البروفيسور الخازم: مشروع وطني لإكثار النحل البلدي

Professor Al-Khazem: A National Project to Propagate the Local Bee

The Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture launched a qualitative project to preserve, develop, and propagate the local honeybee strain. In an interview with Al-Watan newspaper, Professor Ahmed Al-Khazem Al-Ghamdi, advisor to the ministry's agriculture undersecretary, explained the three-year (extendable) project aims to protect the local honeybee strain as a national asset from genetic pollution caused by importing over one million foreign bee packages annually (worth 150 million SAR). The project, part of Vision 2030 and the Rural Development Program, spans several axes including genetic characterization (registering sequences in NCBI), selection and productivity improvement, mass queen production, capacity building, and technical support, with 430 local bee samples already collected from across the Kingdom.