A dynamic subtropical climate, abundant and diverse flora, and highly-valued native honeybees are just a few of the natural advantages that have made beekeeping a centuries-old tradition in Azerbaijan’s Caucasus Mountains.

Yet despite these auspicious conditions, Azerbaijan’s beekeeping sector is performing below expectations and far from its full potential. Production levels are relatively low while market prices for honey remain stubbornly high. Even as consumer demand for beekeeping products rises at home and abroad, traders are still struggling to sell Azerbaijan’s meagre domestic output.

To address the underlying economic and biological problems that are stifling honey production, a newly-launched FAO project will help Azerbaijan improve the productivity of local honey bees and train beekeepers to manage their colonies more effectively. Revitalizing the beekeeping sector will go beyond making apiaries more efficient—it should improve economic and social welfare in rural areas, giving people a renewed opportunity to earn a decent and secure livelihood through an age-old local trade.

In the 1960s, when Azerbaijan was part of the Soviet Union, the state organized beekeepers in the Caucasus Mountains into large-scale collective farms. But after independence, the state-managed apiaries were dissolved and the beehives distributed to small private family farms, many of which had no experience in beekeeping. State assistance to beekeepers effectively disappeared, splintering the supply chain that carried bee products to market.Since 1991, beekeepers have made great strides in recovering numbers of colonies and production. Although in 2014, almost 2,500 tonnes of honey were produced, parts of the production and market chains leave significant room for improvement to make beekeeping as beneficial to rural income and livelihoods as in other countries.

But Azerbaijan’s national honey production was faltering for an unprecedented reason: domesticated honeybees were simply producing less than during the Soviet era.

Historically, Azeri beekeepers populated their apiaries with native Caucasian honeybees, which are well-known a strong and industrious honey producer. But after a deadly parasite devastated state-managed apiaries in the early 1980s, colonies were restored with a different subspecies of bees that came from the country’s southern region.

Although the new bees had a superior reproductive ability, they were weak honey producers compared to the Caucasian bee. Over time, the two subspecies hybridized, leaving Azeri beekeepers with a mixed-race bee that produced less honey per hive than before.

To improve local bee subspecies and conserve genetic diversity, FAO and the Ministry of Agriculture launched an ambitious project in early 2015 to bring the Caucasian honeybee back to apiaries in northern Azerbaijan and make beekeeping an even more attractive and productive business.