Kenyan beekeepers may reap huge profits if Nairobi lobbies for listing of honey exports on the roster of goods permitted into America under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which offers duty-free treatment to goods from designated Sub-Saharan African countries (SSAs).  

The opportunity opened after current winter weather wreaked havoc on the honey industry in the US that has so suffered a loss of more than a million bee colonies.

AGOA allows selected African countries to export to America goods duty-free by the programme that dates back 2000 to promote economic growth through good governance and free markets. It covers non-textile as well as textile goods and was most recently re-authorised through September 30, 2025.

The distant hope of honey exports from Kenya and other African were touched off this week following reports that honeybees are dying at an unprecedented rate this winter, with more than one million colonies lost, according to a survey of US beekeepers by the non-profit organisation Project Apis m. More than a dozen government and academic scientists have mobilised to search for the cause.

Kenya, with more than four-fifth designated as arid and semi-arid produces high quality honey for domestic consumption. The exports has yet not been sufficiently explored.

According to the AGOA agreement, some 5,240 tariff items are eligible for benefits and local honey is sufficiently marketed.

The agreement provides that, in order to benefit from AGOA, a good must be either wholly obtained (grown, fished, mined, etc) or sufficiently manufactured in an AGOA country.

“Sufficiently manufactured means that all third-country materials have undergone a substantial transformation and at least 35 per cent of the good’s value is added in the beneficiary country, with up to 15 per cent of that value attributable to US inputs. Additionally, the good must be “imported directly,” the agreement explains.

Commercial beekeepers in the US have reported that, on average, they lost 62 per cent of their colonies from June 2024 to February 2025, according to the survey, published by the US Right to Know – a non-profit. The organisation gathered data from 702 beekeepers nationwide in January and February. Their operations account for more than half of honey bee colonies managed in the United States.

“We moved quickly to gather information,” said Danielle Downey, executive director of Project Apis m. “We don’t really know what’s going on, and a catastrophic loss could happen again,” USRK reported.

It adds that respondents have lost 1.1 million colonies from late summer through winter, according to the data. Those losses account for 41 per cent of total colonies in the United States, Downey said during a YouTube livestream on Friday that covered survey results.

Those figures do not substantially differ from data reported by the USDA, which has reported colony losses that range from 933,000 colonies to nearly1.3 million colonies from July through March in the last decade.

“We believe this to be an underestimate of these losses,” Downey said.

As of January 2024, beekeepers maintained 2.7 million honey bee colonies nationwide, according to survey data of operations with five or more colonies from the US Department of Agriculture.

Preliminary sampling of live and dead bees has failed to show a cause and a team of at least 16 scientists from universities and the USDA are looking for answers. The survey from Project Apis m. covered whether the bees were stored indoors or outdoors over winter, whether queens had been replaced in lost colonies, whether beekeepers had supplemented their nutrition and how many colonies were afflicted by Varroa mites.

For each of these variables, Downey said, no clear pattern emerged. In the next few months, government and university researchers will analyse samples for pathogens, pesticide residues, microbiome and host-pathogen interactions as well as metagenomic analysis.

In some cases, Downey said, the labs will place priorities on the 500 samples that were collected in February from colonies from around the country that were transported to the almond pollination in California.

Beekeepers who send colonies to the California almond crop were the first to sound the alarm. That crop is the first to require pollination services in the nation. Downey said that beekeepers first noticed higher-than-expected mortality rates when they checked the colonies before transporting them, then were surprised with sudden die-offs of the bees after they were transported, seven to 10 days later.

“They had huge losses in the sheds, and they continued to have losses on the way to California,” Downey said.

Chris Hiatt, a past president of the American Honey Producers Association who runs beekeeping operations in California, North Dakota and Washington State, has never stopped sounding the alarm.

“Over the last 20 years, it gets worse and worse,” he said. “It seems like it doesn’t matter what you do” to try to keep the bees alive.

If beekeepers are reporting average losses of 62 per cent, he said, “That’s record high.”

According to annual surveys by the US Department of Agriculture, losses from late summer through spring have ranged from 933,000 from July 2023 through March 2024 to 1.3 million in 2015 through 2016.

In 2023, the most recent full year for which data were available, the leading cause was infestation of Varroa mites, followed by other pests and parasites, pesticides, diseases and factors such as weather, starvation, queen failure and insufficient forage.

Meanwhile, Hiatt said the days are long gone when he and his father would find 5 to 10 percent of the colonies dead at the end of winter. He considers his own operation fortunate with colony loss at 31 percent this year.

“It’s not sustainable overall,” he said.

During the livestream on Friday, Downey pointed out that colonies cost about $200 each to replace, and that high losses could drive more beekeepers out of business.

“If these businesses can’t stay solvent, there is no backup plan,” she said.

She also said that one in three bites of food depends on pollinators to produce.

“If you like food, you need bees,” she said.

• A Tell report