A local honey and dates festival will be organised at Al Mazrouah Yard, one of the seasonal vegetable markets located beside Umm Salal Central Market, as announced by Agricultural Affairs Department at the Ministry of Municipality. Several local farms and apiaries are participating in the festival, scheduled to be held from December 29, 2022, to January 5, 2023, daily from 7am to 2pm, offering their produce of honey and dates of different varieties. The festival aims to promote local agricultural produce, attracting many visitors and shoppers at seasonal vegetable markets.
Local farms have been receiving tremendous supports by the Ministry of Municipality to enhance their products to raise self-sufficiency rate of the country in vegetables, dates, and honey. Three types of honey are produced in Qatar – Sidr, Samur and Al Rabi according to the seasonal flowers. Sidr honey, which is being produced in large quantity in Qatar, has the highest demand locally.
The Agricultural Affairs Department is running a programme to develop beekeeping activity in the country within the national project for honeybees, to help farms increase and diversify their income. The department has been working since 2016 to localise and multiply the breeding of queen bees in the country to produce a strain that lives in harmony with the Qatari environment after undergoing natural selection and adaptation to the environment. With the support of the national project for beekeeping, the local honey production increased over 10.4 tonnes in 2018 from over 6.3 tonnes in 2017. The project helped produce about 31 tonnes of honey of the nectar of flowering plants of Sidr, Al Rabi and Al Samur from 2013 to 2018.
There are two honey harvesting seasons in Qatar. Sidr honey is harvested in November and Al Rabi and Al Samur honey is harvested in May. The Agricultural Affairs Department provides beehives with all the other necessary accessories to the farmers. They are also provided training on latest techniques of bee-farming. The farms were also provided by the ministry special packaging material to market their products to attract the customers.
