bee population dwindling because of overuse in food production. As beehives were moved to different fields for the purposes of cross-pollination, the stress on the hives made them vulnerable to diseases.

“We also have climate change, which affects the blooming season of flowers. When that changes, bees that are genetically used to leaving the hive at certain times of the year do not get their food outside,” she said.

But the biggest threat, according to Dr Meriem, is the combination of a lack of awareness, genetic pollution and pesticides.

“Our fear of bees is feeding massive use of pesticides,” she said.

Terra’s 100 Hives initiative, along with ‘Bee Kind’, its corporate outreach programme, and the ‘Dr. Jane Goodall pollinator garden’ at the sustainability hub , all aim to address these issues, by fostering sustainable habitats, preserving local flora and fauna, and creating a model for ecological resilience in urban environments.

The pollinator programme focuses specifically on native bees in the region, to promote their growth within the local ecosystem.

For Dr Meriem, bees, which are one of the busiest animals on the planet, can teach children a lot more than just about how they impact food security.

A self-confessed ‘accidental beekeeper’, the veterinary doctor only chose to do her training in beekeeping because it would fit in with her additional education pursuits of getting a business degree while completing her veterinary course.

But her first experience with bees left her humbled.

The man training her was someone who had never been to school himself, but she entered his apiary on her first day of training, she saw him open the box of bees, and soon the hive immediately leaving the box to welcome him, buzzing around him in an embrace.

“When you enter an apiary for the first time, you have that fear that you might get stung. You have all these misconceptions. What I saw threw me off, but in a nice way. He didn’t even have a veil. It was just me, him, and the box of the bees. I felt completely disconnected from what was happening outside of that,” she said.

When she asked her trainer, who would go on to become her mentor, he explained things in extreme detail.

“He started talking about genetics, about Gregor Mendel [a world-renowned beekeeper, apiologist and in many ways a founder of genetics], about his bee selection plan, native species and the importance of bringing them back. It was a wake-up call,” she said.

That was the spark that ignited Dr Meriem’s love for bees and beekeeping.

Today, as the manager of the Pollinator Programme at Terra Expo City, she hopes the beehives being installed at schools in Dubai will spark the same curiosity and help children learn not just about the impact bees have on the environment and our lives, but also the soft skills the busy workers can teach.

“Children learn how to work as a team and how to manage their time, because bees will not wait for you. They develop many other soft skills that will help them in the future. Bees aren’t just important because they are pollinators, these children can study bees in art, looking at how they make their honeycomb, about mathematics and how the bees measure each cell of the honeycomb, to get the exact 7mm measurement for each hexagonal cell,” Dr Meriem said.

The children who participated in the initiative also went away with some fascinating facts from the world of bees.

For nine-year-old Musa Ibrahim Ahmed, the biggest takeaway was how the male bees – called drones – don’t actually do the work in the hives.

“The most interesting thing I learned today is that males don't have stingers, and also, they’re not allowed to fly in the hives. They have wings, and they fly all the time, but the location they are in the most, they're not allowed to do what they do most,” he said.

Learning about the roles different bees play in the bee world was one of the biggest learning experience for the children, according to Saira Ali, a primary school teacher at Deira International School, who received her training as a professional beekeeper.

“When we were explaining the roles of the bees to the children, they found out that it is the female bees that do all the work within the hive, and the children found that really fascinating. For them to realise all the different roles and that togetherness of the hive working together, it was great,” she said.

“With festooning, bees make a line by linking their legs, and that's how they measure to make their hives. If there’s a threat, they work together to eliminate it, they can increase or decrease the temperature of the hive by working together. It's just amazing how they do this instinctively. And yet, you know, humans struggle so much to work with one another. So, it's definitely a message we can take from the bees to work in harmony for the good of our world, our hive,” she added.

Schools interested in joining the initiative can email education@expocitydubai.ae to learn more about the programme. The initiative is open to schools looking to introduce beehives on campus and incorporate biodiversity, pollinator conservation and environmental stewardship into their educational activities.